BikePush

Horns shout. Bells say hello. 🔔

Facebook decides which of our posts you see, and most of them it doesn't show you. 📬

The BikePush Brief lands in your inbox instead: our best riding tips, the gear worth your money, and the cycling stories everyone's talking about. One quick read, no scrolling required.

It's free, and you can leave anytime. Sign up in comments. 👇

✨ At 93, Fred Schmid's truck broke down on the highway on the way to Unbound Gravel. He needed a tow, spent the night at an RV park, and eventually borrowed a Suburban just to reach the start line.

He came anyway. As he had done on and off since 2015.

The Waco, Texas native holds 54 national championship titles and two world titles across road, mountain bike, cyclocross and gravel. This spring, he downgraded from the full 200-mile race to the 100... a concession he made after riding 93 miles on his birthday in April and being "pretty worn out by the end of that."

When asked why he keeps showing up, his answer is typically Fred: "Because I'm a du***ss."

His cardiologist told him he has "the heart of a 33-year-old." His wife Suzanne, a neuropsychologist, puts it simply: "Fitness is the best way to maintain your memory and mental capacity, period."

Fred said it was likely his last Unbound. "The old body's beginning to show signs of wear," he admitted. But his advice to the rest of us? "Just keep going. And maybe you can keep going a little longer."

Nobody wants to hear that their expensive part does basically nothing 👇

Anyone just in love with their bike?

🚴‍♀️ In 1895, doctors warned women that cycling would ruin their faces forever.

They called it "bicycle face." A condition they claimed was permanent: bulging eyes, a clenched jaw, dark shadows under the eyes, lips drawn tight with exhaustion. Newspapers and medical columns laid it out in chilling detail. Flushed or deathly pale skin. An anxious look. A weariness that no amount of rest could fix.

And that was just the start. The medical world built up a whole catalog of cycling diseases. "Kyphosis bicyclistarum," the bicyclist's stoop, would supposedly curve your spine. Other doctors warned of displaced organs, chronic dysentery, nervous collapse, goiter, insomnia, even permanent skeletal deformity in young women. One of the loudest voices, the British physician Dr. Arthur Shadwell, gave over an entire 1897 essay to what he called "the hidden dangers of cycling."

The message was hard to miss. Cycling would wreck your health and your looks, and with them your marriage prospects.

But here's what none of these warnings mentioned. The bicycle was handing women something far more dangerous than a clenched jaw. It was handing them freedom.

For the first time, middle and upper-class women could travel alone, no chaperone, picking their own routes and their own destinations. Suffragists rode out to organize meetings, hand out pamphlets, and canvass across whole regions. Susan B. Anthony said bicycling had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." Frances Willard, who didn't learn to ride until her fifties, wrote that it made women "cautious, courageous, self-reliant."

The bicycle forced a fight over clothing, too. Long skirts, corsets, and petticoats were genuinely dangerous on two wheels. So women started wearing bloomers and shorter skirts, and their legs and ankles became visible in public for the first time. That terrified the establishment.

Bicycle face was never really medicine. It was social control wearing a lab coat, a scare tactic to keep women indoors and decorative. Plenty of doctors at the time saw right through it.

But the warnings worked anyway. Countless women were talked out of cycling, told that a little independence would cost them their looks and their health.

We can see it now for what it was: fake news, invented to police what women were allowed to do.

So the next time someone warns you about a "health crisis" that just happens to target people chasing freedom or challenging the status quo, think of bicycle face. Medicine can be turned into a weapon. And those women rode anyway.

City planners spent decades trying to solve traffic, pollution, and health crises.

Turns out, the answer was simple: bikes.

Here are 6 surprising ways cycling is healing urban spaces right now 🚴

My fall cycling wardrobe has more layers than an onion.

Nearly every cyclist who's hit the tarmac knows this feeling 👇