A Cyclist’s Life in Tenerife (Canary Islands)

Funeral de Nicolas Amador Bello

Nicolás Amador Bello of Club Taoro Fonteide dies in car accident, age 16.

It really saddens me to report this bad news: I just got a call saying that a young aquaintance of mine, Nicolás Amador Bello, a cyclist in the local Taoro Fonteide team died today in a grave cycling accident. This happened not far from where I live at a roundabout near La Orotava, Tenerife, Canarys Islands, Spain.

Actually although I am not officially a part of that team, I had ridden, trained & spoken with him several training rides… I still hadn’t even memorised his face all that well. I am quite literally lost for words. He was just 16, and this has really come as quite some shock to me.

My deepest condolences to his family, friends, and especially Jesús Martín Pérez (the director of the local Cycling Club Taoro sponsored by Fonteide), who always tries his utmost to protect those young aspiring champion cyclists in club Taoro. I will surely speak with Jesús tomorrow morning.

El joven fallecido en La Orotava pertenecía al equipo de ciclismo ‘Fonteide’ y chocó con un vehículo mientras entrenaba
El joven ciclista del equipo Fonteide, Nicolás Amador Bello, de 16 años, fue atropellado esta mañana en la rotonda de acceso a San Antonio cuando entrenaba. La Federación Insular de Ciclismo de Tenerife ha expresado sus condolencias a los familiares del joven y prevé aplazar la carrera prevista para hoy en el III Trofeo Ciclista en Palo Blanco en señal de luto.
El joven de 16 años que falleció hoy atropellado en la rotonda de acceso al barrio de San Antonio, en La Orotava, era el ciclista Nicolás Amador Bello, de la categoría cadete del equipo Fonteide y sufrió el accidente mientras entrenaba, según informó la Federación Tinerfeña de Ciclismo, que ha expresado sus condolencias a los familiares del joven fallecido.

Nicolás Amador Bello chocó con un vehículo en La Orotava y los equipos sanitarios de la ambulancia medicalizada y de urgencias desplazados al lugar del accidente no pudieron hacer nada por la vida del afectado, que presentaba varios traumatismos de carácter grave.

Tags: News Reel by Dr. Leslie Brown
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1. Head for the hills - there’s no cheating yourself here, because you can’t draft behind other riders, and it forces you to keep pedalling continuously. This is our philosophy.
2. Get your cycling equipment ready the night before - so you have no excuses in the morning not to go. That way, you feel extra guilty if you sleep in, and you won’t miss all-important weekend training sessions due to “general morning laziness”.
3. Become an “instant fixer” - don’t procrastinate & delay any bicycle repairs. Fix it ASAP, because a broken bike gives you one more reason not to go for the next ride.
4. Increase your mileage to improve endurance - for example: rather than go for daily 1 hour rides, go for a 2 hour ride every other day, or 3 - 4 hour ride twice a week. This also eliminates a lot of wasted preparation time.
5. Get out quick before you change your mind - clouds looming overhead? Computer not working? Cycling jersey still in the wash? Pacing & wondering whether to go or not? If so, you’re procrastinating. Don’t think, act! Just go already, even if the conditions aren’t ideal! Even if it rains, once you’re wet, you can’t get any wetter. Provided that your habitual bike position doesn’t change, if you make the time to ride, you will get fitter & you will enjoy cycling more… with plain old tap water or with sports drinks; with or without knowing the distance you’ve travelled or the current speed you’re doing; wet or dry.
6. Go for a short ride - we all have other important commitments besides cycling. If you don’t have time for a long 3 - 5 hour ride, don’t obsess over not being able to go. I.e. don’t suffer from “all or nothing syndrome”. Go for an hour. Go for 20 minutes. Its still better than nothing! If you’re really serious, treat it as a “rest or recovery day”.
7. Ride to work - exercise while you commute. Also great for the environment; no further explanation necessary.
8. Join a bike club - the commitment to meet with other cyclists at a specified time and date helps your motivation level. You’re less likely to bail out of a training session, because you let other people down as well as yourself.
9. Don’t set unrealistic goals - because when you fail to reach them, you’ll lose motivation to continue with your training plan. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you skip a day or a week or even a month. Even professional cyclists need rest periods. And lastly, remember that half the fun of excercising is feeling the gradual improvement in your own fitness level. If you haven’t ridden for a looong time, there’s only one way to go, and that’s to be fitter. Maintain positive thinking.
10. Don’t be a slave; embrace change! - this applies to heart rate monitors, cycle-computers, training schedules, ride routines, clothing, food, etc. We’re all humans, we’re all fallible. All routines eventually become boring and “samey”, and then they fail. Hence change is the key. Plan a new ride once in a while.

“Ride your bike. Ride your bike. Ride Your bike.” - Fausto Copi

Tags: Ride the Volcano!, Learning Curve by Dr. Leslie Brown
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1. The mountains are higher in Tenerife than Mallorca (the roads here go up to 2300m, Mt Teide is 3700m)
2. Tenerife is much warmer in the winter months than Mallorca (January, February, March) so you can start your on-bike training earlier in the season.
3. Tenerife has no flat roads, forcing you to train harder.
4. Tenerife is where all the professional pro-tour cyclists do their pro cycle-training camps.
5. You’re sick of all the beginner cyclists /café-poser cyclist culture in Mallorca
6. You’re a loner, and you’re sick at the sight of all the other cyclists in Majorca!
7. You prefer to end a day’s ride on a black volcanic sand beach than an off-white coloured one.
8. You’ve already cycled through all the roads in Mallorca and cycle lanes in the surrounding Balearic Islands.
9. You don’t know how to pronounce “Mallorca”
10. There are no decent offroad down-hill runs in Mallorca!

Tags: Ride the Volcano! by Dr. Leslie Brown
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His full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso!

By Robert Hughes - TIME magazine art critic

To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people–though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso’s audience–meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work, at least in reproduction–was in the tens, possibly hundreds, of millions. He and his work were the subjects of unending analysis, gossip, dislike, adoration and rumor.

He was a superstitious, sarcastic man, sometimes rotten to his children, often beastly to his women. He had contempt for women artists. His famous remark about women being “goddesses or doormats” has rendered him odious to feminists, but women tended to walk into both roles open-eyed and eagerly, for his charm was legendary. Whole cultural industries derived from his much mythologized virility. He was the Minotaur in a canvas-and-paper labyrinth of his own construction.

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

He was also politically lucky. Though to Nazis his work was the epitome of “degenerate art,” his fame protected him during the German occupation of Paris, where he lived; and after the war, when artists and writers were thought disgraced by the slightest affiliation with Nazism or fascism, Picasso gave enthusiastic endorsement to Joseph Stalin, a mass murderer on a scale far beyond Hitler’s, and scarcely received a word of criticism for it, even in cold war America.

No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime. And it is quite possible that none ever will be again, now that the mandate to set forth social meaning, to articulate myth and generate widely memorable images has been so largely transferred from painting and sculpture to other media: photography, movies, television.

[Read more →]

Tags: Inspiration. by Dr. Leslie Brown
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