Bryce

Hello Big Wheel Racers!

First I just want to give a huge thank you/Danke to Big Wheel Racing Europe for giving me a bit of space on the saddle to call home.  My wife and I relocated from Kansas City, Missouri to Berlin, Germany in April of 2011 and had to leave behind a great Kansas City Cycling scene that I have been part of since 1996, including the Kansas University Cycling Team and associated covey of Lawrence, Ks cyclists and my KC homebase of bike bro’s that have supported every team I have been on since ’96, The BikeSource, with the last incarnation being BikeSource/SKC which evolved into BikeSource/Ethos for the 2011 season.  Beyond KC, the Midwest has been home to several MTB race series that I have been part of including the boys up in Nebraska that put on the Psycowpath series, the Northern Arkansas Series including the infamous Devil’s Den stage race, and the Missouri Fat Tire Series which has evolved into the newer but equally bad ass United Federation of Dirt (UFD) with an East and West Series.  Sound like a lot of mountain bike racing?..it is and has been, because on the whole the midwest offers an extremely geographically diverse setting for great mountain biking, from the windy plains and Flint Hills of Kansas, to the rolling glaciated and unglaciated Osage Cuestas of the KC urban region, the entire Missouri River valley region with deep forests and river bluffs, wineries and town from the early 1800’s, the man-sized mountains and raging whitewater of the Ozark uplift and Boston Mountains and th super hilly and steep Mississippi River Valley on the St. Louis side.  I blogged about my 2008, 2009 and 2010 seasons at http://www.blogspot.brycelawrence.com, posting cycling results, race recaps, injury reports, and other such nonsense.  And although I have ridden and trained on road bikes for my entire cycling career to build power and cardio, my racing passion is with mountain bikes because I love the earth, the feel of the dirt, blasting down rocky ravines, and the satisfaction that can only be had by a head covered in spider webs on a spring day.  I have been an Expert mountain biker since 1998.

As long as I have been a cyclist, I have also been a multi-instrumental musician and composer of original music.  From 2007-2010 I was a member of The Rivercity Revelators, a rock/rocabilly outfit that burned down most venues in KC, and the brainchild of a gifted musical collaborator and artist, Desmond Poirier.  In 2009 I recorded and produced the bands second album Thunder on the River, which is available widely on the internet.  During and after the Revelators I also compiled my 16 years worth of music, which I rotate around on http://www.myspace.com/layerlogic.  And in 2010 I developed another musical partnership with Aaron Moran to develop an ambient/instrumental album, Sonus Infinitum, which was released in late 2011 on http://www.reverbnation.com.  I pasted a player widget below, check out the site as well, I am friends with some mind-blowing musicians that you can access through the sonus infinitum website.

So what brought me to Berlin?  Well, my wife is an EU citizen and we just wanted some adventure, so she found a job in Berlin and I enrolled in a PhD program through the Technical University of Dortmund in Landscape Ecology to bring my love of the environment to fruition.  Needless to say I have no idea what the hell I am doing, but I’m working hard at it and reading a lot and hope to someday have an original thought.  But for now, I am just grateful to BWRE for letting me be part of their team, even though I live in the northeast side of Germany where there seems to be a lot less mountain bike racing action than in the central and southern parts where the nucleus of the team is located.