Update: You can now order Pedal, Stretch, Breathe directly right here.
It’s an exciting day here at Taking the Lane Media’s mobile headquarters (currently located on a futon in a living room in midtown Houston, Texas). We’re publishing our first title that is entirely by an author who is not me.
The zine is Pedal, Stretch, Breathe and is an illustrated guide to yoga for bicyclists and to bicycling for yoga-ists. The author is Kelli Refer, who teaches yoga in Seattle and maintains the Yoga for Bikers blog.
She drew a one-page comic for Our Bodies, Our Bikes (that’s Taking the Lane #5) showing two yoga stretches to do with your bike, at a stoplight or before riding. I encouraged her to make more of them, she said she was thinking about it; one thing led to another and the idea for Pedal, Stretch, Breathe was born.
In the months since then it’s been a delight to watch the drawings and text of the zine progress. I’ve been both doing yoga and bicycling for years, but other than the idle observation that better core strength means I can ride faster uphill, and that doing certain poses on a regular basis keep my knees from hurting, I never much thought of them as connected. It’s been a delight to read the evolving drafts of this zine, in which details and big picture ideas about both bicycling and yoga combine seamlessly in ways that blow my otherwise jaded mind. The zine also features illustrations, including a flow chart of stretches to suit your personal riding style and muscle twinges.
One of my favorite sections of writing is about breath. It takes you from the experience of pedaling up a steep Seattle hill, breathing hard, to the Seattle’s greenway movement, to the scientific literature on particulate matter from car exhaust, to bees, to specific breath exercises you can use to get you up that hill more easily. It’s all tied together with some decidedly un-cheesy yoga philosophy. I love it, and I think you will too.
I’m funding this via Kickstarter once again, and again with huge gratitude for the way it makes it possible to connect with people to keep producing these zines. You can support this project and pre-order a zine (or two!) here. Backers will receive their copies of Pedal, Stretch, Breathe and other good stuff this July. [Note: You can now buy it here.]
In other publishing news, the BikeSexuality zine (TTL #7) is also in the works and should come out around the same time. [Note: It’s out now!] If you’re interested in ordering both that and Pedal, Stretch, Breathe, there’s a reward level on the Kickstarter page that net you both.
Thank you all for reading and supporting!