SportTechie’s Athletes Voice series features the views and opinions of the athletes who use and are powered by technology. SportTechie caught up with bike messenger and fixed gear bike racer Nico Deportago-Cabrera at the Red Bull Bay Climb in September to find out about how he uses technology on his bike, both in racing and in his day job.
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Nico Deportago-Cabrera first took up cycling around Chicago in 2004 after losing his driver’s license. Four years later, when the band he played in broke up, Deportago-Cabrera started working as a bike messenger and began racing alleycats against fellow couriers. Riders would speed from checkpoint to checkpoint across the city in unsanctioned races, completing various tasks along the route.
Deportago-Cabrera won the North American Cycle Courier Championships in Boston in 2009, and again in Brooklyn in 2016. He signed on as a Red Bull-sponsored athlete, and has competed in the Cycle Messenger World Championships. His racing seasons each year now pivot from messenger-style races to cyclocross, gravel events, and ultra-endurance. September’s Bay Climb race was a short sprint straight up De Haro Street in San Francisco, with gradients exceeding 23 percent—very different to his flat hometown.
He still lives and works in Chicago as a bike messenger. Over the last decade he has seen the courier industry forced almost out of existence, and then evolve and flourish as the app-driven gig economy has grown.
Racing Up the Red Bull Bay Climb
“I’d forgotten how brutal these hills were from last year until I arrived this morning. Coming up De Haro you can just see the hills kick. And you can’t even actually see the top, because it’s too steep to see over. ‘Ah, now I remember.’ I started to have phantom aches and pains [from] last year and the lung burn started to come back.”
“There’s two ways to go about it. Either you go super hard from the get go and try and get a substantial lead and maintain it. Because inevitably whenever everybody gets to the end of the second hill you’re really hurting. If you can put a gap on the field before that happens then you give yourself a bit of a cushion. Otherwise you just try and stay with the front for the first hill and a half, and save your legs a little bit.”
“In my heat, me and homie were sitting third and fourth pretty close, and somewhere around the second hill he just started pulling ahead of me. I looked back, and I had enough of a gap on the guys behind us. I was like ‘Alright, third and fourth will go to the next chance qualifier.’ Then halfway up that last hill my heart wanted to explode, my lungs were on fire. Your brain’s like ‘Why are you doing this to yourself? Just stop. If you stop, it won’t hurt anymore.’”
“That’s when I looked back and saw the dudes behind me were coming up still, and I was like, ‘Oh man, I can’t. I can’t hold this pace.’ They passed me maybe 10 or 15 feet from the finish line. It was a bummer for a moment, because obviously the competitive side of me was like ‘Yeah! Win this thing!’ But the realist in me was like ‘Maybe it’s OK to not do this another round.’”
Learning to Love Data
“When I started cycling, it was totally non-competitive, I started riding around the city. And then I became a bike messenger. When I got into racing via messengering, I still didn’t train. I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I was like ‘How can I party and race my bike?’ I’d see people with Garmins or heart rate monitors and be like ‘What are you going to do with all those numbers, man? What is this?’”
“At some point when I got more serious about racing and started paying more attention to data, it made me really appreciate the technological side of things. It was never on my radar to have numbers to work with when I’m talking about training, or looking at a ride, or whatever.”
“I do almost all my rides now with a power meter and a heart rate monitor, one or the other, but most of the time both. And it’s amazing now. At the end of my ride I’m pouring over all the data. It’s like OK, well my heart rate spiked here, and this is what the elevation was. If you’re collecting all that data, you may as well utilize it as much as possible. I’ve become very addicted to that aspect of it.”
“I really like my things, and so I feel like here’s a whole new area in my life in which I can spend money and buy stuff and nerd out. When I discovered bikes, I was like ‘Oh cool, I can buy all these new toys, and salivate over new wheels or new hubs or whatever.’ I’m a musician so I do the same thing with guitar gear. I spend an hour just looking at gear, window shopping. I started using the dyno hub when I got into ultra-endurance events because now I needed something in which I could charge my GPS unit, and charge my heart rate monitor, and charge my lights or whatever. That opened up the door to a whole new world of tech geekiness that I didn’t know even existed before.”
Understanding the Numbers
“A long time ago, this dude Sheldon Brown was kind of this like encyclopedia of cycling knowledge. He had a website that you could go to. When I was getting into bikes, I didn’t really have friends who were into cycling. And I was not the kind of dude who wanted to go into a bike shop and ask a million questions and not buy anything. I would just get on the internet and try and learn as much as I could about bikes. It was something to sink my teeth into.”
“And so I wound up on his website a ton and he had a little gear calculator widget, in which you could put in your gear size, your tire size, what your front chain ring was, and your rear cog, and it would tell you all this stuff. It would tell you how far one full rotation of the wheel would take you. And it would tell you what it was in gear inches and basically just give you all these numbers. I didn’t really know what most of them meant, but it kind of served as [a guide]. ‘Alright, well a 48-17 is [74] gear inches and it feels like this. And then what if I changed it to this, a 48-19, and that’s however many inches.’ And then I’d see what that felt like, and I could kinda start to make a relationship between the numbers and what it actually felt [like].”
“I don’t know what a TSS score is actually measuring. I don’t know what FTP actually measures. But I’ve got that number and it’s like a baseline. I know a 180 TSS ride feels like this, or a 150 feels like this.”
The Evolution of the Bike Messenger Industry
“When the fax machine came out the messenger industry was like ‘S–t, everything we deliver can now be faxed.’ The industry took a bit of a hit, and they started delivering other stuff. And then in the ‘90s, emailing and everything changed a bunch of stuff again, and so people had to readjust what they were delivering. And we went through this slump for a long time but since the tech sector has blown up and now there’s all these apps where you can order this or you can order that, suddenly delivery becomes a thing which isn’t just necessary between businesses. Now the individual can have something brought to them.”
“In Chicago, when I started there were about 450 messengers on the road, and then five or six years later there was about 200 messengers on the road, and then there was about 150 messengers on the road, and it was looking really grim. But then the app bubble popped off and suddenly there was all this stuff to deliver that wasn’t going from the architect to the print shop back to the architect … Suddenly the individual user became the primary delivery customer.”
“In a lot of ways it’s really reinvigorated the messenger industry. When I started I had a pager and a Nextel and a clipboard with a piece of paper, and I would have to write every address [down], and I came in over the page, and I’d get signatures. Now I just carry a smartphone, and people can just sign on the smartphone, and you get your addresses and all your runs. A lot of messenger companies don’t even use radio dispatching anymore. If you work at a company that has radios, it’s because you want to have radios.”
“For better or for worse, it’s had a massive impact on the industry: the amount of people who are working, the kind of people who are working, what it is we’re delivering. The first company I worked for, I did court filings. I would file motions and I would serve subpoenas, and I carried blueprints to architects. Now I’ll bring a burrito to a dude’s apartment.”
Planning for the Future
“It sounds so base level. ‘Oh, what do you do?’ ‘I pick something up from one place and then I bring it someplace else.’ But I could wax poetic about being a bike messenger, and the urban landscape, and the last American cowboys. I could wax poetic about it for hours. But really at the end of the day I’m just taking this over there and giving it to somebody else.”
“I never planned on being a bike messenger, I just kinda became one. I never planned on getting into bike racing, or even getting a professional bike racing contract, it’s just kinda what happened. So eventually I’ll get to some other phase in my life where some other opportunity presents itself and I’m not a bike messenger anymore. But it’s just one of those things I’ve been doing for so long it’s hard to imagine what that next thing would be. Whatever it is that gets me off the road will be something amazing because I can’t really think of what else I would want to do.”