Review: Rouleur Notebook
(2020) Call us old fashioned. Sure there is a bike somewhere around the office with the latest technology on it. There is a smart trainer at home that gives precise wattage every moment of a Zwift ride while we shove ice cream in our gob. When it comes to writing there is a curse of great ideas that come along at the worst times. Having a Rouleur Notebook on hand, with inspirational cycling covers, can alleviate some of those lost thoughts.
As creakybottombracket.com approaches its 500th article, it would not be a stretch to proclaim another 500 ideas were lost to the ether of deep sleep. It has always been difficult to convince the mind to keep that amazing sentence stowed all night and waiting in the morning. It is also difficult to convince the body to roll over and clumsily type something out on the smartphone. Forget actually getting out of bed and blinding oneself with a laptop screen. That’ll keep anyone up for hours. So there we lay, repeating the sentence over and over with hopes it will be in the cloud the next morning for us to record.
Except it is never there.
Several years ago, the Rapha Festive 500 received a journal that recorded a rider’s experience of the wintry challenge. There were notes. There were sketches. The pages crackled with each turn I imagine. Constant thoughts sent the writer back to the journal just to record ‘one more thing.’ The submission won one of the contests and was featured on the Festive 500 page as a reference for future submissions. Here is where Rouleur’s Notebook would come in handy.
Citing journalists always asking for extra journals, Rouler magazine doubled down and produced their own notebooks with stunning cycling pictures from their magazines. What arrived at the office is a journal that has been immediately pressed into service. We snagged the journal titled ‘Secteur Pave’ and have found immense pleasure in seeing it record our thoughts. The journal is not big. It will fit conveniently in any bag pocket. Should we ever bow out of a cycling event and decide to report on behind-the-scenes, this would fulfill our daydreams of jotting thoughts from a neutral service car. A simple journal has reignited our desire to write more.
Sure we could get dozens of composition books and scribble away until we have to go to Staples for another box of them, but where is the inspirational cover? How Scribner we feel to pull the elastic page marker away to reveal our last thought. It may look brand-new now, but give it time. These are the journals meant for revisiting. The pages can be filled with race notes, epic ride reflections, and even names of riders who go from our life as quickly as they arrived. This rounded-paged journal could even win you a Festive 500 category. There are 96 pages waiting to be filled.
We chewed on an opening sentence an entire drive home and recorded it. It’s not perfect but it’s there, ready to be reworked and refined for a future article. But the important part is that it is finally there. Contrast that with several weeks ago we managed to figure out how to describe the feeling of a ride, alleviating the burden of description. You know how this ends: With no journal nearby the description was lost and frustratingly we have returned to searching for the words. Hopefully we locate the words and write them down to douse the anxiety of description.
