Journal Category: Punk & community

Leave it in your bag. Or better yet, leave it at home. Put it in a drawer. Tell people you’re going for a ride and you’ll be back when you’re back. This is not a bit. This is a sincere request from someone who has watched the joy drain out of group rides because everybody’s got their Strava going and their phone mounted and they’re worried about the segment and also they just got a notification and they need to check it real quick while we’re waiting at this light.

What your brain does after about 11 minutes

There’s research on this — not bro-science, actual neuroscience — that says it takes roughly 11 minutes of uninterrupted focus for your prefrontal cortex to fully disengage from task-switching mode and drop into something closer to present-tense awareness. Eleven minutes. On a bike, that’s maybe two miles at a casual pace. Two miles in and your brain starts doing something different. You stop cataloging your day. You start noticing the street — the way the afternoon light hits the Santa Catalinas from the Broadway bike lane, the smell of whatever’s cooking at the taqueria on 6th, the sound of your own chain, which you realize needs lube.

“Riding without your phone isn’t a productivity hack. It’s more like a small act of reclaiming your own attention span, which the internet has been eating for about fifteen years.”

What actually happens on a phoneless ride

You talk to the people you’re riding with. Wild concept. You make eye contact with strangers at intersections. You get a little lost and figure it out. You miss a turn and discover a street you didn’t know existed. You stop when something looks interesting because there’s no app waiting to penalize you for it. You get home and feel like you actually went somewhere, even if you went in a circle.

This is what our Tuesday Night Ride is built around. No Strava segment of the week. No fastest group wins. No one’s looking at a screen while we’re moving. We stop at the park and talk. We ride back slow. We end up on the patio and talk about bikes and Tucson and whatever else comes up. It costs nothing and it’s the best thing we do.

A modest practical proposal

Here’s what we suggest, incrementally, if going full phoneless sounds like too much:

1. Start with one ride a week where you don’t mount the phone to the bars. It can still be in your pocket for emergencies.
2. Turn off all notifications for the duration of the ride. Just airplane mode. You’ll survive.
3. After two weeks of that, try leaving it at home for a short loop — 45 minutes, a route you know.
4. Notice how you feel at the end of that ride compared to a monitored one.
5. Keep doing the thing that makes you feel better.

The bike existed before the algorithm. The feeling of riding it existed before the app that tracks it. We’re not Luddites — we’ll happily help you pick a good cycling computer if you want navigation or basic metrics without the social media layer. Come by the shop and we’ll talk through what actually serves your riding versus what’s just collecting your data. Or call us: 520-365-0754.

Last fall we made a movie. Not a short film in the modest-expectation sense — we mean a full remake of the 1991 Kathryn Bigelow heist classic Point Break, except all the bank robberies are on bikes, the surfing is trail riding at Starr Pass, and the FBI agent is played by our mechanic Carlos, who had never acted in anything before and turned out to be a natural. It runs 47 minutes. It is absolutely ridiculous. We screened it in the parking lot on a bedsheet and about 80 people showed up.

How this actually happened

It started with a dumb idea at a Tuesday Night Ride. Someone said “you know what movie would be better if all the cars were bikes” and the answer was obviously Point Break. Two weeks later Dan had a script outline, a borrowed camera, and a list of locations that were either within riding distance of the shop or accessible via a group ride. Filming took eight Saturdays spread over two months. The “car chase” scene was shot on the A-Mountain loop at 6 a.m. before the trail got crowded. The climactic confrontation happens in the Rillito River Park. The surfing-equivalent scene is three people doing wheelies in the Rillito riverbed and it is the funniest thing we have ever filmed.

“We had no budget, two lights borrowed from a theater friend, and a crew of people who were mostly there because the ride afterward was going to be good. It turned out to be the most fun we’ve had making something.”
— Dan

The cast, in full

• Johnny Utah: Dan (shop owner, reluctant protagonist)
• Bodhi: Maria (regular customer, actual good cyclist, zero ego about it)
• Pappas: Carlos (mechanic, scene-stealer, now considering a second career)
• Tyler: Keisha (Tuesday Night Ride regular who we had to convince was actually good on camera)
• The Ex-Presidents (the gang): Various Tuesday Night Ride people who showed up for the promise of tacos afterward

Where to watch it

We’re screening it again this fall — date to be announced on the journal and our socials. We’re also trying to figure out if there’s a way to host the video directly without giving it to a platform that will monetize it with ads for car accessories, which feels wrong for reasons that should be obvious. In the meantime, if you come by the shop, you can watch it on the laptop behind the counter. Bring snacks. It’s 47 minutes and worth every one of them.

Next up: we’re taking pitches for a Mad Max: Fury Road adaptation. Requirements are that it has to be filmable on bikes, it has to make sense in the Tucson landscape, and everyone involved has to have fun making it or we stop. Call us at 520-365-0754 if you want in.

Every Tuesday evening we leave from the shop at 6 p.m. It’s free to join, there’s no signup, and we’ve never in three years dropped a single rider. If you’re slower, we wait. If you’re faster, great — you’re welcome to test your legs, but we’re not chasing you. The ride is for everyone who shows up, not just the fast ones, and that’s not a slogan — it’s the actual policy.

What to bring

• Your bike — any bike. Hybrid, mountain, road, cruiser, fixie, whatever. We’ve had cargo bikes. We once had a recumbent. You’re fine.
• Lights — we ride in the dark half the year. Front and rear, no exceptions. If you don’t have them, come by the shop before the ride and we’ll sort you out cheap.
• Water — it’s Tucson. It’s hot. Even in the fall it’s warmer than you think at 7 p.m.
• Helmet — we’re not your mom, but we’d really prefer you wear one and we’ll say so.
• A few bucks for after — see below re: the patio.

The route

We don’t pre-publish the route. This is on purpose. The route changes week to week based on construction, events, vibes, and whatever Dan or whoever’s leading that week feels like doing. It’s usually somewhere in the range of 8–14 miles and stays mostly on bike infrastructure — protected lanes, paths, quiet side streets. We’ve done the Rillito River path, the Julian Wash Greenway, the 4th Avenue to University corridor, the campus loop at night. We avoid highways and we avoid anything with sustained elevation gain on a Tuesday because that would be mean.

“The route is part of the fun. Not knowing where you’re going makes you pay attention to the city differently. You notice things on a bike that you’ve driven past a hundred times and never seen.”
— Dan

The patio

After every ride we end up somewhere with outdoor seating. Sometimes it’s a bar. Sometimes it’s a restaurant. Occasionally it’s someone’s front porch by accident. The patio is the actual point of the Tuesday Night Ride. The riding is great, but the part where you lock your bike and sit down and talk to people you just rode with — that’s the thing that keeps people coming back. We talk about bikes because that’s what we have in common. We also talk about Tucson, about work, about whatever someone read that week, about nothing in particular. It’s good.

First-timers: just show up at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday at the shop. You don’t need to tell us you’re coming, though you can if you want via the contact page or by calling 520-365-0754. Lock your bike out front, come in, say hi. We’ll introduce you to whoever’s there and we’ll roll when everyone’s ready. Bring a lock for the patio stop.