Biking into a bigger world

Somewhere along an Ironman course, a cyclist’s derailleur has been ripped from the bike, and the race suddenly looks finished.

Dave Baker does not have a repair stand, a well-stocked workbench or much time. So, he finds a gear that will work, shortens the chain and converts the bike into a single speed. If a cable has snapped inside a carbon-fiber frame, he might run another one along the outside and hold it there with zip ties.

It isn’t how he would repair a bicycle back at his Silver City shop. But out here, that isn’t the point.

“It doesn’t have to be pretty,” Baker said. “The goal is to help them finish their race.”

Baker has done that kind of improvising at Ironman competitions around the country and at world championship events overseas. He is a certified USA Cycling race mechanic and has worked as a team mechanic at the Tour of the Gila.

But he has never been a competitive cyclist himself. For Baker, bicycles have almost always been about something else. They have been transportation and independence, a way to teach a kid how to use a wrench, a means of getting an older rider back outside and, eventually, a way to make a living.

“I think they’re a solution for a lot of stuff,” he said.

Today, many of those solutions come together under one roof on Pope Street in Silver City, where Baker owns Silver City Cycles and serves as executive director of The Bike Works, the nonprofit organization he helped build nearly two decades ago.

Baker traces much of what he does now to the bicycle he rode as a kid growing up in the Dallas area. A bike expanded the boundaries of his world. He could explore neighborhoods and go places without waiting for his parents to take him.

“Bikes for me meant freedom,” he said. “I could expand my reach.”

Like a lot of kids, Baker drifted away from bicycles when he became old enough to drive. Then he went to the University of Texas at Austin and discovered that around a college campus and in a crowded city, a bicycle often made more sense than a car. He also discovered Austin’s bicycle culture.

Baker began volunteering with Bikes Not Bombs, an organization that collected donated bicycles and shipped them to support worker-owned bicycle collectives in Nicaragua. After graduating with a degree in geography, he chose the bike shop instead of a job in his field and became its manager.

Eventually, some of that energy turned closer to home. Baker became involved in creating Austin’s Yellow Bike Project, putting brightly colored bicycles around the city for anyone to use. Someone could find one, ride it where they needed to go and leave it for the next person. It was a simple idea but reality was more complicated.

The bikes weren’t always where people needed them. Some were abused. Baker remembers seeing fraternity members driving over them with Jeeps. The experience helped push him toward a different idea: Instead of simply making bicycles available, what if people could earn one of their own, and learn how to keep it running? That idea followed him to New Mexico.

After arriving in Silver City, Baker connected with Jamie Thompson, who was taking middle-school students on after-school bicycle rides from Penny Park. Baker joined him and began looking for a place where they could do more than ride. He wanted kids to get their hands dirty.

The Bike Works eventually moved into space behind the old Silver City Recreation Center in 2008. Donated bicycles became both transportation and textbooks. Kids learned to use tools, repair bikes and eventually take responsibility for one of their own.

The organization remained there for about 15 years before moving to its current Pope Street home. Its Earn-A-Bike program remains central to what it does. Young people make up much of the program, but adults participate, too.                                                                                                                                           Adults can contribute up to 12 hours helping around the shop — sweeping floors, sorting parts, working on bicycles or helping someone else learn — and then choose a donated bicycle as a project.

Baker calls it an “exchange of energy.” Once someone earns a bike, Bike Works volunteers help the new owner bring it back to working condition.

“That’s part of the fun, is bringing bikes back to life that have been neglected for a while,” Baker said.

Bike Works has also offered repair workshops and, for years, led Saturday rides that taught young cyclists the rules of the road and how to ride safely around traffic.

Now some of those rides are coming back. With funding through New Mexico’s Outdoor Equity Fund, Bike Works is developing an adventure program in partnership with the Silver City Recreation Center. Most rides will take place around town, with monthly trips planned to areas farther away, including Arenas Valley and Gomez Peak.

There is another generation of young riders Baker hopes will discover some of the freedom he found on a bicycle decades ago, and another generation of adults who can help teach them. Silver City has retirees who spent their careers working with their hands, Baker said, and Bike Works gives some of them a place to pass those abilities along.

“Mechanics and working with your hands, it’s a bit of a lost art,” he said.

Baker has tested his own mechanical skills in a much different setting.

While working at Gila Hike and Bike, he was approached by a mechanic looking for someone interested in working Ironman events. Baker took the opportunity, traveling to races where he tuned competitors’ bicycles before events and provided mechanical support during them.

On race day, mechanics traveled the course on scooters carrying tools, wheels and tires. A radio call might send Baker toward a stranded cyclist dozens of miles into the bicycle leg of an Ironman. A broken chain, damaged derailleur or flat tire could erase months of preparation.

“People train so hard for these events and they put so much into it,” Baker said.

The experience led Baker to the USA Cycling Race Mechanics Clinic at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and certification as a race mechanic. He has since worked the Tour of the Gila and Ironman competitions, including Half Ironman World Championships in Finland and Marbella, Spain.

He was invited to work another world championship event this year in Nice, France. He declined.

Baker has a new infant daughter at home, and this time the mechanic who has traveled the world helping other people keep moving decided he would rather stay put.

Much of his work now happens inside the Pope Street shop, where two sides of Baker’s bicycle life operate together. Bike Works came first. Silver City Cycles grew out of a more practical reality.

Baker had spent years running the nonprofit while living on a stipend, raising a family and even building a house. Eventually, he said, he needed a way to make more money and support his family.

A retail bicycle shop was a natural progression. Silver City Cycles serves customers who want a professional to repair their bikes, are looking for a bicycle or accessories, or want to explore one of the biggest changes Baker has seen in cycling: e-bikes.

They make particular sense to him in Silver City. The community is relatively compact, but it is hilly. It also has a significant older population. Electric assistance can change what those hills mean to someone who has not ridden in years.

Baker sees it when a customer who hasn’t been on a bicycle in 20 years takes an e-bike for a test ride.

“Oh wow,” they’ll tell him. “I feel strong again.”

It is another version of something Baker first discovered riding around the Dallas suburbs as a kid. A bicycle can make the world a little bigger. It can provide transportation, get someone outside, teach a young person how to solve a mechanical problem or give someone a way to get where they need to go.

Sometimes it can even carry an exhausted Ironman competitor to the end of a race after a mechanic has shortened the chain and turned a sophisticated racing bicycle into a one-speed machine.

The machines have changed as have the places and the people, but the possibilities have not. Dave Baker is still working with those in mind.

“There’s so many solutions that bikes offer,” he said.