3.10.14

Making of the Team


by Carolyn Johnson

Like every good adventure, this one starts with a bike. A year ago, I got a Firefly bicycle and it took over my brain. I rode it almost every day, and the days I didn’t, I looked longingly at it while pretending to read a book (sorry, Saul Bellow). At work, I kept it in a cubicle next to my desk and every time I walked past it, my heart would leap a little bit thinking about where we would go.

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Steve Heuser

But a lot of the time I was riding by myself. Or I rode with—and usually far behind—people who had different goals, such as dropping their friends. I thought there were probably other people like me out there who planned their weekends around lunch stops, scenic vistas, swimming holes, and routes that pushed their limits, but I didn’t know how to find them.

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Dave Chiu

The cycling world can be equal parts awesome and insular, especially for women. The Firefly Adventure Team is an effort to capture everything addictive and thrilling about riding a bike, minus the parts that can be intimidating or off-putting. The team is, by design, eclectic. The six of us have varying levels of expertise and skill and different motivations for riding in the first place. What we have in common is a passion for riding bikes with other people and a compulsive need to get outside. We are all competitive, but this isn’t a racing team—we’re merely out there trying to have a way better time than everyone else.

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Dave Chiu

THE FIRST RULE OF THE ADVENTURE TEAM

Everyone builds their own bike.

A bicycle can seem so much less mysterious and daunting once you’ve braced the top tube against your shoulder and reamed the head tube on a lathe. Punch the serial numbers into the frame and it feels irrevocably yours.

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Firefly Bicycles

Once you’ve installed the components at an all-night party in the midst of an epic snowstorm, you are way better equipped to know what to do if, in mid-adventure, something goes awry. Everyone on this team has actually hugged their bike at some point during its development. It’s part of the demystifying process. It also happens to feel completely natural to embrace a piece of metal after you’ve spent so much time planning it and helping create it.

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Firefly Bicycles

The only other rule of the
Adventure Team is to ride.

We have plans for a great year on the trails, on the roads, up tough climbs, and to delicious meals. We’ll definitely get muddy. We may get lost. We’ll eat so much lunch. We’ll do it again. The world looks different from bike level and so do other people, and we’re hoping you’ll follow along and come join us on our adventures.

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Firefly Bicycles


This team was founded on the idea that riding a bike is a fun, inclusive group activity—even (maybe especially) when it’s really, really hard. A group of cyclists can sometimes seem dauntingly confident—a tight-knit clan of mostly men who hammer and shred and speak a kind of jargon-filled bike Esperanto like it’s their native language. We were all beginners once, and we gratefully remember the people who helped us figure out what the heck we’re doing. That’s why we’re an adventure team—we are even more tough and tenacious when we ride together.
See you out there.  AR square 72