Patrick ⁽⁸⁸⁾

Patrick September 3, 2018

AllRoad Cycling

I got into cycling in the mid-80s on a steel Muddy Fox Explorer mountain bike equipped with an 18-speed Suntour groupset. A couple of friends and I had just finished high school and we all had started to earn a small paycheck doing an apprenticeship when mountain bikes began to get popular. Obviously, we had to have one too. First, just as a means to commute to work and get around on weekends, but soon enough we started taking them to the trails. I was hooked from the very moment.

Patrick August 17, 2018

Single Speeding

Back in 1994 when I lived in Oakland, California for a year, I picked up a free, locally printed cycling magazine at a bike shop in Berkeley. It had an article about single-speeding and I was intrigued. Fresh out of college spending a language year on the little savings I had made during a short, temporary design job in the medical industry, I had a nice mountain bike - a very nice one in fact - but certainly not the cash to build a single-speed as a second bike. Several years passed in which I returned to Switzerland, worked as an engineer then moved to California to start another job. Once I got established and managed to save a bit of cash, I ultimately built my first single-speed.

Patrick March 26, 2018

Fat Biking

Most Swiss my age basically grew up skiing. I didn't. I only got my first pair of skis a year before we went to skiing camp with high school. I sold my skis the same year I graduated from high school and have never skied again. For one, it's an expensive sport, but more importantly, it's a hobby that requires traveling each time you want to hit the slopes. And that's the biggest turnoff for me. Driving an hour or more on busy weekend highways, arriving at filled-up parking lots, then standing in line at the lifts to get up the mountain and meet more long lines at mountain restaurants when hunger calls - that's not how I care to spend the weekend.