Just Ride

A collection of eighty-nine micro-essays ranging from a hundred and fifty to about eight hundred and fifty words, but averaging four hundred, on many familiar and some unfamiliar topics. The chapters are:

Riding, Dressing, Safety, Health & Fitness, Accessories, Upkeep, Technicalities, and Velosophy. There’s a mix of instruction and opinion, and as a Free Bonus, you get medical advice involving the drawing of blood. (The author has his A.A. degree in General Studies from what was, in 1974, Diablo Valley Junior College, so you can ignore the publisher's disclaimer—about consulting a medical professional or some damn thing— before the table of contents.)

It would be somewhere between rare and freaky for anybody to agree with all of it, but for the record, I actually do, which is why I wrote it. But for anybody who isn’t me, I think the most I could hope for is maybe 85 percent. Some of you may be down around 65. This book will help you.

All in all, Just Ride is sort of a manual for the Unracer—the rider looking for a reason to jettison the click-in pedals and uncomfortable bikes and grueling rides, without feeling like it’s throwing in the towel on athleticism, fitness, and fun. It’s full of suggestions and recommendations for riding your bike outside the strange and often dysfunctional influences of racing, and having a better time on the bike because of it.

You can certainly buy Just Ride from us, and thanks. But let me tell you a secret: Another good and maybe better way to buy it is from your local bookstore. If they don't have it, they'll order it for you. And if they order one for YOU, maybe they'll order two from the publisher so they can put one on the shelf. If you do this AND send me your receipt with your contact info (name and zip code are enough), I or we will credit your account $14, which means it's like getting a free book. 

No such deal if you buy from us, but yes, that's super good for Rivendell and I guess me, too. But I do want bookstores to support it, too, and getting them back in the habit with an order-then-purchase will do that. None of MY local bookstores sell it.

Hi Grant,

Thank you for joining us on the show today. It was great to have you with us for a little while and I hope you also enjoyed yourself. We received a deluge of calls, email, and tweets about biking, with several letters telling us how "refreshing" they felt your viewpoint to be. I guess you're right when you say that bike culture has become so extreme toward the racing end that your words of common sense sound refreshing and radical. There is obviously a real demand among our listeners for a more bike-friendly environment.

-From the Just Ride book tour, when book tours were still happening, and not just Zoom calls.