I'm going to have to plagiarize my good friend and co-founder Ben Coles to explain this one. I'm just going to pull some quotes from his blog entry. Jed Schneider also being a co-founder and contributing author of the Ghetto Bike Racing Code of Conduct.
Ghetto Bike racing was more than an activity; ghetto bike racing was a philosophically derived praxis—the perfect Hursurlian marriage of the phenomenological ‘to do’ and ‘to be,’ that amongst other things involved over-intellectualizing the day to day with clever phrasing and complex pseudo-social scientism in order to pass the many long hours spent on the windswept hills of Kansas. Ghetto bike racing was, and is, a life style. ....... The philosophy remains an intriguing avenue for epistemological introspection and interrogation of what it means to be (ghetto) and be hard, the later a subject of intense debate and an even more intensive pseudo-scientific ranking system for the measurement and analysis of hardness that often resulted in conversations following a feat of stupidity. The ethos of ghetto bike racing, summed around these key rules, with the added perspective that safety indeed sucked, was that nothing except the race mattered. And, life evolved around the race.
-Ben Coles
So there you have it. Now, in an obvious attempt to keep readers coming back for more, I'm going to place one rule, a caveat if you will, at a time on the blog. Eventually, Jed Schneider and I are going to make website completely devoted to this philosophy as well as some other things (i.e. Cyclocross: Where your line is your weapon).
Rule number whatever:
Under no circumstance is it "ok" to get dropped from the winning break. The winning break is going to win and winning is what every bike racer dreams of. Do Whatever It Takes to stay in that breakaway.
