The female lays 1 to 3 eggs but 4 and even 5 eggs have occasionally been recorded. The nest is lined with grass and sometimes also with sheep's wool. The male brings dead twigs that are placed by the female. A pair will sometimes use a nest from the previous year and can occasionally occupy an old nest of the common buzzard. The nest is usually placed in a fork of a large hardwood tree at a height of between 12 and 15 m (39 and 49 ft) above the ground. Without RKP, I probably don’t get to become this Dirt Soul, which is just another name for a Dirt Bag with delusions of grandeur.Red kites are monogamous they mate for life and breed from March till May. I will still be contributing to RKP, the Friday Group Ride and other stuff about road and gravel riding, but DSS is for everything else, trail running, hiking, mountain biking and exploration. If you can’t be great, maybe try to be prolific?ĭirt Soul Search is really my Red Kite Prayer, the place where all my ideas can find the light of day. More than 750 posts followed that one, including more than 500 of the Friday Group Ride. It’s more than a decade since I wrote that first piece for RKP. On top of that, they helped me see that there is a good life to be made from going outside, exploring in whatever way you can, and then writing about it. I had been desperate to escape corporate life, soul sick with the banality of it all, and those guys helped me do that. And via all that I learned so much more than I ever could have imagined and met so many great bike people all over the planet, and it’s sort of cliché to say that it changed my whole life, except that it did. Then Outside Magazine named RKP the #1 Bike Blog on the internet. We worked together and visited each other, and met up at industry events and out on the road. I was all the way down the wormhole.įreddy and I became friends. Even writing this, just now, I can see how odd my frame of mind was then. Reading Abt’s pieces about races whose outcome I already knew was something special, because he brought the events and the characters to life in extraordinary ways. I was devouring every bit of cycling history I could and had developed a particular love for the journalism of Samuel Abt, who covered the Tour de France for more than 30 years, writing for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. The Red Kite Prayer, incidentally, is the prayer the breakaway rider in the lead of a race says at the 1km to go banner, the red kite, in hopes of staying away to the finish and winning the race.Īround that time I was, as I said, obsessed. He needed RKP as an outlet for the riot of ideas bursting out of his fingertips (sort of like this site houses every idea rattling around in my head). He had too much for it all to find its way into print or onto BKW. Later I would learn that Padraig started RKP because he was bursting with words. Like cold, salty ocean water, doubt will find its way inside a breach and then… it’s only a matter of time before the ship goes down. When the sh*t goes down and the screws are turned, we all wage the war against the ingress of doubt. Here’s a classic excerpt from Freddy’s work: Belgium Knee Warmers is a term for embrocation, the grease the toughest riders slather on their legs for cold weather training, in lieu of tights or actual knee warmers. It was the deep dive on cycling culture I craved, and it didn’t take itself too seriously. He could reminisce about races decades past and describe what it felt like to turn yourself inside out on a long climb.
He knew how tall your socks were supposed to be, and also didn’t care. Freddy was in tune with the zeitgeist in a serious way. That’s when I discovered Belgium Knee Warmers, written by a guy who called himself Radio Freddy. I was obsessed with cycling, and I wanted to read things that expressed what I felt about riding a bike.
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