CC Guides Paolo and Simone demonstrate the Art of La Morra

Ciclismo Classico Annual Guide Meeting

What is it like spending four days talking, learning, eating and cycling
with 28 Ciclismo Classico guides?

How about inspiring, crazy, engaging, fun, interesting, warm and intense? Each year I spend several days in Tuscany with our guide team, bonding, learning and sharing new ideas as well as best guide practices. Oh yes there are always fun and games like when Paolo Taberetti (we call each other cugini since he is from Fano, the town that my grandfather was born) and Simone Scalas showed me how to play the Italian "Morra" ( a hand game, involves strategy, tactics and energy brought to Italy in the 16th century from Turkey).

Outside of my own crazy family, there is no group of people I feel more akin with and amazingly proud of than this wonderful group of super talented, affectionate and passionate Ciclismo guides.

This year our meeting was based at beautiful La Fattoria degli Usignoli, one of most popular hotels panoramically perched in the hills near Regello in the Pratomagno. Not only are our guides talented but also they are super loyal to Ciclismo, many have been with us 8 years or more. Almost every region of Italy was represented at this guide reunion­­ Tuscany, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardia, Abruzzo, Tuscany, Lombardia, Reggio Emiglia [Emilia Romagna], Sicilia, Sardegna and my family's origins: Le Marche. I love hearing their distinct regional accents
and the way they playfully make fun of each other. There were also four Americans, Irish and Spanish guide to round off our team.

In addition to learning and sharing, this gang is like a one big family who really knows how to have fun. They tease, hug, laugh, yell, and share pictures, stories, jokes and most of all they share a bottomless wild passion for what they do. On Saturday morning we all took a bike ride along the "mitico" Strada dei Setti Ponte to Castellfranco where we piled into a small café for a ritual and one of the many "Sosta di Café" (coffee break).

Running the show this year was European Manager, Davide Marchegiano, Italian base manager Suzie Regul and the one and only Paolo Nicolosi "della Sicilia" who with his affectionate commands of "CAFÉ" and "A TAVOLA", made sure that we got a steady stream of coffee and three delicious four course meals. No meeting has better food for sure! Andi Nufer, Suzie's right hand gal, was busy trying to take meeting notes while interpreting wild gesticulations, Italian sarcasm and linguistic regional nuances.

In addition to amazing native guides, what differentiates Ciclismo Classico from other operators is our dedication to making every guest a better cyclist. Quality coaching requires teaching from the best such as Super athlete and new papa' Marcello Bonino [Bonini] who gave an EXCELLENT cycling skills clinic session. Colorado native, Italian import and Campagnolo devotee, Franco Yantorno (one of the best mechanics on the planet) gave a four-hour session on how to fit and fix almost everything on a bicycle. My new general manager Stephen Lang and controller Scott Robertson were there to witness the passion play up close; they were amazed as I always am with this amazing group of talent.

Are you joining us on a tour in Italy and have some extra post tour travel time? Are you traveling on your own to Italy and wish to have a very unique experience? Would you like to really get up close and behind the scenes of the Italian culture? If so I highly recommend that you hire one of our SUPER knowledgeable guides for a very special and 1-2 day private walking or driving tour. Our guides are also full of unique ideas for private tours and are willing and ready to put together a one-of-a-kind custom tour for you and your friends. Feel free to contact me and I can help match you with one of our Ciclismo Classico guides

New Year's Cycling Resolutions bring balance, health and FUN into 2008!

Greetings and Happy Martin Luther King Day

I love the New Year! It is such a great time to wipe the slate clean and start things anew. I usually take the first few weeks of a new year to craft my resolutions, define new habits and choose those that I want to break. I make my list for the year and get my action plan rolling by late January, leaving plenty of space for serendipity!

So many of us make New Years Resolutions but often the challenge is that the resolutions are simply too generic, like lose weight, exercise more, spend more time with my family, eat more healthy food, take a vacation with good friends. I think the success of your resolutions comes in visualizing the result and by making the goals clear, specific, measurable, realistic and connected to a passion that will get you there. I also like to make one resolution in each area of my world since life balance is one of my core values.

Cycling is such a wonderful sport and activity for it can embrace, inspire and connect every area of your life: health, travel, family, diet, learning, friends and even spirituality. What if each of your New Year’s resolutions had a cycling theme? What if embracing cycling as this year’s theme results in your having the best year of your life?

Here’s my top ten list of cycling-themed resolutions towards a bigger and better 2008:

1. Improve Overall Health & Fitness: Ride your bike regularly.
2. Enjoy Quality Time with Family: Get your whole family on bikes.
3. Connect deeply with old or new friends: Plan your next bicycle tour reunion.
4. Travel More: Take two bicycling vacations this year
5. Make Healthy Cuisine a Habit and Lifestyle.
6. HAVE more FUN: Don’t take cycling too seriously.
7. Connect and Give Back to your Community and Our World: Sign up for a charity rides.
8. Learn Something New: Learn to fix your bike, lead a bike tour, bicycle through history.
9. Save More Money: Save gas money, bike more miles, at least locally, than you drive.
10. More Life Balance and Spirituality: Cycling as meditation in motion.

1. Improve Overall Health & Fitness: Ride Your Bike regularly. Commit to a cycling metric, like an annual mileage goal or a number of cycling days per week goals. Join a cycling club and connect with a Ciclismo Classico ambassador in your area. Most bicycling clubs like the Charles River Wheelmen have regular weekly rides (even in the winter) and have mileage trackers on their websites. If you live in snow country, get out and cross-country ski. It is a great cross training sport and you can use all of your winter cycling gear! Join a spinning class. You'll be surprised how it will condition you for spring riding - plus, it's a lot of fun. Crunch Fitness www.crunch.com offers a class of "karaoke spin" - so you can sing Verdi while you pedal along! This spring, invest in a cheap commuter bike and commit to using your bike for transportation at least one day a week. Get inspired by reading Car Free Times.

2. Enjoy Quality Time with Family: Get your whole family on bikes. Take your family on a local and or international bike trip. Whatever stage your family is in (young kids, older kids, adult kids and older parents) a bike trip is a great way to bond but enjoy individual freedom (i.e. you are not stuck in a car together for hours). The trick is to pick a tour that embraces all levels and has a variety of activities that everyone can enjoy. Parents know how easy it is to convince their kids to do something if other kids their age are doing the same thing. While my 10 year-old son Lorenzo likes to bike, nothing could get him to bike as far or as fast as having other kids to bike with us on our Mediterranean Multi Sport to Sardinia that we did. We will be taking this amazing tour again with our family in 2008, join us! Kids as young as 6 do great on a bike tour, the perfect age is 10-16. You may have to lower your mileage expectations but nothing compares to spinning along a gorgeous road, stopping for ice cream, photo ops, hugs, animal attractions (last year we saw a wild boar in Sardinia) or just taking in the views together. Sure there is the token whining and complaining but they do that at home anyway, right? Everyone’s whining is more manageable if accompanied with inspiring views and good times. Invest in a tandem. Last year we bought two tandems that my ten-year and eight-year old ride on with us. We ride faster, farther and enjoy ourselves enormously when our pace and energy output is more cohesive and consolidated. My eight-year old daughter and I did a 100-mile bike tour across Massachusetts on a tandem last year and it was one of our favorite experiences last year. We usually led the pack and my daughter really learned to stand up and push hard on the hills and experience the pure joy of a fast downhill. I had total peace of mind knowing that she was safe at all times. Singing Sound of Music tunes, keeping track of “yard art” and giving her the map reading and photo- journalist job made the three wonderful bonding and relatively stress free. She is already setting her sights on a cross-country tour someday! Here is a nice book to consider. What about a mother-son tour, a father-daughter tour, a grandparent and grandkids tour, any of these family combinations could be the trip of a lifetime.

3. Connect with old or new friends: Plan your next bicycle tour reunion Reconnect with old or new friends. If you and your friends are active, there is simply no better way to bond than when you are active, learning and outside. Sign up a group of 12 and you travel free and while we do all the planning. Get inspired or record the memories of your trip on Crazy Guy on a Bike. Check out Super Alumni Tom Fortmann’s adventures with friends on his Bike Across Southern Italy with Ciclismo Classico.

4. Travel: Take two bicycling vacations this year. They make you feel refreshed, healthy, connected, young at heart and in synch with your soul. Sounds like the perfect simple soul food. Get out your calendar today, give one of our travel consultants a call and let us help you pick the perfect trip for YOU. Here are some great suggestions for any season:

La Bella Sicilia: Eastern Sicily
Piedmont: The Land of Barolo & Truffles
Andalucia, Spain
Venice to Bologna
Assaggio Toscana – A Taste of Tuscany

5. Make Healthy Cuisine a Habit and Lifestyle. Learn to prepare healthy cuisine by taking one of our Celebrity Chef tours. Sign up for a local cooking class like those offered at the Cambridge Center for Culinary Arts and invite a few cycling friends to join you. Plan to take a ride before the class so your appetites are whet for your wonderful cooking. Take a local walking tour of Boston’s North End, New York’s Little Italy or North Beach. You will be inspired to get back to basics and shop and enjoy more authentic, healthy eating. For extra credit: ride your bike to the start of the walking tour. Check out Bicycling Magazine and commit to learning more about what is the best kind of nutrition for cycling at. Enjoy my 1983 book Cycle Food: A Guide to Satisfying Your Inner Tube.

HAVE Fun: Don’t take cycling too seriously. If you find yourself stressing over your miles, your equipment, your gear or any aspect of your cycling, step back and revaluate how you REALLY want cycling to enhance your life. Cycling is not only about speed and heart rate. Blend your training with some pure cycling fun. Cycling is and should be fun and it can be your means to establishing a lighter look on life. Try participating in a bicycle festival:

http://www.cactushugger.org/
http://www.gorctrails.com/festival/
http://www.shegotbike.com/

Rent a classic bicycle film and experience the wild and wonderful depth of bicycle culture:
http://kenkifer.com/bikepages/lifestyle/index.htm
http://www.chicagofreakbike.org/.

Participate or start a kid’s bike parade:
http://www.bikeparade.com/
http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/tykes-take-the-streets-kids-art-bike-parade/.

Take a friend or partner to a bicycle film festival. The films are so cool, fun, inspiring and the other folks that go are often a unique bunch too.

Come on our Jingle Ride, it is always the second Sunday of December. HO HO HO. Start your own Jingle Ride, Halloween Ride or 4th of July Ride. We would be happy to help you plan your first event. Always practice a monster smile whenever you ride, remember the first time you learned to ride, remember that moment on each bike ride. Get ready for Global Belly laugh day on January 24th.

7. Connect and Give Back to your Community and Our World. Sign up for a Charity Rides, Kids & Cycling, Recycle your Bike! Bicycling offers so many opportunities to make a BIG difference in your community or in the world. For the price of a week of Starbuck’s coffee, join your local advocacy group whom are each working so hard to make cycling safer, easier and more accessible to all. If you live in Massachusetts, please join Mass Bike. Sign up for a charity bicycle ride like the Pan Mass Challenge, Best Buddies or MS Ride. If you are riding the PMC, please join our Team Gelato or take the first Virtual PMC Bike Across Italy, as we donate a portion of the cost of your tour to the Dana Farber. These rides also inspire you to train, you meet other outgoing people who care and the money you raise does great things. Learn more about bicycling organizations that are making a difference like International Bicycle Fund, or Bike Belong and Right to Play. Sponsor our cycling future, invest or get involved in educating children about bicycling with such organizations as Cycle Kids or Safe Routes to School

Donate your old bikes and bike parts to an organization like Bikes Not Bombs, which send these bikes to Africa. Check out this listing for other resources.

8. Education: Learn to Fix Your Bike, Learn to Lead a Bike tour or take a European Bike tour with Ciclismo Classico and learn as you spin! A bicycle is a window to the world and many new skills. It is also a sport where you are forever learning to tweak your technique and improve your performance (if you want). Anyone who owns a bike and commits to riding weekly, should learn the basics of roadside repair. Your local bike shop or community education program can be a source of information on courses. If you would like to take your bicycle education to the next level, sign up for one of the League of American Bicyclists courses: that teaches cyclists to ride safely. Interested in becoming a bicycle tour guide? Ciclismo Classico offers the only week long Leadership for Life program that teaches the fundamentals of bicycle tour leadership. Looking to become a better bicyclist? Every Ciclismo Classico tour offers one-on-one coaching as well as cycling clinics. Consider a Chris Carmichael Training Camp or training program.

9. Finance: Save gas money, bike more miles than you drive. Each year Tom Fortman, one of our Ciclismo VIPs alumni, commits to put more mileage on his bike than in his car. Last year Tom rode 7000 miles by bike, three times the distance than even the most avid cyclist will ride in a year, but nevertheless, using your bike instead of your car will not only save you gas money but you’ll be healthier (health cost bills), happier (therapy bills) and make the world greener, one pedal stroke at time. Before kids, I had not driven for over 20 years and it became my most fascinating cocktail party topic. Now I still only drive when I absolutely have to bring my children and all their stuff somewhere and even then I stick to a two-mile rule with my family. Under 2 miles, we walk, bike or take the T. It is really not that hard to be car free. If you truly want to impress people, tell them that you commute by bike everywhere. You might as well have told them you won the Boston Marathon! We are financial, social and cultural slaves to our cars. Begin to break the dependency. Get inspired by reading Car Free Times. Invest in the ultimate commuter bike, a foldable Bike Friday. Their new Tikit model can get you on and off the subway or bus in seconds.

10. Spiritual: Cycling as Meditation: Take a Yoga and Cycling Tour, Connect with a spiritual place by bike, read inspirational books and see classic bicycling movies. Although I have tried and still like to meditate, I have always found great peace, presence and serenity in the act of pedaling along a quiet road and letting the thoughts drift in and out of my mind, never fixating on any thought just focusing on breathing, pedal stroke, the pulsing of muscles and whatever flows in and out of my mind. In addition to cross country skiing, yoga is the perfect cross training for cycling. It not only stretches and relaxes those muscles that get too tight when cycling but it also teaches how to be more centered and focused on breath, which is the essence of meditation that can be transferred to cycling. Our new yoga and cycling tour makes the natural connection between two highly meditative and physically healthy practices. Rent the Flying Scotsman: to get your soaring spiritually. For your winter walks and workouts listen to some of my favorite inspirational thinkers: Dr. Wayne Dyer, Pema Chodron, Debbie Ford, and Eckhart Tolle.

Enjoy the Best (cycling) Year of your life.

What are some of your cycling resolutions? Please share in the comments section

The 11th Annual Jingle Ride

Eleven years ago, on a ride with one of my staff members, I had this crazy idea to bring together my love of parades, caroling and cycling into one colorful event: The Jingle Ride. It started out with a couple dozen enthusiastic riders at our home in Arlington and has evolved as one of Ciclismo Classico's favorite events. Through slush, frigid weather and balmy days of fresh snow, this 20 mile ride from Arlington to downtown Boston and back has NEVER been cancelled. On warmer days we have had as many as 100 riders but even on the coldest days, like today, we have had at least 50 cyclists gather in costume and ready to share good tidings and belt out their favorite Holiday tunes. The event, that raises money for Cycle Kids, has been covered by the Boston Globe, the Herald, The Arlington Advocate and now my little BLOG.

Today's event had 55 cyclists and one amazing inline skater, Tom Keene who marshaled the route. We were also graced with the presence of Cristiano Bonino, one of our guides from Piedmont, Italy. Bravo Cristiano. Valentina and I on our co-motion tandem, led the parade down its traditional course and caroling stops. We started in Arlington Center and rode down the minuteman bikeway, down Mass Ave to Harvard Square where we launched our caroling with Feliz Navidad, Santa Clause is coming to town and others. Due to construction and ice, we then proceeded down the Memorial side of the Charles River bikepath and crossed the Mass Ave bridge to the Hatchshell where took our traditional group photo and gave out prizes to the best costumes.

Crossing Storrow Drive, we sang Santa Claus is Coming to town and Winter Wonderland as we rode down Charles St. The smiles that we brought to weary shoppers faces is always worth the trip. We stop at the frog pond to serenade the ice skaters. A photographer from the Herald was there so stay tuned to this week's paper! Onto Downtown crossing where we invaded the cobblestone streets with our collective rendition of Jingle Bell Rock...now we are cooking! People take pictures, sing along, point us out to their crying kids. We work hard to get even the grumpiest shoppers to smile. It doesn't take much when you you are dressed in red, have a beard and are riding a bike. Some lunch and warm drinks in our bellies and we followed a horse and carriage to Faneuil Hall which was filled with color and sound. From here we headed back through the public gardens and down Newbury St for our traditional singing of the 12 days of Christmas. We usually make it to seven swans a swimming before we all go a bit brain dead but this year, one thoughtful jingler brought a copy of the song for each Jingler. Even with tired voices and even more tired and cold bodies, the spirit was high!

We ended the ride pedaling back to Arlington via Central Square and Mass Ave and many versions of We are Having A Wonderful Christmas Time. Back to our house for our Post Jingle Party. Nothing like piping Hot Lasagne, some red wine and a warm fire to end this wonderful event. Thank you loyal Jingle Riders! Thank you Joe, Erika, Jewel, Cristiano, Rachel, Natascia, Lili, Mauro, my crazy but enthusiastic kids and everyone who helped make our 11th Jingle Ride a Huge Success! See you next year! Happy Holidays!

Ciclismo Welcomes Italian Dream Team

For the past week we have been thrilled to have not one but two of our Ciclismo Guides in our home office in Arlington. Highly animated and charismatic Cristiano Bonino and Ciclismo's own GQ, Davide Marchegiano were in town to personally "download" Ciclismo's annual strategy in a variety of meetings with key team members. We absorbed their passion and heard their ideas on how Ciclismo Classico can continue to be the best it can be. Davide returned to Italy today but we are lucky to have Cristiano, Mr Charm in our office for the next two months. In addition to his work in the office, he will be traveling to visit our VIP alumni as well as leading some local rides. Cristiano just completed the NYC marathon, his time was a remarkable 3:08. Well actually no suprise if you have ever experienced his energy and know that he runs back and forth to work from his host home in Lexington.