The Many Faces of the February Adventure Cyclist

For the last few years, the February issue of Adventure Cyclist magazine has focused on event rides. We loosely define an event ride as an organized ride of 3 days or more with at least 30 people. The bigger events, however, have thousands of riders. We were fortunate this year to be working with the images of Dennis Coello, one of the premier cycling photographers working today, who has loads of great shots from event rides all over the country.

When I first started mocking up potential covers, I looked at Dennis's shots from RAGBRAI, which featured hundreds of riders streaming through the rural Iowa landscape. They were great shots and would have made for good covers.

I'm particularly fond of the above cover. The light is beautiful and the image has great color, depth, and spirit. It conveys the camaraderie and fun of event rides. Plus, I love how the logo and cover lines look against the clouds.

Then I came to Dennis's images from the start of the Hotter'n Hell Hundred, an annual rally in Wichita Falls, Texas, that attracted 12,000 cyclists in 2009. That's a heck of a lot of cyclists in one place, and Dennis perfectly captured the kaleidoscopic crowd when he climbed into a boom crane and took several images of them all packed together at the ride's pre-dawn startline. As soon as I saw these shots I knew they would make for a unique and graphically compelling cover, but I wasn't sure how they would go over with the rest of the Adventure Cyclist team.

They're a big departure from what we usually do, and they're not exactly inspirational — after all, you don't sign up for an event ride to stand in a crowd with thousands of people in Lycra. So I was pleasantly surprised when everyone else loved the idea. It was just so visually unique. Plus, you could spend more time looking at it than perhaps any Adventure Cyclist cover ever. The image above is the original cover we'd planned to use. I love that the only person looking at the camera (and the one in perfect focus) is the guy in the dead center.

But then I found this image, which captured an even denser section of the crowd. Right away, I knew I had a winner and immediately put it on the cover. Now my cover line — Losing Yourself in Event Rides — was an even better fit.

As you can see, the image is a horizontal shot that we cropped considerably. We typically only do this for a few covers per year, and only when the image is big enough to stand up to the cropping. Fortunately this one was, and we had our February cover. I suspect many people would have preferred one of the more classic covers I'd originally mocked, but sometimes it's fun to put out something unexpected.

photos by Dennis Coello

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RIDE ON THE WILD SIDE appears the first Wednesday of every month and is handcrafted by Aaron Teasdale, deputy editor of Adventure Cyclist and photo editor for Adventure Cycling Association. It looks at the wilder side of bicycle travel and photography, and offers behind-the-scenes looks at the creation of Adventure Cyclist magazine. To see more of Teasdale’s work, check out his personal blog: http://aaronteasdale.blogspot.com.