Travel, cycling, and common sense lead to a new job at Norco Bicycles

Cycling and career change in Globe and Mail Business

What do you want to do when you grow up? If you’re like me, maybe you want to to get paid to read, write, and talk about the fun of cycling all day.

After an unconventional job search by bicycle, I recently started a new job with Live to Play Sports and Norco Bicycles. Journalist Gail Johnson thought my career trajectory was so intriguing, she interviewed me for a profile story in the business section of Canada’s national daily newspaper, the Globe and Mail.

You can read the entire article below, or read it at globeandmail.com.

Avid cyclist, 51, gears up for new career

GAIL JOHNSON, Published Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013 02:23PM EST

Former graphic designer Ulrike Rodrigues landed a job in her dream industry: she is now the integrated Web-content co-ordinator at Live to Play Sports. The Port Coquitlam-based company distributes premium bicycles, parts and accessories. Photo: Benoit Bohly.

Ulrike Rodrigues looks back on the two decades she spent working as a graphic designer in the print publishing field with fondness. But she was in her late 40s when she found herself with an outdated skill set in an industry that was evolving because of the digital revolution.

The avid cyclist took an unconventional approach when it came time to contemplate her next career move. She rented her condo on Vancouver’s east side and headed to India for a six-month solo bike trip.

“One of the best things I’ve ever done in my life for my career, for my learning, and for my spiritual growth is travel,” Ms. Rodrigues says. “When you travel and you see and experience what other people live with, it puts things into perspective. I came back feeling so blessed with what I have.”

Paul Bogaert: the Bike Doctor will see you now

Vancouver bike shop owner and activist puts fun first

Paul Bogaert of Vancouver's Bike Doctor store.

By Ulrike Rodrigues

Larry Ruble is considered a bike industry guru who knows a good thing when he sees it. In 1982, the Mountain Bike Hall of Famer spotted a future in Paul Bogaert.

Recounts Ruble, “I was waiting for a young man at the Purdy’s Chocolates outlet in the lobby of the Empress Hotel to finish serving a very fussy woman … I found her requests and manner very exasperating.” Ruble turned his attention to the sales person serving her and noticed he had “the patience of Job.”

“He had the skills all retail clerks need, but seldom have,” said Ruble. “Being quite impressed, I asked him if he liked bicycles. My wife was pulling on my arm to get our chocolate order in, but I persisted with my questions and finally asked him if he would like to work for me at Russ Hay’s Bicycle Shop.”

Bogaert worked at Russ Hay’s through the summer, traveled, worked with his brother and then figured it wouldn’t be too hard to run his own small business. He opened a second-hand sporting goods store in Victoria, Canada in 1984: the first “Bike Doctor.”

Shaping Vancouver’s cycling advocacy

By 1989, Bogaert had traveled and worked in Mexico, Ottawa and Whistler, and opened Broadway Station Bikes. The East Vancouver shop attracted the city’s emerging cycle-activists, including Marilyn Pollard, Grant Watson, Allison Davis, Gavin Davidson, Andy Telfer, Richard Campbell and Jeff Hohner. With Bogaert’s encouragement and support combined with the strengths each of these leaders brought, they formed groups that shaped Vancouver cycling advocacy.

“The small group of people I was connected with in the early 1990s were doing all the work to promote cycling and to foster groups like BEST (Better Environmentally Sound Transportation) and OCB (Our Community Bikes),” said Bogaert.

Stickers just for bikes at Bike Doctor in Vancouver, BC

As interest in trail cycling grew, so did Bogaert’s store. Bike Doctor moved to the Boundary area of East Hastings, then near its current location on West Broadway.

Community support and good fortune

Unlike many of his bicycle retail colleagues, Bogaert’s emphasis has always been on transportation biking. He thinks it’s “good fortune” that consumer interest has shifted toward the kind of cycling he promotes.

“It’s not that I knew this was coming, but it’s super-needed. It’s something that I’ve been wanting, working at and trying to support, and it’s now becoming popular.”

Bogaert has also always been a reliable supporter of the bike community. When he closed his Hastings Street location, he donated thousands of dollars’ worth of product to BEST’s fledgling Main Station Bikes store. When Momentum Magazine started, Bike Doctor was one of its first advertisers. When Bike Summer, Bike Shorts and Velopalooza arrived in Vancouver, Bogaert provided funding, prizes and elbow grease to the events.

The community has supported him in turn. Bike Doctor still regularly rates as one of the top bike stores in city polls.

Says Bogaert, “But my greatest satisfaction is seeing people who came in and said ‘I really don’t plan to ride to work much’, and six months later they’re like, ‘I can’t believe how much I’m riding!’ That great connection that happens with a person and the right bike and – suddenly they become a cyclist. They realize that they can do it, and it’s fun, and it’s really not that hard.”

To Bike Doctor’s Paul Bogaert, having fun on a bike just makes sense. Maybe it’s even better than chocolate.

Bike Doctor, 137 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC, (across from MEC), 604-873-2453, thebikedr.com

Published in the January/February 2010 issue of Momentum: the magazine for self-propelled people.

Willie Weir: confessions of an adventure cyclist

[Published in the September/October 2009 issue of Momentum: the magazine for self-propelled people.]

Bicycle traveler’s new book describes experiences, not logistics

Writer, radio commentator and advocate Willie Weir has cycled over 60,000 miles around the globe

“I am not an avid cyclist,” admits Willie Weir in his new book Travels with Willie: Adventure Cyclist, “I am an avid traveler who has discovered that cycling is the best way to see the world.”

Weir is an award-winning writer, radio commentator and advocate in Seattle who has cycled over 60,000 miles around the globe. He writes a column about living and traveling by bicycle for Adventure Cyclist, a colorful magazine mailed to members of the nonprofit, Montana-based Adventure Cycling Association.

True to the association’s mission to “inspire people of all ages to travel by bicycle for fitness, fun, and self-discovery,” Weir’s writing describes the experience of riding a bicycle rather than the logistics. His new book is a collection of his columns, and nowhere in the paperback’s pages does this seasoned bicycle traveler even mention mileage, equipment, routes or the type of bike he rides.

Instead, Weir describes facing fear and finding adventure; guardian angels and going the wrong way; the kindness of strangers; communicating without a word; and the privilege of travel.

Gary Fisher: down from the mountain

Mountain biking scenester sees fun and profit in city cycling trend

It’s not unusual for a few of us at Momentum to gather around a table at Gastown’s Irish Heather, order some meat pies and Kilkennies, and brainstorm on cures for the common car. What made it unusual one rainy night last November was that the most fervent ideas came from Gary Fisher.

Fisher was in town for the weekend to help Cap’s Bicycle Shop celebrate their 75th birthday (they were the first shop in Canada to carry Gary Fisher’s fledgling line of mountain bikes back in 1980) and as he put it, “I picked up a copy of Momentum at a bike shop, read it, and went “wow!”

“It felt really good,” relates the bike industry veteran on why he requested a meet-up, “It was people who had the right attitude ~ and I thought I’d just try to investigate.” Being “investigated” by Gary Fisher is kind of like being offered a drink by a Sony Music A&R rep. The man’s talking your language and you’re charmed by the attention, but you kind of wonder where his hands have been.

Same place as yours, it turns out: wrapped around bicycle grips and bullhorns. Only, he’s Gary Fisher and he literally invented the term “mountain bike”. He’s very successfully sold the mountain bike lifestyle to the world-at-large, and now he says he’s wants to do the same for urban cycling.

“Okay,” you say as the waiter slides a fresh pint in front of you, “I’m listening.”

Joe Breeze: on naked bikes and self-propelling prophecies

MTB pioneer admits trail biking was a “diversion” from his real passion

It’s not even lunch time yet and Joe Breeze has already blown my mind. Breeze ~ who with Gary Fisher, Tom Ritchey, and other Mountain Bike Hall-of-Famers basically invented the sport ~ has just admitted over the phone that if he hadn’t been so distracted by that whole fat-tire repack thing, he might have gotten down to what he really wanted to do a whole lot sooner: design commuter bicycles.

“The off-road thing was a diversion from my plan,” admits the creator of Breezer Bikes from his Marin County work space, “It wasn’t part of the script. It just happened…like life.”

“My interest in city bikes came long before mountain bikes,” he explains. “My father commuted to his job in the 1950′s by bike, so I grew up aware of that aspect of bikes.” Breeze rode to school and around his neighbourhood as a kid, but it wasn’t until the 17-year-old bike-toured in Europe that his eyes opened to bike transportation culture.

Says Breeze, “Nowhere was this so pronounced as in Holland with their extensive bicycle thoroughfares, cloverleaf interchanges and bicycle traffic signals….I thought, ‘We’ve got to do this in America!’”

Joe returned home inspired, and got involved in the beginnings of the region’s bicycling infrastructure. Perhaps more significant to the history of cycling, he also paid five bucks for a beat-up 1941 Schwinn Excelsior and turned it into what would eventually be called a “mountain bike“.

Monthly salons draw fans of flying solo

Where do you book an off-season college-dorm bed in Edinburgh? Which cruise lines don’t charge single travellers an extra fee for a cabin? Is it really possible to experience a fulfilling, worry-free adventure if you travel by yourself?

Advice, anecdotes, and appetizers fly across the table at the Solo Travellers’ Cafés. For those who have journeyed by themselves –or want to– this monthly salon offers up servings of solo-oriented tales and information at an eatery near you.

Created less than a year ago by “returned” traveller and workshop instructor Deborah Tiffany, the roving café, usually held on the second Wednesday of every month, has attracted up to 50 participants to neighbourhood tapas, dessert, and ethnic restaurants. A table of 20 café-goers joined Tiffany at Commercial Drive’s Artistico Greek Café recently. Prompted to describe their latest trips, the chatting travellers recounted tales ranging from a Canadian studies work term in Scotland and a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas to a road trip up the Yukon’s Dempster Highway and a cross-country tour of France’s valleys.