Smithers MINNEAPOLIS

My Favorite TC Bike Shops, Part II

I worked next to Medicine Lake and the commute was crushing me. I rode the bus or my bike from Mac-Groveland. The bus offered a two hour haul in each direction. I liked great bike ride, but it took forever and my employer had no kind of accommodation for cleaning up. I had to move to Minneapolis.

The Somec and I took up residence in Loring Park, and I immediately made my way to the Alternative Bike and Board. I’d raced a couple of local mtb events sponsored by the Alt and figured they had a club/team/whatever. I asked the guy at the counter about the club; he looked at me for awhile, smirked, then turned around and yelled “Gene!” into a hallway covered in random photos, magazine cutouts, product recall notices and found objects.

This guy, pigeon-toed with crazy dark hair and wearing a rocker tee, shuffled out and I repeated myself. I recognized him, couldn’t put my finger on it. A long rambling conversation ensued, the point of which I couldn’t divine. It occurred to me that speaking directly of the topic was taboo, which intrigued me. At long last Gene asked me to fill out a member sheet for Maximum Velocity, the difficulty of locating this indicated that my request was unusual.

I stopped by a few times, bought some stuff, couldn’t figure out when we were going to ride. I did notice that part of the hallway collage was a pic of Gene, loosely cropped around his pedaling form, with a Sex Pistols-inspired letter collage caption: Loco Hero

The Alt thing was losing it’s intrigue and my appetite for bike stuff was ballooning faster than my income, so I went a bit further from home and applied to work PT at Kenwood Cyclery near Lake of the Isles. I was soon immersed in the Minneapolis racing scene; one of my first experiences at the shop was working the Kenwood Criterium.

I saw Gene there, with a crew of Alt guys. They had a weird little fairing-clad bike with an aero trailer containing beer (you can see it at one/one today). That’s when I remembered: I’d met him years before watching the Subaru Classic one fall day when I rode over from school in St. Paul. The bike was the same, apparently the super-fan special. They handed me a beer and we laughed about Nelson Vails pulling out after 5 laps.

The close-knit world of Minneapolis shop rats brought me into contact with all the Alt guys, Gene included. Gene and Ken Ring introduced alot of us to cyclocross back when they were hosting district champs. I once rolled Gene out of bed to clear 2′ of snow from a winter cyclocross course, air temp 5 degrees. Pursuits on beater bikes through the warehouse district. And we had lots of rides to scope out prime cross courses when I decided we wanted to step local ‘cross up a bit.

Fast forward, I heard from Baba that Gene and Jennifer quit Q and were building a cafe/bike shop in Gene’s space on Washington. I mulled that over, and the changes afoot downtown, and I thought, “That just might work.” And there are at least two items in the shop that were at Kenwood Cyclery back in the day. I like it there; Gene’s a real pack-rat and it reminds me of great races and parties without any maudlin precious sap.