How To Job Search by Bicycle

A cyclist’s checklist for pounding the pavement

Would you hire this writer? (photo: http://www.davidniddrie.com)

I’m looking for work—a place where I can be smart, passionate, persuasive, and unapologetically car-free. But as I freshen up my career website and surf the job boards I wonder: can this cyclist pass for “Normal?“

Normal wears brisk suits, looks polished and drives to work. Normal also works tirelessly, is paid handsomely, and receives dental benefits. I want all that and am willing to do all that — except for the “drive” part. I won’t drive to work, and I feel so strongly about it that I’ve developed this Cyclist’s Job Search Checklist to keep my career and cycling in balance:

1. Set your parameters

Before I even start looking, I establish how far I’d be willing to ride, in what direction, and for how many seasons. Is transit available nearby? Which bike would I ride and will it be secure?

2. Scrutinize the company’s job posting and the website

Some companies are bike-friendly and they don’t even know it. I recently applied for an editorial position with an online publishing service I’ll call “Writing Is Us.” They used words like “sustainable,” “friendly,” “fun,” “creative” and “forward-thinking” on their Careers page. And a peek at their Contact page confirmed that their address was a pleasant 30-minute ride away.

3. Drop the word “cycling” into your cover letter or resume

Don’t proselytize the Word Of Wheel, but don’t hide your faith, either.  I try to sneak it into the cover letter somewhere (“able to blog about modes of sustainable transportation, e.g. cycling”) or bury it in the “hobbies” section of the CV (“volunteer bike guide for school groups”). You never know—someone on the hiring team may be into cycling too, and you could set off their bikey radar. Another tip is to describe yourself as “forward-thinking.”

Does Cycling Make Me Sick?

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

Life on the edge (of traffic) has its pros and cons

Last spring I shared My Dirty Little Secret that sometimes I hate riding a bike. This winter I wonder if cycling hates me.

I’ve been bike commuting all my life and for many of those years, I’ve had a chronic cough. It’s a deep, seal-like bark that starts with a tickle in my throat and erupts into chest-wracking spasms. Minutes after stepping inside after a ride, the hacking starts and my friends wonder how I’ve managed to hide a two-pack-a-day habit.

The thing is: I don’t smoke. I’ve never smoked, and the only vice I’m guilty of is my addiction to tasty beer and tearing through town on a bike. I ride my bike to my chiropractor, who lauds my healthy lifestyle as she adjusts my spinal subluxation; and I ride my bike to my massage therapist, who pinches my seized trapezius muscles into submission.

“Do you ever see those photos of road racers at the podium?” asked Francois one time as he squeezed a rock-like cord of muscle in my neck. “They stand up there and they’re all round-shouldered from years of bending over their handlebars—like you!”

Good drivers, bad cyclists and a new kind of traffic

Published in the November/December 2009 issue of Momentum: the magazine for self-propelled people.

Do bicycles change the way we communicate?

With no windshields to mute it, this traffic talks to itself.

I was really looking forward to my dental appointment – the adjustment to my night-guard would be pain-free; but more importantly, I would enjoy a long ride across town on one of Vancouver’s traffic-calmed commuter bike routes to get there. I hadn’t done a good spin on it since before I’d left to live and cycle in India a year ago. When I returned I worked from home and – you’ll only hear this from a cyclist – I no longer commuted as much as I wished. I was curious: had traffic changed while I was away?

I set out in golden autumn air that shimmered off storefronts selling felt hats and pumpkin spice lattes.  One foot on the road, one foot on my pedal, I waited for a green light at a busy intersection. A coal-gray Pathfinder pulled up along side me at the white line.

“Hey, hello,” called the burly driver across his girlfriend in the passenger seat. I peered into the open window of the SUV, not quite sure what to expect.

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.

Cycling Goa, India with Hostelling International

[Published in the August 2009 issue of Goa Today Magazine]

Backroads “Slow Goa” tour targets cyclists and activists

YHAI cycle expedition takes an early start out of Assolna, Goa (click to view photo gallery)

Visitors have toured Goa by car, motorbike, bus, boat and train; but now – thanks to the Goa Branch of Youth Hostels Association of India (YHAI) and Sports Authority of Goa – adventurers and activists can learn about the state’s natural beauty and social issues from the seat of a bicycle.

Says Panjim-based Program Director Manoj Joshi, who added a series of seven-day, 360-kilometre bike expeditions to YHAI’s popular trekking programmes last year, “We wanted to create a tour with the activist in mind. Cycling is a sport for people who have an awareness of environmental and development issues. This expedition shows beaches, nature, and water falls but it also shows how Goa is being deforested; how the greed of the few is displacing families, and the rape of the nature.”

To that end, Joshi and his team volunteered months of their time researching equipment, attractions and routes. In 2008, they provided five groups of twenty cyclists with knapsacks and 24-speed mountain bikes for a circular route that reached as far east as the Karnataka border. Starting from Panjim (Goa’s capital city), youngsters and grandfathers alike pedaled south along the Arabian Sea on Colva-area beaches, east through Balli’s terraced paddy fields and Cavrem’s mining villages; up into the ecologically significant Western Ghat mountains; and then west along the freighter-trafficked Mandovi River past Old Goa (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and back into Panjim.

Along the way, cyclists stayed in rooms in Assolna’s sports complex, lodges in Netravali’s Tanshikar Spice Farm, tents near Dudsaghar Falls in Bhagwan Mahaveer Sanctuary, and dorms in Bondla Wildlife Sanctuary. Extra side trips included Budbudyanchi Talli (Bubbling Lake) at Gopinath Temple; a forest trek and swim at Savari Falls; a zoo tour of cobras, guars and leopards in Bondla Wildlife Sanctuary; and a visit to the Bom Jesus Cathedral in Old Goa.

The YHAI Goa Biking Expedition runs December/January of each year and is open to anyone who is a member of Hostelling International or Youth Hostels Association of India (YHAI). Joshi estimates the 2009/2010 fees will be Rs 3000 ($61 USD) for Indians and Rs 5000 ($102 USD) for foreign visitors. Bicycles, rucksacks, safety equipment, accommodation, and meals are all included in the price of the trip. For more information contact Manoj Joshi, Sports Authority of Goa,
or visit YHAI’s web site at www.yhaindia.org.

• Photos: 2008 YHAI bike tour in Goa, India
• Stories: 2008 YHAI bike  tour in Goa, India
• Girl Gone Goa – tales of travel, sex, magic and cycling

Social media sprout a social cycle club in Goa, India

Published in the July/August 2009 issue of Momentum Magazine.

How an average cyclist became an accidental activist in India

An early ride of the Goa Cycle Club

Here in Vancouver, Canada, I consider myself just another person in the city who rides a bike. I keep a pretty low profile compared to the cycling artists and advocates I admire. But something radical happened when I bought an Atlas bicycle, rode it, and wrote about riding it in Goa, India for six months. I became an accidental activist.

“Hi Ulrike,” wrote a reader in response to one of my Girl Gone Goa blog stories, “We’ve recently returned from the UK, to resettle here. I’ve brought back a bike, but as it needs some basic work, I’ve not begun pedalling here. Everyone here tells me I’d be crazy to try, so it’s good to hear of your experiences.”

“We” was Luis Dias and his wife Chryselle. They were Goan and keen to ride, though eight-month-pregnant Chyselle admitted she’d need to have the baby first. Luis and I headed to the Panjim ferry jetty and cycled and chatted along the Mandovi River. He said he was looking for a community project to dig his teeth into.

Cycling Culture in Vancouver

Published in the Spring 2009 issue of Vancouver Review, a nationally distributed quarterly magazine that focuses on ideas, culture and arts from Canada’s West Coast.  A collaboration with Museum of Vancouver‘s June – September 2009 exhibit Velo-City: Vancouver and the Bicycle Revolution.

• Listen to Ulrike Rodrigues and JJ Lee discuss cycling style and fashion on CBC  Radio One’s Fashion Mondays (YouTube audio, 6:30 minutes).
• Editor Imran Amed of The Business of Fashion and writer Ulrike Rodrigues discuss Vancouver’s new Fashion Cycle.
  

It’s the New Normal

By Ulrike Rodrigues

Three things happened in Vancouver’s bike scene  in 1991: Lance Armstrong won the Gastown Grand Prix, Richard Campbell founded Better Environmentally Sound Transportation, and an elderly gentlemen on Bidwell Street sold me his silver Nishiki bike for $300.

I didn’t know anything about Lance, BEST, or Vancouver, but I did know the quickest way to acquaint myself with my new city was to touch it – metre by metre – with the treads of a bicycle. Starting from my new home on Guelph Street (the same name as the Ontario city I’d just departed) and armed with a vague BC Transit map, I surveyed my Mount Pleasant neighbourhood on two wheels.

In the following months, my circles widened and I became familiar with the alleys, warehouses, dirt lots and secret gardens that radiated out from Main and Broadway. I ventured across each of the three False Creek bridges and joined segments of paths that followed the water’s edge. They led me to even more cycling adventures: soft, wooded paths in Stanley Park; goldenrod-lined dykes near Science World; breezy, crunchy gravel on Locarno Beach; and a maze of hard-packed forest dirt in the UBC endowment lands.

“It’s like hiking through the forest!” I marveled as each pedal stroke revealed a new turn of trees, “Only faster! And funner!” I was ten again – on my Supercycle, a lettuce-and-mayonnaise sandwich in my blue plastic basket, shoe laces coming untied, hands wrapped around white plastic grips with blue-and-white striped streamers.

I was free, flying, laughing out loud, grinning at dogs. I was in a new city – Vancouver! – and in a familiar place – on a bicycle! It was so simple. Could it get any better than this?

Bike-Friendly Guelph Initiative on Earth Day

Bicycling in Guelph something to celebrate

Published in the April 21, 2009 feature section of Canada’s Guelph Tribune, a Metroland Media Group Ltd. publication.

"What traffic?!" I wondered.

Guelph, Ontario — I blame it all on Guelph. Long before I cycled for adventure in Western Canada, the United States, Mexico, Belize, Cuba, Thailand, Laos, New Zealand, England and Goa, India, I cycled in Guelph.

My family moved to Guelph in August of 1975 and I quickly discovered that though the high school I attended was less than five kilometres away, it took most of an hour to reach it by public bus. I suffered this for a few years, but one Sunday curiosity and stubbornness led me and my bicycle onto a dirt road, past a quarry, under a highway and behind the football field of Centennial Collegiate. It was fun, easy and took less than 30 minutes. I was hooked.

Live and cycle in Goa?

Girl Gone Goa: Ulrike Bemvinda Rodrigues

Sure, read all about it on my blog  Girl Gone Goa: travel, sex, magic and cycling in an Indian State. I wrote over 60 stories on life in Goa as a single woman of Goan descent in 2008/2009.

Since I’m a freelance writer, so you’ll also find full-text newspaper and magazine articles that I wrote for various publications, including columns in Momentum Magazine; a profile of me in Goa Today magazine (Goa Today), an opinion piece on tourism and garbage (Herald), a discussion of the  India goverment NRI Commission’s “Know Goa” program (Goa Today), and an introduction to the Goa Cycle Club and cycling in Goa (Herald).

Enjoy, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions, comments, or related writing assignments.

Cycling and Calvin Klein collide at the beauty counter

Face, meet the world of the food and beverage hostess

I'd rather be Audrey than tawdry

“What you need,” Christopher murmured, peering into my face, “is a silicone primer.”

Oddly, he wasn’t talking about bike frames. I had run into a department store to escape the rain and a handout In the ladies’ room had caught my attention. “Come by the Calvin Klein counter,” it suggested, “Receive a FREE Foundation Consultation and Sample!”

I wandered the maze of make-up boutiques until a red-haired woman at the Clinique counter with eerily perfect skin asked if she could help me.

I motioned at my handout. “I’m actually looking for the Calvin Klein counter but…” I offered, “you could show me what you’ve got since I’m here.”

“Well sure,” she said as she opened a tube of foundation, “We can dab a little on your hand if you like.” I looked down as she spread the flesh-toned liquid on the meat of my thumb. It blended in fine, but bits of lotion stuck in the lines of my skin. It reminded me of women I’d seen (usually in the late-night food and beverage industry) who walked around with tiny, tawdry channels of makeup dried into their eyelids.

I showed her the bits and told her that’s why I’d been avoiding foundation up til now. “Well,” she said sweetly, “That’s why you need to exfoliate.” I thanked her and headed for the Calvin Klein counter.

“Slow Food” bike tour in Pemberton, B.C.

Sample locally-grown produce and West Coast scenery by bicycle

Slow Food Cycle Sunday is a free one-day tour organized by the community of Pemberton (north of Whistler, Canada) to increase awareness and appreciation of their growers and suppliers. This year more than 2100 cyclists cycled the 50 kilometers of country roadway that linked 12 participating farms.

View photos of Slow Food Cycle Sunday 2008

From the Slow Food Cycle Sunday web site:

“The World Watch Institute reports that the average food item eaten in North America has traveled 2500-4000 km from farm table. The distance between good food and your table is as short as a 26km bike ride.

Sea to Sky’s signature agritourism event, Slow Food Cycle Sunday Pemberton blows the fast-food drive-through away. A pedal-powered trip through the natural buffet that is Pemberton Meadows farmland, to meet local growers and sample produce fresh from the field.

Next year’s event is scheduled for August 16, 2009.

Cycling Alberta’s Trans Canada Trail and Iron Horse Trail

Western province showcases its TCT urban paths and rail trails

The province of Alberta is the largest per capita donator to Canada’s nation-wide, multi-use Trans Canada Trail, and perhaps as a result it boasts not one but four Alberta TCT routes. I was invited to explore two sections of the trail by very different means: by bicycle on Edmonton’s River Valley Parks, and by all-terrain vehicle (ATV) on northeastern Alberta’s Iron Horse rail trail.

Edmonton’s River Valley Parks

With 460 parks, the city of Edmonton boasts the largest expanse of urban parkland in North America. Twenty-two parks comprise the “ribbon of green” that lines the North Saskatchewan river, and the Trans Canada Trail joins over 150 kilometres of total urban bike trails.

Accordingly, Edmonton’s bike community is active and ardent. Visit Alberta’s capital city for their annual Bikeology festival every June; drop by the Edmonton Bicycle Commuter Society‘s non-profit Bike Works shop; or join a “Show N Go” ride with the friendly members of the Edmonton Bicycling and Touring Club.

View photos of Edmonton City Cycling: River Valley Trail, North Saskatchewan bridges, Bike Works, Earth’s General Store, and Bikeology’s “mocktails on the bridge” event (20 images).

Alberta’s Iron Horse Trail

It’s taken 10 municipalities more than 3 decades to transform almost 300 kilometers of abandoned rail bed into a visitor-friendly section of the Trans Canada Trail, but they did it.

Thanks to the grassroots efforts of individuals (Riverland Recreational Trail Society) and communities (Muni-Corr), Alberta’s Iron Horse Trail (AIHT) now passes through boreal forest, farmland, and wild animal habitat to connect 15 historic towns in the province’s northeastern “Lakeland” region.

Still in progress and partly a wilderness trail, the Iron Horse caters primarily towards equestrians, snowmobilers and ATV’rs at the moment. That may go against the Trans Canada Trail’s non-motorized use philosophy, but bear in mind that it’s these community users who have maintained the trails over the years and worked so passionately to preserve it. In conversation with the townspeople along the route (in Heinsburg, Elk Point, St. Paul, Bonnyville, Fort Kent and Cold Lake) I was convinced that they are very excited about welcoming hikers and bikers as the trail moves towards completion.

All the trail’s staging areas provide water and toilets for example; and food and accommodations are not far away. I was particularly impressed by the tiny town of Elk Point which has blue prints for an off-the-grid “green” visitor and community centre.

View photos

At this point organizers suggest that though it is considered an unsupervised backcountry, the trail nevertheless demonstrates a community-supported legacy experience along Alberta’s oldest and longest continuous trail.

View photos of Alberta’s Iron Horse Trail: Heinsburg, Elk Point, St. Paul, Bonnyville, Glendon, Fort Kent, Cold Lake.

Klunkerz: Billy Savage’s MTB flick goes DVD

Now on film: the bikes, parties and people that made mountain bike history

It’s not something you should watch by yourself, Klunkerz. The independently written and produced DVD by fat-tire aficionado Billy Savage recounts mountain biking’s California days in the ’70′s and takes you there so vividly — with tons of footage, still photos, and interviews with a bunch of guys (and a couple of girls) who drank beer, smoked pot and then got on their damned bikes — that you and your friends will want to join in.

Wendell, Karen, Ian, Paul, Andrew and I didn’t light up, but we did crack a few beers in my living room one Friday night as we gathered to watch Savage’s flick. Finally on disk, Klunkerz has sold out theatres, won awards, and no doubt brought tears to a few MTBer’s eyes as it screened in the film, bike and sport circuits.

Filmmaker Savage demonstrates a genuine knowledge of the bikes, and rapport with the people who first dragged their heavy ’40′s and ’50′s-era Schwinns up a San Francisco-area mountain for kicks. Not only do many of the Mount Tamalpais riders — Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher, Tom Ritchey et al. — do screen time, but they share their stories and video footage with him in a way that feels trusted and intimate.

Not just talking heads, the film lingers on the stuff us riders love: the bikes, the parties and the trails that made Marin County famous. You actually see the 1.8 miles of fire road that the riders ate up (or ate them up, as injuries were frequent), the grease smoke coming off the hubs, and the keg-parties that fuelled the whole thing.

The editing is so sharp that the riders practically finish each others’ sentences. You get a real sense of their excitement and you’re reminded that at mountain biking’s heart, the message is universal: riding a bike is super fun, and you ought to try it.

Our gang really picked up on that. In discussion afterwards, Ian was stoked to see how how fun — rather than equipment — created the scene. Wendell liked seeing the riders’ passion turn into something huge, and Paul (an MTB Hall-of-Famer himself) was impressed by the amount of history that the film dug up that he hadn’t heard before. And I felt affirmed by how writers and photographers like Wende Cragg, Jacquie Phelan and Dogtown’s Ray Flores can play an important part in recording a movement and spreading the word.

Visit the Klunkerz web site at www.klunkerz.com to chat with Savage and order your own copy. For more on the history, I recommend the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame web site.

Published in the May/June 2008 Momentum Magazine.