Solé is stoked to unveil our new blog series, Sole San Francisco. Sole SF is brought to you by friends and ambassadors of the company, Justin Yee and Max Schultz. We hope you dig their style and can get a glimpse into the San Fran bike culture. Keep an eye out for future posts, enjoy!

 

 

I’m in the building and I’m feelin like Yee! First and foremost, lets get introductions out of the way. We are two friends that live in San Francisco and share a passion for track bikes. With each post, we hope to give you a glimpse of our day-to-day lives on our bikes, while being 100% real. With that said, we apologize in advance for showing you how much better the bike scene is up here than down in SoCal (our burritos too!).

It’s tough to imagine a better city to ride in than San Francisco, where everything you could need or want is easily accessible by bike. Most people that we talk to that have never ridden in SF think we’re crazy/stupid for bombing brakeless down these hills. We think that is what defines our style as riders -- being fully committed to our lines and going as fast as possible. It’s a feeling that is hard to explain and is what initially drew us to these bikes in the first place.

Once heralded as the skateboarding mecca in the late 80s through 90s, San Francisco experienced a similar subculture movement with Track Bikes starting in the early 2000s. My first exposure to this was in 2007 when I was at college in Texas, with the release of Mash SF. For those who have never seen it, do yourself a favor and find a copy! The rawness and similarities to many of the skateboard videos I’d grown up watching sucked me right in, and it wasn’t long after that I bought my first track bike. I’ve met a lot of friends through riding with similar skateboarding backgrounds, and it’s sick to see pro skaters like John Cardiel and Julien Stranger become big names in the SF bike scene.