zencycle.co founders

By age twelve, Phillip's imagination had already been shaped by two proto-mythic figures—James Bond and Bruce Lee—icons of disciplined action and quiet power. Drawn to that ideal, he left team sports for a Saturday-morning judo class at the local YMCA, eventually earning a brown belt and, more importantly, finding his tribe. His instructors—former US Marines who had served in Okinawa, the birthplace of Japanese martial arts—taught with uncompromising traditionalism: strict discipline, zazen meditation, Japanese commands, and the conviction that technique and inner stillness are inseparable. Phillip later trained in Isshinryu-style karate and, at eighteen, traveled to Japan to study aikido at a remote Air Force base in snowbound Aomori, where Japan’s reverence for nature left a lasting imprint. Since then he has cycled across much of Japan, experiencing the country through sustained physical engagement rather than tourism. As a student of Zen, he sees endurance cycling as a moving form of zazen—cultivating discipline, presence, and ego dissolution through motion. These experiences inform his creative work, including The Hidden Middle, a nonfiction book-in-progress about his bikepacking adventures in Japan, which ultimately form the foundation of zencycle.co: the belief that movement, place and disciplined practice can align mind and body in ways both ancient and urgently modern.

Alan Van Tress is a longtime Oakland-based bicycle advocate and one of the Bay Area’s early proponents of bike-centric transportation. He came to local attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s not just as a cyclist but as someone living the advocacy he believed in: he operated his business by bike, using cargo setups and trailers to do telephone wiring around the North Oakland and East Bay area — promoting car-free commerce and demonstrating that bikes can be practical transportation and livelihood tools, not just recreational vehicles. Now he has joined longtime friend and expat Phillip Alan Epps as Co-founder of zencycle.co a wellness and consciousness-raising endeavor involving extended cycling retreats in remote areas of Japan.