When 560-pound Eric Hites was dropped off by his dad on the side of the road in Massachusetts with his $170 bike last month, nobody believed that he’d actually start pedaling across the entire country. But he had nothing to lose. 
 
 And he wanted his wife back. 
 
 At 40 years old and weighing more than a quarter-ton, Hites hit a wall in life. His estranged wife, already a widow, said she didn’t want to repeat the past. He couldn’t hold a job, in part because of his weight, and prospects in his hometown in Danville, Indiana, were scarce. Friends and loved ones were tired of his excuses, and so was he. 
 
 “I was just failing as a human being,” said Hites, a DJ, pizza maker, telemarketer. “You name it, I’ve done it.” 
 
 Today: Hites is 60 pounds lighter and 55 miles into the journey of his life. And a man who described himself as a miserable failure just a few months ago now finds himself in a story becoming bigger than, well, himself. 
 
 “Everyone seems connected to this story,” he said from a tent outside Bliss Congregational Church in Tiverton, a coastal town in Rhode Island where he’s been on a layover for more than a week. “Everyone is coming forward and wants to be a part of it.” 
 
 When he wobbled into town, his rims were warped from all the bumps in the road against his immense weight. His spirits were a bit dashed, his meager funds were dwindling and any sane soul would say he should probably call it quits. 
 
 “I get thinking a lot and parts of me scream ‘What are you doing? Go home you idiot. But I know I’m not going to do that.” 
 
 With not much cash left and a busted bike, he was thinking about rigging up a harness and pulling his trailer of 300 pounds of stuff like a horse, feet on the ground, heading forward. 
 
 From a post inside a Dunkin’ Donuts, Hites has been doing what he’s done since he first pushed off from the side of the road in Falmouth, MA, and that’s telling his story. A story of love for a woman, determination to shed not just weight, but the self-loathing and sadness that comes with it. 
 
 ‘Bigger than just me’ 
 
 It didn’t take long for word to spread, and on Friday, Hites will set off once again on a brand new bike donated by Newport Bicycle, supplies donated by the Tiverton Police Department, and a growing online community of thousands rooting for him and inspired by his story. 
 
 “I’m just trying to lose weight and build a new future for me and my family,” Hites said. “But now, it’s grown bigger than just me.” 
 
 Like many people who arrive at crossroads in life, Hites knew something had to change. And he was determined to finally follow through. After decades of falling short of expectations, it was time to prove everyone wrong — including himself. 
 
 A few months into the separation, he called his wife and said, “I’m going to change. I’m going to get my health back and give us a future.” 
 
 “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she replied. 
 
 She thought he was all talk, as usual, but he was driven in part by a song by The Proclaimers: “500 Miles.” 
 
 “I told her, ‘I don’t think I can walk 500 miles, but I’ll ride my bike that far just to prove my love for you,’” Hites said. “’While on the road I’ll find somewhere for us to move, out of our crappy town, to start our life over again.’” 
 
 He started hitting the gym to prepare. He picked what he thought was a sturdy bike. He rigged a trailer to haul 300 pounds of stuff. And on June 10, after a long ride from Indiana, he was alone on the side of the road, watching his dad drive away. 
 
 And he was ready to pedal across the United States. 
 
 Overcoming obstacles 
 
 The initial goings were a slog. It turns out he got a bike with the wrong type of suspension and less-than-ideal gearing, so much of his energy was wasted. He labored to make progress, sleeping on the side of bike paths, in a hostel and sometimes resorting to a hotel room if no kind stranger offered a place. He posted his progress on his blog and on Facebook, though not many people noticed at first. 
 
 He kept pushing ahead as best as he could. 
 
 It didn’t take long for his wife to take notice. After two weeks, she realized that he’d actually meant what he said. 
 
 “When she realized I was gone, that I had left and actually was doing what I said, she said it pretty much was the most romantic thing,” Hites said. 
 
 Along the way he’s met artists, shopkeepers, craftspeople, tourists, young children, old men and women. He’s fought rain, heat, met up with a personal trainer in Martha’s Vineyard and attended church services in places of worship dotting the route. One night, he nearly lost all his charging gear and his wife’s diamond ring, but a friendly police officer saved the day and found it after multiple trips. 
 
 It has been lonely and there were occasions, “I get thinking a lot and parts of me scream ‘What are you doing? Go home you idiot,’” he wrote on June 27. ”But I know I’m not going to do that, but it still makes me feel like I’m never going to make it home, or hit my goal, or that I will fail and be a laughing stock and lose what I hold so dear.” 
 
 When he rolled into Tiverton about a week ago, Hites was facing yet another crossroads. It looked like he had won his wife back, but his bike was broken and the Herculean effort ahead was no less daunting than when he began. He could have stopped. 
 
 Afterall, he did win his woman back. 
 
 Community steps up 
 
 Things, though, have taken on a life of their own. His posts on Facebook made the rounds and messages started to pour in. Even after Newport Bicycle offered to give him a bike with a suspension set up for his frame, offers and messages kept pouring in. Meanwhile, his dwindling GoFundMe account started to balloon in value, increasing from a few hundred to nearly $3,500. 
 
 “I’ve had offers for 60 bikes now,” he said. “Everybody came through.” 
 
 By Wednesday, his story was starting to get national attention. The Beach Body network of personal trainers is working to launch a national campaign to get people moving with Hites as he pedals his way across the nation. 
 
 “When she realized I was gone, that I had left and actually was doing what I said, she said it pretty much was the most romantic thing.” 
 
 And most profound for Hites are the messages he has been getting from people who find themselves exactly where he was a few months ago: stuck, alone and overweight. 
 
 “This trip has so many meanings for me and now it seems to have so many meanings for everyone else,” he said. “This is my job now. To make it the whole way.” 
 
 As his coach said, “This is your job until you’re done. You job is to talk to people and do all of these things.” 
 
 And even if he wanted to quit, he can’t now. For a man who set off to save his life, he now finds himself the driving force for others to save their own. 
 
 “Everyone is counting on me now,” Hites said. “I don’t have an exact route or a plan. I’m taking it day by day, sort of letting myself randomly choose which roads to go on.” 
 
 
 
 Whatever route Hites takes, he’s blazing a trail. This “Fat Guy” has found a path that leads to a better future, and not just for himself. ||||| TIVERTON, R.I. (July 23, 2015) — A 560-pound man from Danville is biking across the United States in hopes of losing weight and saving his marriage. 
 
 Eric Hites started his journey two weeks ago in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Thus far, he’s traveled 90 miles and he’s already lost 60 pounds, but a bent rim on his bicycle has kept him in Tiverton, Rhode Island since late last week 
 
 The Newport Daily News reports that Newport Bicycle is outfitting him with a new bike that can withstand his weight so he can continue his journey. 
 
 Hites, who currently wears size 70 pants and a 10X T-shirt, says he’s always been a big person. 
 
 “I hit 40 and I said, ‘I’ve got to change this,’” Hites told The Newport Daily News. 
 
 He hopes to lose hundreds of pounds, and he says he’ll be happier and healthier if he can get down to 300 pounds. 
 
 Hites has a website called Fat Guy Across America where people can follow his journey. ||||| In its current form, a rim has many jobs. Not only is it the braking surface, but the rim also anchors the tire and helps support the rider. And, as a relatively large, rotating object, it can't be too heavy. To meet this requirement, rim manufacturers use materials that are strong and light, but don't offer ideal braking performance. By contrast, a disc rotor is small, so even if it's made from a relatively heavy material (most are stainless steel) it still winds up being fairly light—an average 160mm disc rotor weighs about 115 grams, while a standard aluminum box-section clincher rim weighs about 440. 
 
 The greater degree of control comes as the result of a bit of counterintuitive physics. A disc rotor's smaller diameter compared with a rim's brake track means it has to work harder to stop a bike. But because it's working harder, you get better control (modulation), explains Wayne Lumpkin, founder of Avid Brakes and creator of the Ball Bearing mechanical and Juicy hydraulic disc brakes. How much harder does it have to work? According to Lumpkin, disc-brake pads must squeeze with about 1,000 pounds of force to achieve near-lockup, while a rim brake needs only 200 pounds for the same job. The larger span (0 to 1,000 pounds versus 0 to 200) is a bigger window in which to control braking force; hence, better modulation. 
 
 Then there's the superior feel of a disc brake. The calipers found on most road bikes are relatively flexible and are mounted to a bicycle with a single small-diameter bolt. Their job is to squeeze rubbery pads against a compressible brake track. A disc, by contrast, uses a stiffer caliper and squeezes largely noncompressible pads against an incompressible rotor, giving you a solid, precise feel. Cyclists used to a road-bike caliper may find disc brakes grabby at first, until they adjust to the increased power and learn to take advantage of the precise control available. 
 
 Why Discs Are Safer 
 
 It's not just better performance that has the bike industry thinking hard about disc brakes; safety is a big factor, especially with the rise of carbon rims. 
 
 After a crash-filled Stage 10 of the 2011 Tour de France, Johan Bruyneel, the winningest team manager in Tour de France history, was quoted as saying, "I think it's time to start to consider some different equipment. If you look at the bikes, they've become lighter and lighter, so why not consider disc brakes? They're heavier, but I think it would be perfectly possible. And discs definitely brake a lot better." 
 
 Light, aerodynamic carbon hoops are easy to love, but their expanding market share has exposed increasing numbers of riders to their chief drawback: subpar braking. In recent years, manufacturers have mitigated the problem by making pads out of materials better suited to carbon wheels and producing brake surfaces that are better able to distribute heat. Even so, the braking performance of carbon wheels is average at best in dry conditions, often inconsistent, or with pulsing felt at the lever. In wet conditions, power can be almost nonexistent, some experts told us. 
 
 One wheel expert, who agreed to be quoted only on the condition of anonymity, described the problems this way: "The surface isn't consistent on most rims as the customer receives it. And if the rim is made in segments or has variation in layup around the rim, the local stiffness in the brake track will vary, so while the rim may be geometrically consistent, it will not be consistent when loaded and deflected by the pad." 
 
 In addition to poor braking, there are concerns about the safety of carbon rims. Because they do not quickly redistribute heat over a large surface area like aluminum rims do, they can develop concentrated hot spots under prolonged, heavy braking. In extreme cases, this can compromise the integrity of the composite, clincher or tubular. Once weakened, spoke tension and other forces can pull the rim apart, causing a wheel failure and potential injury. Without having to design rims to withstand those braking forces, engineers could safely lighten and refine rim designs. 
 
 The Revolution Is Coming. . . Slowly 
 
 After speaking with 10 of the largest companies that make high-end racing frames, brakes, wheels, and components, we were able to draw a clear consensus: It's inevitable that high-performance road bikes will have disc brakes within the next few model years. At the moment, though, it seems that component and bike manufacturers are each waiting for the other to commit to the technology. 
 
 "Clearly there are a lot of issues to overcome, but the technology is at a place where it will work, so the manufacturers just need to get on board and begin to move it forward," said Josh Poertner, technical director at Zipp. 
 
 To transition, manufacturers will need to rethink road frames and wheels from the ground up. Bikes may initially be anywhere from 100 to 500 grams heavier than similarly equipped bikes with rim brakes. The effect that disc brakes might have on aerodynamics is also largely unknown, although the results of some tests were not encouraging: "Disc brakes were tested in the Texas A&M wind tunnel a decade or so ago, and they sucked," said Damon Rinard, Cervelo's senior advanced R&D engineer. He acknowledged that the company is considering a new round of wind-tunnel testing with discs. 
 
 The industry also needs to agree on standards for the new brakes, or risk confusing consumers with competing standards, just as too many bottom-bracket standards currently saturate the market. Charles Becker, SRAM's category manager for road and triathlon, says he hopes the industry can find middle ground. But SRAM isn't waiting. It's undertaking experimental development of road-bike disc brakes. "From both SRAM's and the industry's perspective, I'd like to see it happen," says Becker. "I think there's a lot of performance to be gained." 
 
 Those deciphering disc technology tell us that cyclocross is a great proving ground for refining road-oriented disc brakes—Specialized expanded to two complete disc-equipped 'cross bikes in 2012, from none in 2011, and we expect offerings to further expand for 2013. Zipp's Poertner, one of the most optimistic advocates for discs, told us that the revolution may be even closer: "The next Eurobike (August 2012) will be all disc brakes, all the time, for road and 'cross," he said. Others, however, were more tempered in their expectations. 
 
 At Bicycling, we have mixed feelings about the prospect of trading in our favorite frames and wheels for something new and unfamiliar. But we've also experienced the problems with braking on carbon rims, and we are eager for better products, especially if it means we're all safer on the road. 
 
 If you want discs on the road now, you can cobble something together—or buy a Volagi Liscio. Disc brakes are standard on this high-performance bike built for long distances. Look for the review at BICYCLING.com/volagi. ||||| It's a Saturday night in South Los Angeles, and on the corner of Florence and Pacific avenues, an evangelical stands with a megaphone, beckoning passersby to save their souls. The veins in his throat bulge with impassioned pleas to join his iglesia, but he's having trouble drawing a crowd. People are watching the bicycle race across the street. 
 
 Hundreds of riders are amassed in a rainbow of Spandex for the annual Wolfpack Hustle HP Gran Prix, an all-out sprint of 1,000 feet, in which cyclists on fixed-gear bikes hit speeds above 30 miles per hour. Four blocks of Huntington Park's Pacific Avenue are cordoned off for the race. Down the road, spectators waiting expectantly nibble street food or bob their heads to a live DJ. 
 
 Everyone who's anyone in L.A. competitive cycling is here, for an event that not only reveals who's fastest on two wheels but is also the last chance for riders to score points in the Unified Title Series before a men's and women's champion is crowned. An announcer shouts, "It doesn't get any bigger than this, folks!" 
 
 Many people know about the monthly Critical Mass rides, which meet at Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue, and CicLAvia, which closes key streets to cars on a few selected Sundays each year. The real action, however, stirs after most Angelenos go to sleep, on wild, late-night cycling escapades. 
 
 There are "party rides" with names such as Taco Tuesday and Poppycock MoM Ridaz Thursdays, where cyclists sometimes chug malt liquor or don costumes. There are rides that include rock bands playing in parking lots during rest stops, and rides such as the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, which feature changing themes and challenges such as scavenger hunts. 
 
 But for all the cheeky fun, in this vast community, competition and prestige run deep. While the Huntington Park drag race is city-sanctioned, this is actually a recent development. Almost all rides defy traffic rules, and most of L.A.'s cycling competitions remain underground, like The Fast and the Furious on bikes. There are even various styles: "drag" races, such as the 1,000-foot sprint down Pacific Avenue; "crit," or "criterium" races, in which cyclists do laps; "relay" races, where teams spar against one another; and "alley cat" races, in which riders must complete a challenge in the middle of the race, such as guzzling a quart of milk, or buying and donning women's undergarments at a specified store. 
 
 Photo by Ryan Orange 
 
 All the varieties are familiar to Edgar Juarez, or "Willo." Not only is Willo one of the fastest riders on the local Wolfpack Hustle team but he also has developed a following of fans who refer to themselves as "Team Willo." Willo's rise represents a larger trend that has shaped L.A.'s underground cycling community: He comes from a background colored by desperation and gang violence. Cycling is a way to escape crime, gain sponsorships and see the world. That transformation has touched far more lives than just his own. 
 
 When Willo returned to his native California from Mexico just before high school, his mother hoped she'd made the right decision. She'd wanted to raise him and his seven siblings away from the crime-ridden Long Beach neighborhood where they were born. However, "One thing led to another until it was just as she feared: I started making money the wrong way," Willo says. 
 
 One of his friends in Long Beach had connections to an organized crime syndicate and persuaded Willo to join a crew that stole cars — six to 10 every weekend, he says. Most were targeted for wealthy clients, but it didn't take long, Willo says, before "we were boosting cars just for fun." 
 
 Willo loved the adrenaline rush. They were chased by cops. They were shot at. It was like Gone in 60 Seconds, only with higher stakes. One night when Willo was on lookout, he heard the pump of a shotgun behind a metal gate door. "Yo, we gotta go," he told his friends. But his "crazy motherfucker buddies" decided to grab the car in front of the house anyway. 
 
 "Eventually the cops knew our names and would come by the house," he says. 
 
 "Hey, Edgar, how's it going? Where's your brother at?" they would ask. 
 
 Willo became cocky. Behind the wheel, he could outrace the cops, and that convinced him to try his hand at illegal street racing. His car of choice was an '88 Civic JDM with a customized trigger for nitrous injections: "Line 'em up, head 'em up, ate 'em up every time, bitch. It was awesome." 
 
 Awesome, that is, until he was caught in a police raid. 
 
 Willo has gotten used to people asking him to sign their bikes. Photo by Ryan Orange 
 
 Willo spent six months in jail. "Thank God I never got caught for anything worse," he says. "But I realized it was time to change." 
 
 Two things turned his life around. First, his two daughters. The second was cycling. 
 
 At 31, he's scrappy in appearance, his hair slicked back into a wave that seems to match the curves of the tattoos on his forearms. His lean torso tapers into bulging thighs. A boyish grin reveals a few missing front teeth, lost when he T-boned a truck while cycling brakeless down a steep hill. He didn't make the green light. 
 
 Splitting time between family in Compton and Long Beach, Willo says he represents "Lompton." He's gotten used to people in both neighborhoods asking him to sign their bikes, typically with his personal motto, "Zero Miedo" — an English/Spanish hybrid for "No Fear." 
 
 As Willo's racing number is called, he jumps up nervously from his cushion. He grabs his Aventón fixed-gear bike with FSA carbon cranks, a 130mm stem, carbon forks and a carbon bar with no brakes. The frame itself weighs less than four pounds. 
 
 “At first we were like, ‘What the fuck is he wearing?’ Those dorky shorts and shoes looked so funny to us.” —Willo 
 
 All of it has been paid for by sponsors, which Willo calls "a pretty sweet gig." And it's not even the best perk of being on the Wolfpack Hustle team. Last year Willo was sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to race in Barcelona, Spain. 
 
 "Can you believe that?!" he exclaims, shaking his head. "Spain, through cycling!" 
 
 The underground bike scene in L.A., most people agree, took off thanks to a single group: Midnight Ridazz, whose origins can be traced to a chilly evening in February 2004, when six cyclists and two skateboarders were hanging out in Echo Park and spontaneously decided to tour the fountains of downtown Los Angeles. 
 
 Their 18-mile adventure became known as the first Midnight Ridazz ride, a name devised by its eight participants. One was Don Ward, now a well-known face of L.A.'s cycling community. At 6 foot 8 inches, he's better known by his nickname "Roadblock," given because he would step into intersections and use his huge frame to block cars until all the cyclists, sometimes many dozens, had passed through. 
 
 "We called ourselves 'the Mommas and Papas,'?" says Ward, now 41. 
 
 Don Ward, Midnight Ridazz co-founder Photo by Ryan Orange 
 
 For the original eight, the fountain tour was something of an epiphany. As the Mommas and Papas explored downtown, they realized something: At night, the city opened up to them. They suddenly had free rein on the roads, the freedom to discover L.A. on their own terms. They could pass through the richest and poorest neighborhoods in a single evening. 
 
 And so as most Angelenos relaxed at home, their group took to the streets. It felt adventurous — they could explore places such as the L.A. River, where cars aren't permitted. And it was a middle finger to commercialized entertainment and reliance on cars — something Ward vibed with, given his background in graffiti and playing in punk-rock bands. 
 
 They were hooked. 
 
 So the Mommas and Papas took to organizing a monthly ride that incorporated different themes, which they reflected in the route or in the design of the decorative spoke cards they handed out to riders to pin to their bicycle's wheels. Other times, they asked participants to wear costumes, as with their early "heavy-metal ride." Their idea was to be inclusive, to encourage people with all kinds of bikes and levels of cycling experience. 
 
 What began with a small circle of friends grew by word-of-mouth. By the summer of 2006, more than 1,000 cyclists met up monthly in the parking lot of Pioneer Chicken in Echo Park. 
 
 The organizers were beginning to feel overwhelmed. "It was just too much for us to handle on our own," Ward says. 
 
 In late 2006, Ward volunteered to put together a Midnight Ridazz website, an open forum where anyone could organize and post rides online. "Now, the ride belongs to you — the Ridazz community," the site promised. "Use www.midnightridazz.com as your community-organizing tool." 
 
 “Things changed once we started inviting the party guys to the fast, serious rides like Wolfpack Hustle, and they got their asses kicked.” —Don Ward 
 
 Of course, the decision to relinquish control came with growing pains. 
 
 Some rides were fast and physical, such as Wolfpack Hustle, which Don Ward began organizing. Others were geared toward urban exploration, like the original Midnight Ridazz rides. 
 
 The problematic crop were party rides. They encouraged debauchery: beer runs, party hopping, smoking weed. In extreme cases, it seemed bicycles were merely an excuse to get drunk — a way to score an adrenaline rush by biking while intoxicated. 
 
 Of the party rides, no other achieved the infamy of the Kushtown Society, a weekly meet-up in Koreatown cheekily named after the marijuana indica strain "kush." 
 
 "Before, drinking and smoking had been mostly on the D.L.," Ward says. "Then Kushtown came out and did it right in the open." 
 
 Hansel Echeverria, who still organizes the weekly Kushtown Society rides, says he posted the ride on the Midnight Ridazz site in 2009, after he and some friends were kicked out of the Chinatown Mosey: "Those Chinatown guys basically told us to fuck off, so we did our own thing." 
 
 Most Kushtown riders were young, male teens — 15 to 19 years old, from neighborhoods surrounding East L.A., South Central and Koreatown. Some heard about the ride from videos posted on graffiti websites such as 50mm, which had started to cross over with cycling culture. 
 
 Party crew on wheels, DTLA Photo by Julio Bustamante 
 
 "We had absolutely no control when all these other kids showed up," Echeverria says. 
 
 From the first ride, he says, other Kushtown cyclists engaged in "grab and go" operations at rest breaks — nicking items from liquor stores. While some riders spray-painted walls, others would run into stores en masse, grabbing armfuls of whatever was within reach — 40s, fifths of hard liquor, six-packs. On the very first ride, Kushtown hit a store on Melrose Avenue. 
 
 Things got serious when some Kushtown riders started going to other bicycle rides, where they stole accessories, and in some cases even bikes, from other cyclists. That got everyone's attention. 
 
 Heated arguments erupted on the Midnight Ridazz website: what to do about these young punks? 
 
 One cyclist expressed the frustration in a March 2010 post: "We rolled down pico by arlington and some kid, from his window sees us and yells 'KUSHTOWN' like its a fucking gang..... we're just trying to ride our bikes. stop fucking this scene up for us and tag and steal on your own time?...?" 
 
 A response from a Kushtown rider: "Mind ur own and let k-town ride...n stay out of our way...or u will get ur shit stolen and sold...haha...ill b next to u and u won't even notice." 
 
 Echoing the frustrations of many, one rider wrote, "These kids are running amok all over the city and we're basically letting them get away with it. Personally, I've had enough of them." A few forum users went so far as to threaten calling the police. They needn't have bothered: Kushtown was already well known to the city's law enforcement. 
 
 Senior lead officer Gordon Helper, whose Pacific division encompasses the Koreatown area, took a special interest in Kushtown. Previously head of the unit that trains LAPD's bicycle cops, he had advised the Critical Mass ride and followed activity on the Midnight Ridazz website closely. 
 
 "It was well known that if [Kushtown] pulled into a CVS, they would steal alcohol," Helper says. 
 
 Helper visited the ride off-duty in plainclothes, and found that a majority of the young men weren't there to cause trouble; most wanted to cycle. If the focus would shift more to cycling, he realized, the groups' penchant for theft and vandalism might fade. Cracking down would be counterproductive. 
 
 So Helper took a chance on Kushtown, holding back other officers who pressed him on why they shouldn't break up the ride, if only for all the traffic violations the cyclists committed. 
 
 "Because," he told them, "if most of these guys weren't cycling, who knows what they'd get into?" 
 
 That view was shared by a few cycling advocates, including Don Ward, as well as Mark Didia, who had been involved since the early days of Midnight Ridazz. 
 
 "There was a culture clash, no doubt about it," Didia says. "But when you consider all the nonprofits out there trying to attract these same types of kids and help them, just think: Here they were showing up each week voluntarily, pushing themselves in a positive activity, cycling." 
 
 "Things changed once we started inviting the party guys to the fast, serious rides like Wolfpack Hustle, and they got their asses kicked," Ward recalls with a chuckle. 
 
 At "hustles" — cycling lingo for fast-paced rides — party riders from groups like Kushtown Society found themselves exposed to cycling that required strength, conditioning, nutrition. Those without proper training were dropped within blocks. It was humiliating. 
 
 Willo Photo by Ryan Orange 
 
 Willo, who rode mostly with Kushtown and Taco Tuesday, recalls one race where he was beaten in a sprint to the finish line. As he walked away after the race, someone quipped, "If you're not first, you're last!" 
 
 Willo froze, then wheeled around. "Being from the 'hood," he recalls today, "I yelled, 'Which one of y'all wanna get down? Y'all a bunch of bitches!' Not one of them said nothing." 
 
 But even Willo had to admit that rankings don't lie. And that's when he started to train seriously. 
 
 The year 2011 marked a turning point. As more young cyclists from Kushtown and other party rides participated, they got stronger. A competitive attitude moved through the ranks. Riders took fewer breaks. Some stopped drinking. 
 
 The group started racing on its return rides back to Koreatown. At first it was a friendly competition, but the riders kept close tabs, even silently, on one another's speed. No longer was respect earned by robbing a liquor store. It was earned by riding like a beast. 
 
 If one final thing crystallized the allure of competitive cycling, it was sponsorships. 
 
 Willo remembers one Kushtown ride in 2011, when Jesus Lizama, who'd helped to organize the group with Echeverria, showed up with a brand-new carbon-framed bike, wearing a full racing uniform — Spandex bike shorts and all. 
 
 "At first we were like, 'What the fuck is he wearing?' Those dorky shorts and shoes looked so funny to us," Willo recalls. 
 
 But when Lizama replied that he'd been given the bike and suit by a sponsor, for free, the other riders were floored. Most worked low-paying jobs as store clerks or in trade professions (Willo daylights as an electrician). 
 
 "It didn't take long for some of us to realize: Wait a minute, we're already faster than [Lizama]. How can we get sponsored like him?" recalls another rider, Stephen "Neu York" Mergenthaler. 
 
 Riders began reaching out to bike shops and attending cycling conventions such as Interbike, offering to represent the companies in races. Others formed their own teams in order to pursue corporate sponsorships. 
 
 Willo began to aspire to a sponsorship after he won the Wolfpack Marathon Crash Race in 2012, held on the L.A. Marathon route the night before runners took the course. The win put him on the radar of Don Ward, who later offered him a spot on the Wolfpack Hustle team. It came with a full sponsorship from Aventón Bikes. 
 
 "My wife had been critical of all the time I spent cycling," Willo says. "But when I came home with that new Aventón bike, I saw her and was like, 'I told you!' I almost teared up because I was so fucking happy." 
 
 The next Kushtown ride, Willo took his prize bike, and his compatriots congratulated him. Many now have sponsorships of their own, and the stealing and tagging seem a thing of the distant past. 
 
 Even LAPD's Helper has to admit: "I have no complaints now." 
 
 Of course, not everything has changed. On one recent Kushtown ride, about 50 riders are scattered in a parking lot behind a Denny's. Most sport "fixies" with high-end carbon or aluminum frames, and one group launches into a discussion about some cyclists who were ticketed by police on Pacific Coast Highway. 
 
 "Those pigs were already waiting for them, and gave the leader of the ride a ticket for the whole group, because they were cycling along the inside lane of PCH," one rider says. 
 
 "Damn, that's fucked up man," another agrees. 
 
 A pipe with a freshly packed bowl is passed around. Then a cyclist named Chris arrives with a brand-new Fuji spec bike. Someone asks if he can give it a test ride, and starts doing tricks on it. 
 
 "Hey, don't skid on my carbon, dude!" Chris yells. 
 
 Nearby, another group including Hansel Echeverria fondly recounts the epic party they threw last weekend: "Pizza and bud, man, that's all I need." But they trail off midstory when they see a young Latino couple pedal into the parking lot. 
 
 Evelyn "Nyrah Hearts" Lemus and Neu York have arrived. 
 
 There's a certain air of celebrity about Nyrah and Neu York, and their presence has tensed the mood somewhat. 
 
 Nyrah says it's because they're like the "Brad and Angelina" of the underground cycling world. Like Willo, the couple has developed a virtual following using social media — people recognize them in coffee shops, she says, and ask for autographs. 
 
 And Nyrah is only the second woman to show up to tonight's Kushtown ride. The urban cycling world is dominated by men, although there are some all-female groups such as S.W.A.T. — the She Wolf Attack Team — as well as rising stars like Jo Celso. 
 
 “I wanted it pink so people would know they’re getting beat by a girl. Your bike is who you are.” —Nyrah Hearts 
 
 "The catcalling is ridiculous," Nyrah explains. "It's not like we're looking to hook up; we just want to ride like everyone else." The only reason Nyrah feels she can go to Kushtown is because she's Neu York's girlfriend, and no one wants to mess with him. Not only is he a fast cyclist but he's also a mixed martial arts fighter. 
 
 Nyrah is Salvadoran and lives in Koreatown. At 26, she has two kids, 7 and 5, from a previous relationship. Growing up was tough. She was kicked out of one high school because of her bad attitude, and moved to an all-girls charter school across the street from MacArthur Park. "That school was even worse. They would search our hair. There were metal detectors. We had to take our socks off, move our bra around." 
 
 She began riding in 2011 on Taco Tuesday party rides; as she discovered a talent for racing, she helped found the Gorilla Smash Squad racing team. Outside of working for a trucking company, it's become her primary focus. 
 
 "Now, it's hard to do things with other friends who don't ride. ... They don't understand my weird tan lines and battle scars." 
 
 Nue York and Nyrah Hearts, the “Brad and Angelina” of the underground cycling world Photo by Ryan Orange 
 
 Neu York, 24, also races for Gorilla Smash Squad and works as an assistant at a bicycle shop. Born in L.A., he got his nickname from being raised in the Empire State. He has plenty of battle scars; his ears are cuffed from years of boxing, and from cycling — as Nyrah puts it — "he's missing a piece of his butt" from a crash onto hot gravel. 
 
 Neu York is a fierce competitor who remembers his own turning point: In one of his first races, the winners were rested and smoking cigarettes by the time he crossed the finish line. It was embarrassing. "I didn't like to lose — that feeling of coming in behind." 
 
 That certainly isn't the case now. When the other Kushtown riders see Neu York, they know the second half of the ride back to Koreatown is going to be fast. 
 
 "OK everyone, rolling out!" Echeverria yells. 
 
 The ride takes off, a phalanx of flashing bike lights rolling down Vermont toward Jefferson, taking up both lanes on the right. Allowing cars to pass is not a common courtesy, and from the "fuck you" salvos the riders get from drivers and a few guys outside liquor stores, it's apparent they're a known menace. Some of the riders respond with sing-songy "fuck yous!" of their own. 
 
 One cyclist skids in and out between plastic traffic dividers in the middle of the road. Then, as a T-intersection approaches, there's some confusion about which way to turn, until someone shouts "LEFT TURN, DUMBASSES!" The ride whips through the red light to a symphony of honking. 
 
 Nyrah grins. She's riding a bright pink fixie manufactured by her sponsor, Leader Bikes. 
 
 "I wanted it pink so people would know they're getting beat by a girl," she says. "Your bike is who you are." 
 
 Neu York is close behind, on a black Leader EQNX fixie that runs to $1,300 just for frame and fork. 
 
 As the ride digs deeper into South L.A., it picks up pace. Riders whoop and crack jokes above the rushing air. Neu York positions himself in the front of the pack. He looks relaxed — perhaps because his chief rival, Willo, isn't there. 
 
 As online ranking systems become more sophisticated, and riders develop followings on Instagram, there is pressure to be on top. Finding out who's fastest is as easy as clicking on the latest race statistics. 
 
 While Willo has been fastest in the past, crowned champion in 2013's Unified Title Series, recently Neu York has been turning heads; last April he won the Beast of the East crit for his fourth time running. 
 
 "Love him or hate him, he's really fast, and nobody can deny that," Nyrah says. 
 
 Willo actually might deny that. But while he's usually at Kushtown rides, he's also been in Barcelona racing for Wolfpack Hustle, along with 18 to 20 other Americans in the BCN Red Hook Challenge. It was Willo's first trip to Europe, all on the dime of his sponsors and team Wolfpack Hustle. 
 
 Even with the sponsorship, "hustle" is a good way to describe Willo's lifestyle. The night before he left for Barcelona, he visited the Bicycle Casino to play no-limit Texas Hold 'Em for four hours, coming away with $200 and using the money to flip some Go-Pro cameras. That left him enough money to provide for his family while he took time off from his work as an electrician. 
 
 Neu York brushes off his rival with some fighting words. "I mean, I wouldn't sleep on him in races — but at this point I'm all around stronger than him." 
 
 Once Willo is back, it won't be long before he and Neu York square off at the HP Grand Prix drag race on Pacific Avenue. 
 
 
 
 "Number 94, number 94, you're up!" 
 
 It's the sudden-elimination rounds at last year's Wolfpack Hustle competition in Huntington Park, brief, intense races lasting less than 30 seconds. 
 
 Willo feels determined to put in a good showing; in Barcelona he didn't do as well as he'd hoped, placing 38th out of 200 riders. "Now I know what A1 Sauce tastes like — those guys in Spain don't fuck around," he says. 
 
 Neu York, Willo and Nyrah have all placed in the top eight men and women. But Nyrah is knocked out in the third round. And although it had seemed likely that Neu York and Willo would race one another directly, Neu York is unexpectedly eliminated after a bad start, finishing sixth. 
 
 Instead, Willo faces the defending champion, Nate Koch, who cycles for the USA Olympic team and is dressed like Captain America. 
 
 It's come down to the electrician versus the Olympian. 
 
 "3-2-1-GO!" 
 
 It takes only 22 seconds to determine the race winner, but when Willo returns from the finish line, he's smiling anyway. "I'm third, baby! That's whassup!!" 
 
 Koch goes on to win the night's event for the men, and Nissy Cobb takes the honor for the women. 
 
 Since it's the end of the season, awards also are given out for the entire year. Neu York is third for the season; Willo is third for the drag race. 
 
 As bottles of Champagne are handed out, Willo playfully douses Neu York, who can't help but beam. 
 
 The journey to make L.A.'s urban cycling community legitimate has been a tumultuous one. As if to show how far things have come, the riders cheer and take pictures under the supervision of the police, who've shut down the street to let them celebrate. 
 
 Among them is LAPD's Helper, who actually ran the megaphone for the event. 
 
 "It's so inspiring to see these kids now racing," he says. "In fact, my dream is to see them some day in the Tour de France." ||||| A year ago, before the man they call Bike Batman began his work—before he headed out on missions around the Emerald City with a pocketful of cash and the cops on speed dial and a paladin’s sense of wrongs to be righted, before he’d rescued two dozen stolen bikes from the grubby fingers of the city’s thieves, before even anyone referred to him as Bike Batman—he was just an average-seeming guy in Seattle who liked to ride his bicycles. 
 
 He rode his bike to work. After work, he rode his bike home again. In the evenings, in his basement, he wrenched on bikes that he fixed up and flipped. Monkeying with bikes helped him burn off stress. The guy had a wife who also liked to ride, a wife who at times would wonder aloud if all that half-finished transportation would be departing the basement soon, honey, so they could finally tackle that remodel. 
 
 In short, the guy showed no crime-fighting predilection—certainly no inkling to become a vigilante who would face off against criminals while armed with little more than a smartphone, some spare time, and a pair of brass balls. He didn’t choose to become Bike Batman. 
 
 Sometimes in life, though, the cape finds you. 
 
 All the action heroes have their origin story. Here is Bike Batman’s: It was May 2015. A Monday or a Tuesday. Our guy, an engineer, was at work. (Never mind where, and don’t worry about his name. He doesn’t want the glory or need the guff.) He was surfing online for a steel bike for his wife to ride on an upcoming trip. And—well, here, let him tell you what happened next: 
 
 “So I was looking for a Surly Cross-Check,” he says one recent day at lunch over a pulled-pork sandwich. “And I’d been searching for one on Craigslist forever. And one finally popped up. And it was really, really cheap. And I thought immediately, this is either stolen—it’s super beat-up and all the parts are junk—or the person doesn’t know what they have. It was like 300 bucks. And it would sell for $700—like half-price. 
 
 “So I started asking the guy questions about fit, about parts, about whatever. And the guy couldn’t answer anything. So I think, OK, this is probably stolen. And I did a quick Google: ‘Surly.’ ‘Cross-Check.’ ‘Seattle.’ ‘Stolen.’ And a Bike Index ad popped up. And the Bike Index ad had pictures of this bike, and it had a contact number for the owner of this thing.” 
 
 Bike Index, if you haven’t heard of it, is the nation’s largest bike registry and a clearinghouse for info on stolen rides. It lists more than 75,000 bikes. When someone loses his bike and turns to the web, if there’s a hit, Bike Index is often one of the first links that pops up. 
 
 So our guy—he’s not Batman at this point, remember, still just some joe who likes bikes and who’s in possession of a certain curiosity of mind, the kind of guy who likes to pull on a string to see what’s at the other end—reaches out to the original owner of the Cross-Check. 
 
 “I shoot her a text. I say, ‘I may have found your bike for sale. Could you provide some details?’ And she responded with pictures of her police report, pictures of her receipts, all this stuff. Serial number. 
 
 “I think she thought I was some weirdo.” 
 
 It could’ve ended there. Except it didn’t. That afternoon, our hero pulls on the string a little harder. He decides to pose as a buyer so he can meet the guy who’s selling the stolen bike. He has no idea what to say. No escape route. No nothing. The seller suggests meeting in downtown Seattle. Right by the city jail, as it turns out. 
 
 When the seller shows up, it’s not one guy. It’s three guys. “They looked like drug addicts. And, you know, whatever. I talk to people like this all the time. I take after my mom—talk to everybody. My wife hates it. And I start talking to them, looking at the bike. And immediately I’m like, this bike is set up exactly like the lady’s that I’ve been texting. I flip the bike over, check the serial number. The serial number’s the same. OK. At this point, the bike is stolen. I don’t know what to do. 
 
 “I said, ‘Just give me a second, guys.’ I dialed 911 on my phone. Conveniently, my phone didn’t dial. So I pretended to talk to the police as I derived a plan. 
 
 “And I said, ‘Well, guys, I’m sorry to tell you this, but this is my girlfriend’s bike. And it’s stolen. And I just talked to the police. And the way I see it, you’ve got two options. You can wait here for the police to come and tell them your story and how you came upon the bike, or you can get out of here and just let me throw the bike in my truck.’ One guy immediately ran away. As soon as I said ‘police,’ he was out of there.” 
 
 Here it should be said that even though you have met Batman only a few times, at places and times of his choosing, what strikes you most about him is his utter unremarkableness. To the near-stranger, he is beige, nearly without affect, almost boring. Don’t misunderstand: Once you get to know him, you see that he’s smart and funny. But his hands do not wave when he talks. Inflection is not one of his gifts. In this way, he rather reminds you of those other Batmans—Christian Bale, Michael Keaton—who managed to be both charismatic and two-dimensional at the same time. 
 
 Bike Batman, of course, is keenly aware of the face he presents to the world and to thieves. “It’s just important to be this energy sink, basically,” he’ll tell you later. “The only reason this has worked for me so far is that I just go in there and just keep an even keel the whole time…As soon as you start getting worked up, that person is going to start getting worked up with you and feed off the energy and vibe that you’re putting out.” 
 
 (It probably also doesn’t hurt that our hero is in his thirties, big-shouldered, thick russet beard, Viking-looking. He isn’t the first guy you would choose to fuck with over a hot Litespeed.) 
 
 But back to the action, where one thief has fled but a standoff has arisen with the remaining dirtbags across the empty saddle of the stolen bike: 
 
 “The other two guys were getting a little amped up. My heart is just in my throat. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just standing there. And I said, ‘Well, guys, I’m not waiting around any longer. Alright, I’m out of here.’ I throw it in my truck, try to race downtown at 5:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, make it about 50 feet—and then stop at a traffic light.” 
 
 Not exactly a clean getaway. 
 
 Still, he makes it. “I called the lady: ‘Yep, it’s your bike.’ I drove about six blocks and met her downtown, gave it back to her. And she was just so happy.” It didn’t matter, he says, that the bike was all janky and barely worth the trouble. 
 
 Photo: Cole Ott 
 
 Right there, our guy could’ve walked away. But his work didn’t feel finished. The seller—probably the coward who ran—had dozens of bikes for sale on Craigslist. So our guy forked over all the woman’s info to the Seattle Police Department. Then he waited for the boom to fall. And he waited. “Seattle PD was going really slow. And I was getting really frustrated watching these bikes go up for sale and coming down.” 
 
 He got a little obsessed. Doing his own “hack job investigations,” he found more Bike Index postings about stolen bikes, and then located them for sale on websites. About a week after his first sting, he saw a red Surly Karate Monkey for sale, cheap, on a site called OfferUp. He easily found the owner on Bike Index, a young country boy from Idaho whose ride vanished in the 20 minutes he ran upstairs to see his girlfriend at the University of Washington. 
 
 He and the kid set up the buy, then rendezvoused that night with the thieves and followed them to a bleak area south of downtown Seattle where trailers squatted in a circle and shadows moved in the dark bushes. It was the land of stolen bikes. Just tons of them. Again, our guy had no plan. No way to communicate with his new sidekick. “We were idiots,” he recalls. Once they confirmed it was the kid’s bike, “I was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you call the girlfriends and tell them we’re doing alright?’ And I’m wearing a wedding ring. I’m trying to pull it off and put it in my pocket. 
 
 ‘Okay, the girlfriends.’ And he runs off to call 911.” 
 
 The kid must’ve screamed bloody murder, because seven cops descended. Cuffs slapped on perps. Bikes recovered. The police admired their initiative—and told them that their initiative would probably get them shot. 
 
 But goddamn it was a rush. “This kid was hosed if he didn’t have someone else. He was like, ‘Fuck this city,’” our guy recalls. “It was so much fun and felt so good to stand up and, you know, not let all these, particularly out-of-town people, get this bad rap for Seattle.” Later, some cops called him Robin Hood. A grateful citizen in the Seattle Times named him the “bike repo man.” 
 
 If the alter ego born that dark night must have a name, however, the guy preferred Bike Batman. 
 
 Stealing bikes is a crackin’ business. Across the nation, property crime has been falling for years, even precipitously. But bike thefts? Not so much. About 185,000 bikes were stolen in 2014, according to FBI statistics. That number is probably wildly low, because it doesn’t count burglaries in which a bike is taken. And only about one in three property crimes is even reported to police, the feds say. 
 
 In Seattle, 1,563 bikes were reported stolen last year, about double the number that were stolen in 2010. In Portland, aka Bike City USA, 2,100 bikes were stolen in 2014, according to a database compiled by the Oregonian. That number has doubled since 2007. 
 
 Bryan Hance is the Portland-based co-founder of Bike Index. He started his site out of frustration that thieves can steal a bike in Portland, say, and take it to Seattle, and the theft doesn’t get shared among law enforcement. “They’re totally balkanized. City A’s database does not talk to City B’s,” Hance says. Even college campuses usually don’t talk to the city around them. But if everyone registered their bike on a website and reported it there when stolen, bikes would be unsellable. In theory, anyway. 
 
 “Everybody asks, why bikes? And there are a couple factors,” says Hance. “One is that they’re worth a helluva lot more than they used to be. Ten years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find a $2,000 bike unless your were a racer,” he says. “Now, a median price for a commuter is $1,300. The price is better, the components are better. 
 
 “Factor number two: Back when gas was $5 a gallon, a lot of people started riding. And they’ve stuck with it. And that puts a lot more bikes on the road. 
 
 “Then, a) crystal meth, b) crystal meth, and c) crystal meth.” Oh, and heroin, Hance adds. “And that leads to a lot of shitty, low-level property crime.” 
 
 There are more reasons. Take the rise of online commerce sites used to sell the stolen goods. You know Craigslist and eBay. But do you know 5miles? Or Letgo? Or OfferUp or Neerbuy or Saily or VarageSale? These sites are a visual marketplace, showing pictures of an item but often including few words to describe it. They offer the seller anonymity while making it hard for police or others to search the web for keywords. Lost a bike? You could spend hours scrolling through pictures across more than a half-dozen sites trying to track it down. Then do it again the next day. These sites may sell legit merchandise. But they’re also the 21st-century way to fence stolen goods. Think tag sales for tweakers. 
 
 In Seattle, the detectives who deal with burglaries are the same ones who get handed bike thefts, says Detective Scotty Bach of the Seattle Police Department’s Major Crimes Task Force. In the inevitable triage that is police work, home burglaries—with its bigger price tags and terrified families—naturally go to the front of the line. Unless there’s a major lead or a big sting, bikes tend to fall by the wayside, says Bach. Every theft matters. But some matter more than others. 
 
 And then there’s the marketplace. Bikes wouldn’t get stolen if people didn’t buy stolen bikes. But people do buy stolen bikes. Either buyers are oblivious, or they put blinders on. Buying a cheap bike from someone you meet on an app “sort of gives it the sheen of legitimacy,” says Hance. (It’s not a sketchy deal in a dark alley! It’s e-commerce!) But people don’t ask the right questions. Or don’t want to. Or don’t care. 
 
 Finally, let’s give a grudging shout-out to the thieves. Though drug-addled and twitchy-fingered, they’re now damn good at what they do. U-locks scarcely slow them down anymore (angle grinders, modified car jacks, huge bolt cutters, pry bars). Cables? Might as well tie your bike with dental floss, laughs Hance. Some thieves don’t even bother with the locks initially: In Portland, thieves have used angle grinders to saw through bike racks and dealt with the lock later. There have been break-ins at apartment buildings that contain “those cheap, shitty aluminum” vertical bike racks, and the thieves “saw the entire freaking rack off the wall,” making off with 25 bikes at once, Hance says. 
 
 (Your smartest move is to take your bike inside. Boss won’t let you? Make your bike harder to steal than the bike parked next to it, says Hance. That means throwing on two locks, minimum. Bike theft is about time and convenience for the thief and making it just enough of a pain that he moves on. As the old joke goes, you don’t have to outrun the lion, you only have to outrun your buddy.) 
 
 So, yeah, it’s a jungle out there. Enough to make a city cry out for a hero. 
 
 In the 12 months since he began, in May 2014, Batman returned 24 bicycles to their owners—all in his spare time, for free. At first he did it solo. Over time, he met some cops, and he met victims who had friends who were cops, and he sometimes called them to help on his stings. Still more officers reached out to him after the story in the paper. 
 
 Getting bikes back to people became a bit of an addiction. “It felt so good, just so good to get people reconnected with this thing that they’ve got all this emotional attachment to,” he says. “And most of these guys don’t have renter’s insurance, or they don’t have an insurance policy on their bike for whatever reason. They’re out $2,000, $3,000 when this thing gets stolen.” 
 
 Photo: Cole Ott 
 
 Consider the tale of Maggie Stapleton, one of Batman’s favorite recent stories. 
 
 On an unseasonably warm April Friday this year, Stapleton, who’s 29, was grilling outside with friends in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. As the day cooled, everyone went inside. When Stapleton did, she plumb forgot to lock up her bike. 
 
 Bicycles have stories. Her Salsa Vaya—steel, traffic-cone orange—was the bike she bought after she first met her boyfriend, a longtime cyclist. Atop her Salsa, Stapleton became a cyclist, and a bike commuter, riding to and from her job in downtown Seattle. She has put thousands of miles on it. This summer, she was training to ride the Ramrod, a glorious, one-day, 150-odd-mile, 10,000-foot crusher that loops Mount Rainier. 
 
 But when Stapleton came outside at midnight to ride home, the Vaya—well, you know. 
 
 Stapleton went home and posted the loss online wherever she could think of. She tweeted. She contacted bike shops. Nothing. She was bummed. “This bike does have a lot of sentimental value to me, because it’s the first bike that made me fall in love with cycling.” 
 
 And this is what’s so interesting about bikes, isn’t it? A bike is just a thing—an ingenious concatenation of gears and wire and leather and steel. Really, we should care for it no more than we care for a toaster, or a BluRay player. Yet we do. Hance thinks he knows why. Bikes carry the freight of memories of experiences we’ve pedaled through while in the saddle. “It’s not that it’s ‘a thousand-dollar bike that I’ve had for five years,’” he says. “It’s ‘the thousand-dollar bike that I rode cross-country with my dad who had cancer,’ or ‘that I bought when I had raging PTSD after Afghanistan.’” Sure, for 60 percent of people, when it’s gone, it’s gone. But the other 40 percent, it’s like they’ve lost a limb, says Hance. “They don’t want it back, they need it back,” he says. “They’re ready to go Rambo to get that bike back. 
 
 “That’s where things get real interesting.” 
 
 Call Stapleton one of the 60 percent. She was sick about her lost bike, sure. But what could she do? She’d forgotten to lock it up; now it was gone. Lesson learned, she said to herself. Then, on Monday night, she received a phone message. “I think I may have found your bike,” said the voice. She called back. It was Batman. He already was winging to North Seattle to meet the seller. He had been checking the listings one last time before bed when he saw a fishy post; cross-referenced it; and found Stapleton’s post on Bike Index, complete with tell-tale details—a scratch here, mismatched tires. 
 
 Stapleton met up with him in a Sam’s Club parking lot. Batman had already called the cops. A plan was hatched: The police would hide nearby as Batman met the thief in the parking lot of a Kidd Valley burger joint. He scrawled the Vaya’s serial number on his hand. If it matched the one on the bike, he’d turn the crank to call in the cavalry. 
 
 “What should I do?” Stapleton asked the officer. 
 
 “Why don’t you go get some french fries?” the cop replied. 
 
 So Stapleton watched through the plate-glass windows of the burger joint, about to lose her mind as the dirtbag produced her beloved bike, and Batman turned the crank, and the flashing lights woop-wooped into view. She went home that night with her Salsa Vaya. 
 
 “It does kind of restore my faith in humanity,” she says. “A lot of people do bad things, but someone out of the goodness of their heart reunites people with their stolen bikes?” 
 
 Only later did she realize she’d had a brush with Batman, whom she’d read about in the paper just days before. 
 
 Others are out there fighting bike crime, too. There’s a woman in San Francisco who’s good at it, Hance says. And bike messengers down there “who are not to be trifled with. God help the person who takes a bike messenger’s bike.” I ask for another. Hance points me to one of the best of the spotters, folks who see the stolen bikes online and contact the owners. A “ninja,” he calls him. The guy has tracked maybe 20 bikes. 
 
 The Portlander doesn’t want to give his name or where he works. He doesn’t want to get too involved. He’s got kids, he says. But he explains his methods. 
 
 He looks for suspicious bikes during free moments at work, he says, then puts the owners in touch with ads by the shady sellers. He calls himself a middleman. It’s a different kind of crime-fighting, he says, done in front of a computer, at a standing desk. But he also patrols his not-quite-gentrified neighborhood. He keeps an eye out. He started a monthly cleanup. He’s the kind of neighbor you want to have. “Once or twice a day, I’ll see someone what they call ‘ghost riding’ a bike”—riding one, while guiding a second, thousand-dollar bike. And they “don’t look like any kind of rider,” he says, when I ask him why he does this. “I’ve had two bikes stolen from my house,” he says. 
 
 Our thirst for justice runs strong. And just as we are creative in our desire to slake that thirst, we are ingenious in the search for vengeance. A corner of YouTube is devoted to the delight of those who have exacted retribution upon jerks who would steal our bikes. To watch these clips is to feel a bit like indulging in pornography. This is wish fulfillment, after all, the next best thing to the satisfaction of being there and punching the guy yourself. There’s the Portland guy on YouTube who sees his stolen bike in a Seattle Craigslist ad, drives three hours north to pose as a would-be buyer, and then hounds the thief on foot through Seattle traffic until police cuff the baddie. There are the videos of “bait bikes” outfitted with seats wired to remote-control stun guns. Grown men, their taints zapped, lift off from two wheels into the branches of tall trees. It’s sadistic stuff. 
 
 An aggressive anti-theft group in New Orleans called Stolen Bikes NOLA has begun posting mug shots of frequent offenders. Last year, in a surveillance spearheaded by a 240-pound former bounty hunter from Alabama, the group’s members performed an elaborate tail of a suspected thief known as Track Suit as the man moved through the French Quarter, even as Track Suit donned a wig and hat to avoid detection. (Police finally arrested Track Suit.) 
 
 Like the Portlander I spoke with, Batman’s crime-fighting also starts during downtime at work. Take this morning, he tells me while we’re at lunch. There was a ten-minute conference call. But he didn’t really have to participate much, he says. “So the first thing I did was pop up Craigslist and OfferUp on both screens of my computer and just scroll through them passively until I see something that, you know, raises a red flag for me. And then I cross-check Bike Index, or I’ll open up Bike Index and scroll through the recent stolen bikes. So, five minutes, or 30 seconds here and there.” Anyone can do it. 
 
 He pulls out his phone. Here’s one now that he’s flagged. It’s a Trek, lime green. With that, my sidekick powers of observation end. 
 
 Batman, though, is just getting started. 
 
 It’s a modern touring bike, he says. “I would say you could end up buying this for around a thousand bucks from REI. The components look fairly new. They’re asking $250 for it. 
 
 “If this is a normal sale, I would expect to see ‘TREK. MODEL. SIZE.’ And just some details,” he says. But look at this listing, he continues—all it says is “Green Trek Bike.” No size. No nothing. 
 
 Price, and an inarticulate seller, are only his first clues. He’s just getting warmed up. He’s a detective now, picking up bits of lint, gathering circumstantial evidence, building a case. “The photo is taken in front of a flipped-over shopping cart and a makeshift barbecue, some burnt chairs or something. OK, no big deal, whatever. But then I go to”—here he clicks on the guy’s profile—“this guy’s name, and this guy’s profile is made in May of 2016, and you look at his other sales, and they’re all equally sketchy.” 
 
 Next, Batman takes the info and surfs over to Bike Index. He punches in what he knows: “Trek.” “Green.” “Within 100 miles of Seattle.” Several contenders pop up. He starts to weed them out. It helps to know bikes by a glance, their geometry and components. Batman knows bikes. 
 
 “Nope. Nope.” None seem to match. It’s a dead end. Just another shifty-looking sale. For now, anyway. 
 
 One of the biggest problems in busting up bike sales is that a lot of people simply don’t report their bikes when they get lifted, he says. If a bike is stolen in Seattle that’s worth more than $500, you’ve got to visit a police precinct to file a theft report or wait for an officer to arrive to document the theft. “And if you work like I work, 12 hours a day, all the time—Saturday I’m gone constantly. If somebody was to steal something of mine, and a police officer wasn’t able to say, ‘I will be there in five minutes,’ I just can’t wait around the three hours for ‘I will be there between eight and noon.’ That ain’t gonna work. We live in a busy city.” 
 
 I ask Detective Bach what he thought of Batman’s vigilantism. He was blunt. “I thinks there’s some huge risks for what he’s doing,” Bach says. “I would never advise a citizen to meet a suspect on his own. You’re buying these bikes from people who possibly are high on narcotics. You just don’t know.” 
 
 A few years ago, Seattle Bike Blog’s Tom Fucoloro was nearly aerated with a screwdriver while helping to retrieve a friend’s stolen bike. Bach also points to an incident north of Seattle in February, in which several people claimed they’d found their stolen construction tools on OfferUp. After being unable to secure a police officer’s help in time, the people met the seller and tried to make a citizens’ arrest of the alleged thief. Instead, the man pulled a pistol. He later was arrested. (To be fair, Batman these days usually calls the cops as he goes to meet the perp, and they formulate a quick plan, so the the police are waiting nearby to descend.) 
 
 Still, Bach recommends gathering as much info as you can about the stolen bike and who has it to make the police’s job as easy as possible, and then calling the police so they can intervene or make the buy instead. “If you can get us involved early, that’s great,” Bach says. And then be persistent, he says, until someone with a badge pays attention. 
 
 Our Batman is quite familiar with some of the occupational hazards that come with being a bike vigilante. There’s the danger, for one. 
 
 Last summer, when Batman was still new at this, he spied a Cervélo P2 for sale, confronted the thief, and took it. (“I’ve got a picture of the victim, he’s standing on my porch with just this gigantic smile on his face, like, ‘Oh my God!’”) Two weeks later, another stolen bike pops up on OfferUp. 
 
 Batman got a little careless. Though he had changed his profile and his picture, his texting pattern was similar. He recommended meeting at the same parking garage. He arrived early and saw the same thief, who he later found was wanted for violent crimes. Now the guy was with four friends, who were waiting in the corners of the parking garage. Batman let that bike go and lived to fight another day. 
 
 Perhaps it is no surprise that Mrs. Batman does not love these stories. Still, he adds, “She’s supportive. She knows it’s something that’s really important for me, and she has chosen to support me in it. But there are times where, for instance, with Maggie Stapleton’s bicycle, I found that at like 8:30 p.m. or something, I was literally brushing my teeth, looking through the bikes on OfferUp” and went out to bust the guy, he says. “And the whole thing was very rushed. She doesn’t like that. She wants me to contact the police, get a plan together.” 
 
 Then there are the hazards of trying to be a zealous do-gooder. 
 
 Last summer, Batman was flying high on his success, recovering bikes left and right, feeling cocksure. A Rodriguez coupled tandem came up for sale, dirt cheap. (A note here: Rodriguez Cycles are sweet custom steel rides hand-built in Seattle. A new, fully kitted tandem can go for up to $9,000 today.) The seller is sketchy, jittery, knows nothing about the bike. Batman sets up the buy and calls the police. 
 
 They meet. Batman tells the woman the jig is up. 
 
 Fuck off, she says. The bike’s mine. 
 
 The police arrive. They ream out Batman for profiling someone as a criminal with no proof. The irony wasn’t lost on him. “I had a friend, a bleeding heart liberal teacher, was just talking about what a piece of shit I was,” he says now. “I don’t even think I was aware of what I was doing.” (The unlikely owner apparently got the Rodriguez through an auction of a forgotten storage unit, à la Storage Wars.) 
 
 After that, he says, “I seriously considered stopping this foolishness altogether. But I got an email or a text from someone saying, ‘Thank you so much. I just put 60 miles on my bike or whatever, it feels amazing.’ And I thought, I can’t. It just feels too good.” 
 
 So he didn’t stop. But now he plays by new rules. If he can’t contact the owner and confirm that a bike is stolen, he won’t contact the cops and get them involved. Sometimes he’ll snap up a really suspicious bike himself and try to find the owner later. It’s all about acting fast, he says. “This is like ambulance chasing. If you’re not the first one there, someone else is gonna swoop in, and then you’re not gonna find the owner.” 
 
 And when it all goes right, it is sweet. 
 
 Last fall, Batman sees a carbon Cervélo P5—a crazy-expensive tri bike, maybe $9,000 retail—for about $3,000. It’s obviously hot. But Bike Index shows bupkes, and local police have no reports. Batman talks the kid selling it down to $1,700. Tells him he’ll have the cash when he gets back from a business trip in a week. 
 
 During the delay, Batman gets on the horn. He calls the Cervélo rep to find out where the bike was sold: Oregon. He calls the Oregon shop. The shop calls the bike’s owner. The owner calls Batman. 
 
 
 
 “I left for Hawaii three weeks ago,” the owner says. “That bike should be in my house.” 
 
 “Well, it’s not,” says Batman. 
 
 The next day, when he meets the thief, the fuzz swarms. Turns out two guys with family in the neighborhood knew the cyclist’s schedule and had emptied his house when he headed to the islands. Nobody even knows there’s been a crime until Bike Batman solves it. 
 
 Why does Bike Batman do this for us? He has a life, after all. He’s got a wife who wants to sit on the couch with him and watch Game of Thrones. He’s got friends. A busy career. He’s got bikes to ride—four at last count, not to mention the hobby bikes cluttering the basement. Why do this? 
 
 
 
 Photo: Cole Ott 
 
 Our comic book heroes have always been different from us—in their monomania, in the black-and-white way they see the world. The rest of us accept early to shrug and live with the unfairness of it all. But the heroes we invent and raise up, they don’t shrug. They don’t accept things the way they are. That’s what makes them so appealing and yet also keeps us distant from them. We admire their monomania, and we distrust it. We want to know what’s really in their hearts that makes them not like us. 
 
 “Really, it might be 3 percent, let’s say, adrenaline. Some subconscious adrenaline seeking,” Batman says of his motives. (“It’s not like the adrenaline I get from riding a mountain bike or something, or riding really fast,” he wants you to know. “But it’s kind of the nervous energy I get when I’ve got way too much on my plate.”) “And there might be 2 percent of something else. But I would say 95 percent of it is just getting that bike returned.” 
 
 Here’s a for-instance, he says: After the recovery of Maggie Stapleton’s bike—the Salsa Vaya, the french fries—he friended her on Instagram. “I was having a really, really busy week the following week, after getting that thing back for her, and I was really not super-enthused with work. And every once in a while I would just open up Instagram and look at a picture of her riding the bike and just think, fuck. Yeah.” 
 
 “I know that sounds creepy,” Batman adds. And he laughs at himself. And you laugh with him, because the mask has slipped down, and you see that the guy across from you isn’t Batman anymore, isn’t some abstract concept about the war in man’s breast between Good and Evil. It’s just a big, Viking-looking guy who gets frustrated at work, just like you do, and who right now is wearing a giant grin on his face because he’s found something he really, really likes to do, and that something happens to be helping other people who are in a jam. 
 
 No, Bike Batman, that’s not creepy at all. In fact, that’s about the most normal thing in the world.
– Eric Hites recently hit 40 and decided it was time to make some serious lifestyle changes. Having reached 560 pounds thanks to soda and a whole lot of sitting around, the DJ says both his health and his marriage are at stake, reports the Newport Daily News. Unfortunately, after getting off to a good start in Falmouth, Mass., (Tiverton-Little Compton Patch reports his dad dropped him and his $170 bike "on the side of the road") and losing 60 pounds in those first two weeks, the Indiana man hit a bump in the road, reports Fox 59: He bent the rim of one of his wheels in Tiverton, RI. "I thought it would take four months, but [having started in June] I’m only in Rhode Island," he says. Fortunately the owner of nearby Newport Bicycle, who says it "seems like a really good cause," built him a new bike by fitting a frame with mountain bike wheels that should support his weight all the way to California; he'll reportedly hit the road again today. Having first made a name for himself when he published the cookbook Everybody Loves Ramen, a compilation of 50 recipes from his college days (he studied graphic design but never graduated), Hites hopes to publish again, this time about his journey. He's traveling with his gear in tow, and writes on his website Fat Guy Across America that first and foremost he's got "to prove things to my wife and love." Patch reports the two were estranged when he set off, and that his wife, who was widowed once before, didn't want to repeat the experience. She has reportedly told him his quest is "the most romantic thing." Hites says he doesn't know his exact weight now (he dresses in size 70 pants), but he may weigh himself on the big scale at the junkyard up the road before getting back on the saddle. He says he hopes to drop down to a chubby but healthier 300 pounds. (When it comes to marriage, this is apparently the best age to wed.)