The Bakery: Don’t Call it A Comeback

Tara Llanes is the Queen of Comebacks. When you hear her name most people will think of the 4-Cross crash that left her with a complete spinal cord injury, but there is a lot more to what Tara has overcome and what she has done to stay connected to an industry that she calls family.

Tara fell in love with bikes when she was eleven, the year she started racing BMX. Eight years later she made the switch to mountain biking and shortly thereafter won gold at the X-Games. In her first year of racing professionally Tara crashed and broke her collarbone at Nationals in Washington. In an interview in 2000 Tara expressed that she thought no one would want to sponsor her after that, little did she know that the support of her bike family would see her though a lot more than a broken collarbone, or three.

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The Bakery: The Dangers of Riding in TIght Pants

I like men who ride in tight jeans. I enjoy watching them struggle to pull their jeans up over their kneepads, I think because it looks roughly as awkward and exposed as I feel when I’m peeing in the woods.

I am not really one to worry much about what other people ride in, aside from a slight jealousy when I see 16-year-old boys looking better in tight pants than I do, but a simple Google search reveals scads of people with strong opinions about this particular fashion choice in our riding community.

There is nothing that ages you more than criticizing the fashion choices of a new generation, and yet there are pages and pages of references to “girl jeans”, emo kids, and the superiority of riding in tights. Among these opinionated folk there also seems to be some debate about the appropriate age for tight pants. Forum experts weigh-in with everything from no appropriate age, to you have to be pre-pubescent, or pre-thirty. This is something I probably should be taking into account.

Are fashion trends really all that dangerous to our health? We still see girls in stilettos regardless of all the public safety announcements about the damage they can do to our feet, legs, and backs. I decided to spend some time researching the dangers of riding in tight pants. The Internet will have you believe that there are some real disadvantages to making yourself into a mountain biking sausage, and some of them are kind of gross.

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The Bakery: I’ve Found Religion

I’m not what you would consider a religious person. In fact the last time I was in church the priest interrupted the marriage ceremony to tell me not to stand on God’s furniture to take photos. I think God would want you to have nice wedding photos, don’t you? There’s also the small matter of religion rejecting me before I could reject it. My parents tried to have me baptized because it seemed like the right thing to do, unfortunately the minister in our small town refused because I was a bastard; my parents weren’t married. The little old ladies were up in arms over it and protested, but the minister held his ground. Good for him for believing in something. For me it took a little longer to find somewhere I wanted to be every Sunday.

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