All Roads Lead to Dirt with Alexey Vermeulen.

Originally publish on TreadBeatMag, January 2019

For the last few years, it’s been Belgian Classics and Spanish food for Michigan native Alexey Vermeulen. He was at the start of a promising career as a professional road cyclist. But his Tour de France dreams were cut short after only two years in the UCI WorldTour. It’s been a year since his old team, Lotto-Jumbo, decided not to renew his contract. But after a year of soul searching, Alexey has found new opportunities in road racing’s ill-mannered cousin; mountain bike racing. Alexey has signed on to race for Bianchi in the 2019 cross country season.

Treadbeat: Anyone who grew racing a bike dreams about racing in the World Tour. I’ve been living vicariously through your blog for a few years. I really enjoy how candid you are about your experiences.

Alexey: Like how I struggled in China?

Treadbeat: Yeah, and about losing your contract with Lotto-Jumbo. It was all pretty honest.

Alexey: I really loved racing at the World Tour level. Racing at the top level of your sport is a great feeling of achievement. At that level, you don’t have the same stress. You feel like you’ve made it, everyone has contracts. But then sometimes reality hits you.

I raced continental for a year after losing my spot on Lotto-Jumbo. I think it took me that year to figure out dirt was the direction I wanted to go. So, I started asking around, talking to friends at different companies, to find out what it would take to prove that I could race mountain bikes.

Treadbeat: In your time as a roadie, would you have ever imagined becoming a pro mountain biker?

Alexey: No, I never would have imagined this new route. For so long you are working towards a goal, and that is your sole focus. For me it was the Tour de France, as it is for many young racers. You get there and you’re just about to reach out and grab it, and it slips out of your hands.

Treadbeat: I’ve never raced in the World Tour, but I’d imagine the culture in professional road racing would be worlds apart from mountain biking.

Alexey: Road racing is serious, more professional. I wouldn’t say that mountain bikers are unprofessional. But my limited mountain biking experiences, it incorporates more of what I enjoy about racing. It’s just about being on the edge and enjoying the people around you. At a mountain bike race, everyone is lined up along the course; half of these people just rode their own race, and now they’re cheering for you. Mountain biking to me just seems so much more accessible. There’s a trail near my house that’s good and flowy. It’s great because my grandma could go ride it and have fun. But I could go ride the same trail and absolutely kill myself on it.

Treadbeat: You’ve already had some impressive results; getting second at Iceman-Cometh in the fall. I bet that felt pretty good.

Alexey: I didn’t really know what to do to prepare for it, other than just riding my mountain bike more. Iceman is fast, almost like a road race. I did another race, a little further North called Peak2Peak. I won that, and it gave me the confidence that I needed to know that I could do the technical riding as well. I was disappointed that I didn’t win Iceman, because as a local that race is such a big deal. But I took a step back and was really happy with what I had accomplished in a couple months. Geoff raced better on that day and might have a bit more mountain bike wisdom than I do.. The guy is a legend.

Treadbeat: You did a great interview with James Startt while you were racing on the road. You said that the Olympics were a major goal for you. What about the possibility of riding a mountain bike in the Olympics?

Alexey: Of course, anyone racing at this level would have the Olympics at the back of their mind. But it would be gawdy to tell people that’s my goal right now, because it’s too early. I’d like to maybe get closer to that Olympic goal. The Tour de France dream is still there, it always will be. But it’s not as realistic right now. But I think if I’m still this excited to be racing mountain bikes in five years, I’ll know I made the right choice.

Treadbeat: What do you think you will be doing in 5 years?

Alexey: I am honestly not sure…I am enjoying taking my racing career one year at a time. I think if I’m still this excited to be racing mountain bikes in five years, I’ll know I made the right choice.

Treadbeat: You wrote an entry a year ago, when you first lost your contract with Lotto-Jumbo. You said; “cycling is romantic, sometimes in a twisted way”. There have been so many times in my own life where I feel like I’ve stopped riding for good. But riding bikes always find a way to take over my life again in totally unexpected ways.

Alexey: So many people just keep doing the same thing. When it doesn’t work anymore, they just keep doing it, thinking that it’ll come back. Life changes and I think it’s important to change with it. It’s beautiful. I feel like I must have said beautiful a hundred times ha, don’t write that down. Cycling is romantic, but sometimes you just have to rediscover the romance in a different way.

Mini Simmons - A Love Affair.

Originally publish on Surfbunker, January 2019

The first time I tried to shape a surfboard, I approached the bottom of the board with only one thing in mind; rocker. Little did I know, I was ignoring a subtle yet crucial element of surfboard design.

Pick up your favorite board. Turn it upside down. Stare at it from the nose, slowly turn the board in your hands and let your eyes follow the slope of the rocker. Do you see what's happening to the bottom of the board? That’s called bottom contour. If you're smarter than me, you’ve known about this all along. I applaud you for not being an ignorant kook like me. If you've never noticed, don't worry. You can nod your head and pretend you already know. The guys at your local will still think you're cool.

There are important things happening under our feet, on the bottoms of our surfboards. Somebody could write an entire book about the fluid dynamics and the creative experimentation involved in bottom contour design. It goes without saying that I don't possess the requirements to write that kind of book. I studied English, not fluid dynamics. It would take many Surf Bunker articles to cover the minutiae of the bottom contour. How different conditions, different fin setups, different shapes, affect the way water is channelled through the bottom of our boards to create speed and drive. Sometimes, the bottom contour can help turn a board into pure magic.

In addition to shaping mediocre surfboards, I love borrowing and trading boards. I'll take every chance I can to try some weird, funky, new, or interesting shape. Learning how to ride a new shape reminds me of the stoke I had when I first learned to surf. Plus, it helps me cope with the pain of knowing I'll probably never surf a high-performance thruster with any style, or 'steez', as the hipsters call it. But rippers be damned. The right board, with some inspired bottom contour perhaps, can certainly go a long way in making me feel like a ripper.

I recently got my hands on a Mini Simmons inspired twin keel fin. Shaped in Wales by Howzi. My initial thought was that I had picked up a board which was the surfing equivalent of a knock-off handbag. James, the board's owner, told me the board was 'a little suntanned'. The rails were patched with Gorilla Tape, and I had to fill a few cracks with resin to make sure the board didn't sink.

The first few times I used the board, conditions resembled what my good friend Cei calls 'mushburgers', or 'not particularly inspiring'. I immediately noticed how easily it glided through flat, gutless sections. I swear, on my second wave, I surfed the board straight across flat water.

After a few days of 'not particularly inspiring' surf, I started to get a feel for the board. It really worked its way into my heart. I decided to ditch my thruster for a few weeks and really commit to getting this board dialled. I had some memorable days riding the board around Peniche. Dig the fat, round rails deep into the face and you'd be surprised at how steep the Mini Simmons can hold its line. But it certainly takes a different technique, only learned after many botched drop-ins and bogged rails. The horse has long been beaten dead, and many surfers have already figured it out; you surf a twin fin with the rails instead of the fins. The same principle holds true on the Mini Simmons. At 5'3, this thing resembles a wet cookie more than it does your run-of-the-mill shortboard.

I couldn't give this board a proper review if I didn’t try to surf it in as many different conditions as possible. I almost died surfing the board in 3-meter waves. I paddled into a large, choppy wave; carefully setting my eyes on a line before I made the drop. The board had other plans. It shot off like it was late for work. I think I only had one foot on the board when I flew over the shoulder where I belonged. Fine, I don’t have as much style as I thought, even on the twin fin. I'll leave it to Torren Martyn to surf twin fins in overhead waves. The sensation of dropping into that wave was something like stepping on a wet bar of soap on a tile floor... during an earthquake. I think it knocked the wind out of me.

On a nice head high day, the board makes me a legend in my own mind. Long, swooping, clean cutbacks. No missed sections. The tail couldn’t have any less rocker. It helps me catch waves that I probably shouldn’t catch. After a few weeks on the Mini Simmons, I thought 'wow! I am RIPPING! Maybe I should get the thruster out again'. After about an hour on the thruster, I realized my surfing was as flacid as ever, and swore that I will (maybe) never touch a thruster again. The Mini Simmons gave me the illusion that I might actually be a decent surfer, and boy what a feeling that is.

James tells me that speed control in little cover-ups is easy on the Mini Simmons; just run your hand along the inside to stall. Before the hair wash is over, the board will have no problems accelerating. You'll be getting sneezed out of shoulder high cover-ups like a stale marshmallow out of a blowgun. I think we all wish we could charge as hard as James. But I believe it. I'm probably an intermediate surfer on a good day, and I have such a hard time with speed maintenance. Speed maintenance on a Mini Simmons, no problem for a simple goon like me.

The magic is in the hull. The nose has a rolled-vee shape, blended into a single concave along the middle. The rolled vee parts the water like a sloppy drunk Moses, allowing the concave to plane immediately and easily. The board is fast. No flowery language, no poetic nuance. Just flippin' fast. It tears through sections where an HPSB would sink.

For the weekend warrior, the Mini Simmons adds some lucidity to each wave you catch. And you'll certainly catch more waves. This sun-bleached nugget from the land of leeks is one of the most enjoyable boards I've ever laid my mortal hands on. When the waves are shoulder high and gutless, I might be tempted to fall to delusions of grandeur. Maybe, just maybe, today is the day for HPSB. Then I remember, I'm not a high-performance surfer. The old adage is as true in the lineup as anywhere else; why be something you're not?

Men in Grey Suits and Other Things We Don't Like to Talk About.

Originally publish on Surfbunker, April 2018

It's likely that you've never heard of Mossel Bay. But, there's a good chance you've seen pictures of it. A dummy seal drags limply behind a boat. In an instant, two tonnes of husky, toothy apex predator comes straight up from the bottom like a freight train. It flies through the air like Gabriel Medina, before flopping down and displacing the ocean the way a VW bus might make a splash if you dropped it from a helicopter.

Mossel Bay is a popular place for scientists, natgeo photographers, and lowly surfbloggers to go and get a glimpse of the scariest critter on earth. The great white shark is nature's perfect hunter. Like a sentient panzer tank, I think I can speak for most of us when I say it evokes a feeling of both awe and soiled wetsuit.

Numerous seal colonies and the ideal water temperature create the perfect climate for men in grey suits all along the South African coast. Commercial shark cage diving has become extremely popular among visitors. There are just a handful of countries where cage diving is available to the public; including Mexico, Australia, and South Africa. But some of our wetsuit clad brethren are not particularly keen on the idea.

On a small and placid day, early on in my time on the Cape, I recall seeing a boat bobbing lazily about 200m from where I was floating on my board.

"Is that a fishing boat?" I asked the Afrikaans longboarder nearby.

"Naw bru, that's the cage diving boat!"

The concentration of sharks along the South African coast is something that surfers in the area have to make peace with. For many, this isn't an issue. Maybe you've heard it before, I hope I'm not blowing a secret. But there are a few decent surf spots in South Africa.

The South African surfers I've met either have an unwavering confidence in statistics, or an equally unwavering level of denial about the subject. I could never discern which was which. Either way, they seem to have a healthy respect for the ocean's top boss, though some might politely shush you if you try to talk too much about them.

Once, while wading in the keyhole in Jbay, I saw what was probably an 8 foot blue pointer breaching not far from the lineup. Rather than thrash and claw their way back to shore in a panic, everyone sat on their boards and enjoyed the show as the fish put on a display of leaps and flops before disappearing back into the alien world. The alien world where we like to dangle our feet just for fun. I'm fairly certain that it was not a great white, but some other kind of large shark. But the experience helped me understand a few things. First, South African surfers are batshit crazy. Second, it's obvious that the people who spent their lives in these waters have developed a kind of distant understanding of the things that lurk underneath them.

Not long before that, I had spent three days on a cage diving boat in Mossel Bay, trying to see a great white with my own eyes. For the first two days, biology interns poured rotten fish juice into the water near Seal Island, in the hopes of appeasing tourists who came in droves. Armed with nothing but false bravado and GoPros, we waited. No sharks appeared. Growing up away from the ocean, I once had this idea in my head that as soon as you dipped your toe in the water, something would probably bite your leg off. Wade a bit too far from the sandbar? BAM, you've been bitten in half. I think that this fear is not uncommon among inlanders. But here we were, literally begging the sharks to come say hello. And we saw nothing.

It was on the third day that we finally saw one. It goes without saying that I never considered a great white to be cuddly, and I still don't. I am also not a marine biologist. But the behavior of this hefty grey sheila looked more like a timid and curious cat, than a cold-blooded jaws. Throw a toy mouse on a string at a cat, and watch the way it studies the toy before it makes a move. This is what came to my mind while I watched her swim around and inspect the tuna head, making several passes before showing us her terrifying bite.

Afterwards, I embellished my story a bit in an attempt impress two Brazilian girls at my hostel. It was around this time that one of the local surfers cut me off.

"That is just about the stupidest f****** thing you can do. Would you go to Kruger with a steak tied around your neck to get a photo of a lion?"

I'd never really thought about it, but he made a good point. All over the Western Cape, there are signs telling tourists that they'll be fined massively for feeding baboons or baiting them with food. Over time, baboons have become less afraid of humans and see them now as an opportunity to get something to eat. As a result, they are more likely to approach people in places where they share close proximity. Granted, the cage diving boats aren't actually feeding the sharks. But the sharks smell the tuna, and they come to hunt; right next to a cage full of people.

I don't know how a shark's feeding habits compare to a baboon's. But I do know that on dry land, it is pretty widely accepted that baiting an animal with food is a pretty stupid idea. The same goes for bears in Montana, where I work as a mountain bike guide. I'm sure as hell not going to be dragging a deer carcass behind me with the hopes that my clients get a photo-op with a grizzly. In part because a deer carcass would be heavy, but also because I'm afraid of bears.

I can't advocate against shark cage diving, because I'm no expert. But if you're considering doing it on your next vacation, read up a little. Decide for yourself. There are more educated people in this world who are already posing the same question.

In my mind, maybe climbing into chummy and baited water wearing a shiny black wetsuit to get a photo isn't a great idea. I mean, you won't get eaten because you're in a cage. But I bet if you asked the surfer in the shiny black wetsuit, surfing just within spitting distance of your cage diving boat, he might agree with me.