SweatHawg Headwear

General information

I relinquished the perpetual frustration of golf to pursue cycling after moving to the small town of Sisters Oregon in 1995. With an athletic background in ski racing, I made the happy discovery that the balance instincts from skiing translate directly to mountain biking. One small but very important difference however, personally verified; gates bend when you hit them, trees don’t. ☺

After a few years on a simple rigid bike, a friend convinced me to step up to full suspension, and the experience was so improved I took to spending all my playtime on the bike trail in the forest behind my house. A road bike was soon added to the growing collection hanging in the garage, and a few of us (team “Brothers from Sisters”) began making the annual trip down to Winters CA to compete in the Davis 12/24, a twenty-four hour road race that is a qualifier for The Race Across America. Two of these four man teams still hold the records in both age categories for total distance covered in a day.

My passion for mountain biking and the bike trail that had become my playground soon turned me into a trail maintenance freak. After collecting teams over several years to treat the soil with clay and eliminate the many stretches of deep sand that appeared by mid-June, in 2003 I began advocating for expansion of the trail system. Eventually, with the crucial support of Sisters Trails Alliance, Central Oregon Trail Alliance, the USFS, and some of the “Brothers from Sisters”, I was privileged to lead the multi-year effort that expanded the Peterson Ridge Trail from a “lollipop” out-and-back into the full-blown 25 mile stacked loop system out there now.

Of course one of the consequences of hard riding for many cyclists is perspiration, lots of it. It cools you off, great, and for many it also gets in your eyes, drips on your glasses, and adds a small measure of misery to an otherwise happy experience. After trying every device available for sweat management over the course of a decade plus, in the summer of 2011 the light bulb in my head finally came on. I had a friend stitch an absorbent strip to an old abandoned and surgically altered do-rag. The SweatHawg was born, now my constant companion on the bike.