There is a little known provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 requiring the Treasury Department to reimburse to all qualifying applicants up to $2000 of allowable costs for cycling-related improvements. Got that? The government will give you $2000 to help you be a better cyclist. Now this is stimulus spending you can believe in. Or, it would be if it were true. It’s not. I made it up. But let’s pretend the provision exists and you are given $2000 to make yourself a better cyclocross racer. How would you spend the cash?

It is a hypothetical not exclusive to the cycling community. In a recent article on his Web site, byThom,  Nikon guru Thom Hogan analyzed the same question. What should an aspiring photographer do with $2000? Although his article dealt more with lenses and camera bodies than wheelsets and carbon frames, the bottom-line advice Hogan gives translates the same to both worlds. For instance, look at the three sentences below taken from his article and replace “images” and “photographer” with “results” and “bike racer.”

“There’s a real difference between wanting the latest equipment and wanting to create better images,” Hogan writes. “If you just want the latest gear, you fall into the Photographer Wannabe category. If you want to improve your images, congratulations, you probably are a Real Photographer.”

Around here, this is what we like to call a universal truth. Continue reading “The $2000 CX Upgrade: Every Picture Tells A Story”