From the Archives - Portrait of the Young Cyclist: Part 1

Introduction

I thought I’d just about exhausted my archives—that is, old essays and stories I’ve been writing since the ‘80s—and then I stumbled across a folder called “True Stories.” Jackpot! One of them was called “Portrait of the Cyclist as a Young Man.” I vaguely remember writing this back in 2003, but I don’t remember why. The full story runs like 14,000 words so I’ll be breaking it into installments, which I’ll run about once a month for a while. Here is the first.

Portrait of the Cyclist as a Young Man – Part One: How the Sport Found Me  (written in February 2003)

Don’t let the working title mislead you—what I am about to write will share nothing with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (except, I guess, being written in English). Joyce must have had time on his hands, because he wrote and wrote and wrote and never got to the point (that I could see, anyway) and I gave up reading after about 150 pages. As for me, I have only one night to write this, since I’m fighting a cold and can’t ride. My goal is to write the entire history of how I became a cyclist and why that is important. If my output is poor, it’s because I’m in an awful rush. If it’s too verbose, that’s because I’m pretending I’m being paid by the word, just like the pros. (Get it?)

It’s all my dad’s fault, really, because my first bike was a ten-speed. Dad must have worked hard to find a ten-speed, in 1978, in my size. It was a Fuji Junior and had 24-inch wheels. The fact of the ten gears wasn’t the point—my dad figured that any 9-year-old, or at least his 9-year-old, would be too stupid to work the gears without running into a parked car or something, and told me not to touch the shift levers. (I reckon this was supposed to be an interim edict, but he never remembered to rescind it or teach me how to shift. Maybe he figured youthful disobedience would eventually take over, in which case he was right.)

[This is pretty much exactly the bike I had, only mine was red.]

It was the dropped bars, mainly, that differentiated my Fuji from the bikes my friends had. With my three older brothers, who of course also had ten-speeds, I held a playful contempt for regular bikes. We even had a label for them, something like High-Rise-Handlebar-Banana-Seat-Small-Wheel-In-Front-Big-Wheel-in-Back-Streamers-from-the-Grips-Stupid-Schwinn. I’d have to check with my brothers—I’m sure I mangled that—but you get the idea. I remember asking Dad if ten-speeds were faster, just to make sure, or to get something juicy to quote to my friends, and he said in his professorial voice, “The dropped handlebar improves the aerodynamics of the rider, which would make the bike faster.” I didn’t know the word “aerodynamic”—heck, it wouldn’t enter even the specialized cycling vernacular for other couple of years, but it had “arrow” in it and whatever garbled version of that word I spewed for my friends made their eyes grow wide. I felt like a racer long before I ever entered a race.

So did my brothers. I remember Max, at 10 or so, asking our next-door neighbor Greg (no authority on cycling, of course, but a good six or eight years older, and thus an authority on Life) if he (Max) looked like a racer, and demonstrated his style by riding to the top of Howard Place and executing a U-turn through which he put down his inside foot and dragged it lightly as if for support. When Max returned and pulled up to a stop, breathless, Greg laughed and said, “Yeah, you really did look like a racer, except for when you put your foot down in the turn.” I took a lesson well and never did that.

It’s difficult to remember whether my first exposure to bicycle racing was the Red Zinger Bicycle Classic stage race or the movie “Breaking Away.” I don’t think it matters. They were both huge. The Red Zinger gave me a taste, or at least a smear, of the sport. Our mom would drive us out to the Morgul Bismark course, which in the late seventies was basically the middle of nowhere, and we’d screw around for half an hour or so waiting for the racers to come by. Why we didn’t hike up to the top of The Hump, the second hardest climb, is beyond me. Lazy kids, I guess; we watched from the base of the climb. The pack flew by too swiftly for us to catch more than the patchwork of colors, like an animated quilt, and the whirring of chains, mostly drowned out by our own cheering. We knew the racers mainly through the great program that the race had put out. George Mount—Smiling George—was our favorite racer. The way he grinned while suffering, he was a superhero.

Then there was the two-page section showing nothing but racers who had crashed, with lots of blood and such, and it was a natural draw for bloodthirsty young boys.

The program also had a section showing the racers’ legs, all shaved, totally muscular, vein-y, superhuman. I also remember that the racers had these really cool-looking hairnet helmets—we called them Bandinis, for some reason—and between the name and the obvious lack of real protection, we were completely enchanted. I also remember that one or two of the racers had the new Bell Biker helmets, like what our dad had. The fact of those helmets told me that it was possible, just barely possible, that a nerdy kid like me might actually be able to join that race someday, even if at the back of the pack—heck, even off the back of that pack. I would be honored.

While the Red Zinger aroused our interest, “Breaking Away” blew us completely away. It delivered not just a glimpse of the sport, but a real story—actually, lots of real stories, and the main story was of this being a European sport that an American could hope to have a tenuous piece of, but only if he’s willing to immerse himself in another culture. (This was remarkably accurate, if you look at what Jonathan Boyer and Greg LeMond had to do to make it in international cycling at this point.)

It didn’t occur to us to view Dave as an adult would, to find humor in his attempt to become Italian—we were completely with him, somehow identified completely. When the Italian racer put the pump in his spokes, sure, we hated the guy, but we were also in awe, and couldn’t really fault him because this was their sport, not ours, so the Italians were somehow exempt from judgment, like how a hockey player who assaults another player gets a couple minutes in the penalty box instead of going to jail.

Max taught me that Europeans were physically stronger than Americans, and less affected by pain. (When we had some new neighbors and wanted to try to convince them that we were from Europe, we demonstrated our heritage by pretending to fight, and being unfazed by the punches we landed on each other.) “Breaking Away” helped to teach us that as Americans we were not worthy of this beautiful sport. So complete was my awe of the Italians, I was as horrified as poor Cathy was when Dave gave up the Italian impersonation. Even his triumph at the end of the movie was only over a bunch of American college students, on crappy AMF Roadmaster one-speeds. Winning the race, and holding up the trophy, didn’t quite redeem him. What did redeem him for me was that at the very end, he had picked up a new French persona. For months after seeing that movie, I carried around a French/English pocket dictionary and made a horrible attempt to speak in that indecipherable language.

The other thing “Breaking Away” did for us was to steep us in the arcana of the sport. What we didn’t catch from the movie itself, we got from the Bicycling magazine article about it. For example, I knew that the cycling caps that flooded the marketplace as being identical to Dave’s—that is, yellow Campagnolo caps—were completely wrong. They weren’t the right canary yellow (they were too orange), and they had too many stripes down the middle (i.e., five, these being the World Championship stripes). Dave’s cap had just three stripes.

When I found the right cap, for a shocking $5.00 at Pedal Pushers (most caps were $3.50), I had to panhandle for the 30 cents I needed to cover the tax, having only a five on me. When a friend accidentally broke the plastic inside the bill, and refused to apologize appropriately, our friendship was over. I also had a really cool red Cinelli cap, with the old coat-of-arms logo. By wearing these to school instead of a baseball cap, I brought on myself the scorn of my peers, but took it as a natural part of the outcast role I’d need if I wanted to embrace this sport. Boulder, Colorado was something of a cycling mecca even then, but this did not trickle down to the elementary school level. That cap was almost a badge of courage. I was almost, I felt, a Cutter.

[With a cap that cool, it’s a mystery why I wasn’t totally popular at school, especially with the girls. As you can see below, my overall fashion sense was unparalleled. The t-shirt I’m wearing actually says “LAMBCHOP” on it. My mom sewed those letters on there; Lambchop was her nickname for me. At least I had the physique for cycling, though I didn’t appreciate that at the time.]

All my identification might well have stayed in the realm of unearned or false had it not been for the Red Zinger Mini Classic stage race put on by the Sandvold family—Eric and his dad Eddie—and three of Eric’s friends. I guess they’d done a little race in 1980, but I never knew about it. It wasn’t until 1981 that they put on what can honestly be described as a totally legit stage race for kids. They had published a program that was remarkably similar to the Red Zinger ones we’d seen, except of course it didn’t show a lot of crash photos. (Don’t want to scare the devil out of the parents!)

The race’s slogan was “By, for, and about kids.” It looked like an incredibly cool event, and my brothers and I got our registration packets all together, and a kid named Scott M—, who had seen me riding around and saw my caps, even recruited me to be on his team, along with his friend and next-door neighbor John Lynch. There was only one problem: getting permission from Dad. Remember, this is the guy who didn’t want me to know about gears, lest I ride headlong into the back of a parked car.

We were all terrified to approach Dad. He was often grumpy, especially when we wanted something. He also never “got” sports and so far as we knew had never tried one. Mom supported the idea of us racing, but either she wanted to teach us assertiveness or she was as terrified as we were, because she refused to ask on our behalf. We boys all discussed the matter together and decided that Max, being the black sheep of the family, was in enough trouble with Dad already that it wouldn’t matter if he pushed our old man even further. Max wasn’t in a position to refuse his mission, because if he did, either Geoff or Bryan could beat the crap out of him, so with the two of them together he wouldn’t have a chance. Heck, I would have happily piled on myself, to dole out whatever I could add to the beating. Okay, I guess I’m exaggerating about the threat of actual violence, but anyway the matter was decided. Max would ask that night at dinner.

What a solemn occasion that was. The room was deadly silent through the whole meal as Max attempted to summon his resolve. This was very strange, because normally dinner time was an open forum for just about any subject, or at least any scientific or technical subject, and normally our table was abuzz with conversation (or at least my dad lecturing us while we nodded our heads and pretended to understand). The whole meal went by in awkward silence, the rest of us boys glaring at Max while he sweated bullets. Finally, just after dessert was served, Max finally cleared his throat and took the plunge: “Um, Daddy, um, I was wondering, er, actually, my brothers and I were wondering if, um, there was any way that we could, um, enter this bike race, that’s just for kids, um, because it’s really good exercise and would be good for us.” (Something like that.)

Dad didn’t even hesitate. “No. You boys are too stupid to be bike racers. You’d get yourselves killed.” I knew it sounds improbable that he actually said this, but I am quite certain I have it verbatim. My brothers remember it as well, and all our versions jibe. That was it. Nobody said another word for the rest of dessert, and immediately afterward Dad went back to work and nobody ever spoke to him again on the subject.

I guess I was relieved at his refusal, because I’d been pretty ambivalent about the idea myself. Not so much because I’d get myself killed, though I’m sure that worried me too, but the fact is, I was no athlete. I’d swum for years, first lessons and then the swim team, and I basically sucked. The best I ever did was third in some backstroke event (that loss-leader stroke), and that was only third in my heat—I ended up fourth overall, and that was only summer league. I was as undistinguished a swimmer as ever floated on water (or, more to the point, practically sank). I remember when our coach, Paul S—, got some video equipment and filmed us so that we could watch the footage and analyze our stroke. His main criticism of me was that I didn’t stay in my own lane. I’d kill for that footage today: sure enough, halfway through a lap I actually wander out of my lane, under a lane line, into the path of an oncoming swimmer. I tried to explain that I had to swim with my eyes shut because my goggles leaked so badly. Maybe the only guy everyone laughed at more was John W—, who swam freestyle with a butterfly kick.

And yet swimming was my best sport! At school, in Track & Field, I was always dead last in everything. I wished I could throw like a girl—it would have been an improvement. Every aspect of PE class was a source of humiliation. It was assumed that every boy knew the rules of football and baseball. I did not. I had no idea what was going on. Football was the worst. Offense? Defense? I didn’t know the difference. As far as I was concerned my job was to stay out of sight. Baseball? Just sit there and don’t swing, I told myself: if you don’t swing, you can’t strike out, and might get to walk. And yet the teacher kept calling strikes! I thought it was because I wasn’t holding my bat still enough, that the teacher must have thought she saw it move. I had no idea about a strike zone. I just stood there, as motionless as a statue, as the strikes were counted. I was uncoachable; teachers assumed I knew exactly what was going on and was simply demonstrating my complete contempt for the sport. Utter humiliation. Why would cycling be any different?

I guess I have my dad’s prohibition—and moreover my mom’s reaction to it—to thank for the fact that I ended up becoming a bike racer. Mom all but insisted that we all sign up for the Mini Zinger, on principle. I remember this well. The day after Max crashed and burned on our behalf, I was in the kitchen, hanging out around the stove while Mom cooked, and she asked me if I was entering the race. I reminded her what Dad said, and right there on the spot she basically made me commit to signing up. It wasn’t a long conversation, and I don’t remember her argument, but after that I was fully committed. I submitted my application, and …

To be continued

Tune in next time for the wretched tale of my flunked bike inspection, and—worse yet—the bike racing clinic where, for the first time, I felt bad about being a talentless loser unwilling to make himself suffer properly.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—-~—

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Roof Rack Fracas

Introduction

A friend of mine up in Bend told me about this trust fund guy he sees around who not only has the ultimate bike rack for his (cool 4WD) car, with attachments for every kind of recreational toy (bike, kayak, skis), but carries all the equipment around full time, like a rolling trophy case for his outdoorsy lifestyle.  The dude is clearly not alone in seeing his rack as an outward manifestation of social worth; rack manufacturer Yakima has printed the slogan “Overcome rack envy” on their catalogs and other promotional items.

At the other extreme you have:  me.  I never even wanted a car, much less a rack to put on it.  I don’t like cars.  I don’t like stuff.  While most people enjoy the retail experience, to me most purchases feel like a defeat of some kind.  And yet, I get by.  My lifelong refusal to buy a TV has resulted in four used-TV donations from concerned friends and family.  In college, my bike traveled to races on a badly oxidized piece of crap rear-mount Hollywood rack that my friend found at the beach.  On our way home from our final race of the collegiate season in 1990 we didn’t even bother with the rack—we just threw our bikes, and the rack, into the back of the car.

And yet, retail activity cannot be held off forever, and recently I decided to bite the bullet and buy a roof rack, so I could bring everybody’s bikes on a family vacation.  (Until now, I’ve used the two-bike Rhode Gear Super Shuttle rear rack I bought back in ’91 when I worked at a bike shop.)  This post chronicles my recent bike rack purchase and how it threw me into conflict with friends, family, and a salesman.  I also offer a few handy tips about saving money and frustration when you do buy a rack.

Build or buy?

Cheapness was a core value in my family.  When my dad decided we could bring our bikes on a family vacation, he built a rack for our weird two-door Saab station wagon.  (This was a family of six.)  The bikes went on the rack with both wheels attached and were held in place by custom-lathed wood pieces, a lot of rope, and the sheer force of my dad’s intellect.  Putting the bikes on the car took something like forty-five minutes and only my dad knew how to do it.  Removing the front wheel to improve aerodynamics was probably never considered:  gas was well under a dollar a gallon and the Kyoto Protocol was two decades away.  I don’t have a photo of that racks, but here’s a photo of a similar one my dad built five years later (and which he mounted to the original Saab roof rack he’d moved over to his Subaru).

In high school, when my brothers and friends and I were going to bike races every weekend, we made a giant roof rack for my friend’s late-‘70s Volvo wagon.  My brother Geoff had learned how to weld in shop class; he scrounged up a loaner welding rig somewhere and made wheel trays out of these giant pieces of iron fence material.  He welded struts to these, apparently made of scrap pig-iron, to cradle the wheels.  There were swinging aluminum struts that terminated in these crazy clamps that looked like the beak of a bird of prey.  I think we used sections of old inner tube to keep from scratching the bikes.  (I say “we” but upon reflection I doubt I actually helped, other than maybe to  sing and clap.)  Here’s a photo of that rack.  (Also shown is the Yakima rack we bought to supplement it, so we could carry eight or nine bikes at once.  To pay for that Yakima, we all worked for a week scrubbing a drained swimming pool with hydrochloric acid.)

So did I consider building my own rack this time around?  Not seriously.  I did take a quick look at ehow.com to see how they recommended building a rack.  What a joke.  Check it out here.  They have very cryptic instructions involving PVC and suction cups (!).  There are no diagrams or photos of any kind, other than a stock Getty Images photo of a sporty-looking dude standing in front of a car which has what appears to be a commercial bike rack on its roof.  The instructions say, “If you are a visual person, consider buying a bike rack and using it as model to make your own.  Then return it within the allowed time frame and with proper documentation for little to no charge.”  As you can see, whoever wrote those ehow instructions is going to burn in Hell.

Seeking advice

Some people love the process of selecting consumer goods:  the reviews, the consumer testimonials, the price comparisons, etc.  Not me.  I’m a pretty good price shopper once I know what I want, but I don’t kid myself that I can sort out what’s really the best product.  Fortunately, I’m on a bike club, EBVC, that’s chock full of bona-fide bike gear mavens.  I sent out a note asking for recommendations, little realizing—though I should have—how much dissent there would be.

One guy, a club veteran who raced the Red Zinger back in the ‘70s, wrote, “I know someone who took some thrashed old high-flange front hubs, cut the flanges to roughly match the contour of his cross bar, and clamped it down to the cross bar with a couple hose clamps.  We went to many races with that setup which cost about $1.25/bike.” 

Seems like a perfect idea, except that a) I don’t have crossbars to begin with ( the “towers” that fix them to the car’s room are the expensive part of the rack), and b) others on the club are convinced that any rack that holds the bike by the tips of the fork is dangerous to the health of the bike.  One guy wrote, “Fork bends side to side, and is not designed to do that...  I think this could be a real problem when it comes to carbon forks, where the weave is laid in accordance to the expected forces/stresses.”  Another agreed:  “I used a Yakima fork mount … and at the end of the season I found multiple stress fractures behind the head tube.”  This elicited a pointed response from yet another guy:  “I think the damage to the bike may well be attributed to the stresses incurred by ‘bubble butt.’”

Soon we had a full-on e-mail debate.  One friend cited a report from Lennard Zinn, who checked with several bike companies, all of whom said the fork-mount racks were fine.  Not that the industry shouldn’t capitalize on any fear the consumer base might have, my friend went on to say:  “Yakima does make a sorbothane-backed flannel bike wrap filled with goose down for its carbon outfitted clients.”   He concluded by pointing out, “EBVC should have a discussion group page on its website called ‘Sorry I Asked...’”

Others piled on with their points of view.  A couple guys recommended a rear-mount trailer-hitch rack that will hold four bikes.  Somebody else countered that  there are two types of people who use trailer-hitch racks:  those who have been rear-ended (and thus had their bikes wrecked), and those who are going to.  Needless to say somebody immediately pointed out that there are also two kinds of people who use roof racks:  those who have driven into the garage with the bike on top and those who are going to.  Oddly, nobody outwardly recommended the kind of roof rack where you leave both wheels on the bike.

I did consider that kind of rack, because it’s what the Cutters had on Mike’s car in “Breaking Away.”  That (apparently home-made) rack looked really cool, especially when Mike was “hot-rodding around campus.”  It didn’t seem to take Dave that long to put the bike on the car, though long enough that when Moocher smashed the time-clock’s face at the car wash (“Don’t forget to punch the clock, Shorty!”), thus quitting his job on his first day, the car was still there to take him away.  What if Mike’s car had a Yakima or Thule rack, and Mike had driven off before the offensive “Shorty” comment?  Maybe Moocher would have acted differently, and continued working at the car wash, and maybe Nancy would never have agreed to marry him.

With this cinematic moment swirling in my head along with all the conflicting bits of advice, suddenly the decision seemed bigger than just choosing a bike rack.  The problem with asking advice is that you may find yourself in the position of ignoring it, which means incurring a certain degree of social peril.  When my advisors disagree with one another, I can’t please all of them. 

It’s one thing when you’re ignoring the advice of friends—who can blow off the slight by saying, “Your bike sucks anyway, who cares if you wreck it”—but of course it’s worse with family, which is why I regret what I did next, which was to ask my dad what he thought.  I thought he might approve of the fork-mount rack on the basis of fuel efficiency, but he wrote back, “As to the stress of holding a bike by the dropouts:  I would not do it.  The riding stresses on a bike are never that kind of stress.  The center of gravity is always on the plane of symmetry of the bike, even when you are leaning way over in a hard turn, so the stresses are always symmetrical.  But when a car is going around a corner, the bike is not leaning, and one dropout gets hundreds of pounds of tension, which it was not designed for.   Also, I would worry about the fork top, which will have the same tension.” 

He also addressed my concern about fuel efficiency:  “Needless to say, I don't much care about extra gas costs ... what matters is extra CO2 and its effect on the future.”  His recommendation was to build a special both-wheels-on type of rack:  “drill holes in the roof and bolt the for-and-aft wheel troughs and other fittings directly to the roof, avoiding cross-wise bars which have lots of drag.”  Drill holes in my car?  I’d rather just leave my bike—or better yet, my car—at home.

The final bit of advice came from the REI salesman.  By the time I went there I was pretty sure I didn’t want the both-wheels-on type of rack (too expensive, not aerodynamic, and not recommended for carbon frames, which I may own one day), but still I asked him about rack types and wind drag.  He promptly replied, “If you care about wind drag” (Berkeley subtext:  “if you care about the planet”), “then you have to get the Thule.  It has been proven that the square crossbars of the Thule are more aerodynamic than the round crossbars of the Yakima.”  He delivered this statement almost triumphantly, seeming to expect that this rationale would carry the day.  Thus, he was visibly disappointed and seemed almost offended when I proceeded to buy the Yakima.  Frankly, I’d done more research on the Yakima’s compatibility with my car (not that I really doubted a Thule would fit fine) and was running out of time.  Plus, the Yakima bike mounts were cheaper. 

I suppose many a consumer would walk triumphantly out to his car, shouldering his cool new toy, whistling, pleased to have bought his way that much closer to a perfected life.  Not me.  I felt exhausted at the ordeal of ignoring good, solid advice, while possibly affronting friends, family, and the REI guy.  Plus I was out like $600 for a product whose very use would get me a hefty dose of liberal guilt, not to mention possibly damage my bike.  (During my road trip I put the cheaper, heavier bikes on the roof, while continuing to carry “my precious” on the rear-mount rack.)

Advice – Part 1

Okay, I promised in my introduction to give you some advice about bike racks.  The good thing about a blog is you can ignore my advice, or even privately ridicule it, without offending me.  (Or, if you’re a confrontational sort, you can comment below or e-mail me.)  

My first suggestion is this:  if you’re shopping for a rack and have factory-mounted rails on your car (i.e., that the bike rack mounts to), then skip buying the optional lock cores for your rack.  But wait, you protest.  Locks make so much sense!  After all, with one Allen wrench and about five minutes a thief could make off with the $600 rack.  And if the thief had an accomplice he could take the rack and all the bikes with it—a several thousand dollar haul.  Why wouldn’t you want to lock it up?

Well, I didn’t say not to lock it.  I said to skip the lock cores you can buy from the manufacturer.  First of all, they’re expensive:  $55 for a set of four Yakima cores, $60 for Thule.  I must admit, they’re pretty cool; though the Yakima website doesn’t explain this very well, these cores can be installed in the fork-holding mechanism so the bike is locked to the rack, and the same kind of core goes in the rack tower to lock the rack to the car.  One key does all the locks.  This amounts to what one person (trying to convince me to buy them) called the “clean, yuppie feeling” of buying something really slick, whatever the cost.  Well, I can do without that clean, yuppie feeling, especially if it costs me $55 (and was made in China for $0.45).

Second, these locks don’t secure the wheels of the bike.  The front wheels, if you choose to mount them to the rack (using the optional wheel holders), can be swiped in about thirty seconds.  If a thief didn’t mind climbing up on the car, he could steal the rear wheels too, in about a minute.  Sure, you could thread a cable and padlock through the wheels, but then you’ve just undone the essential slickness of the lock core system.

Meanwhile, at least in the case of Yakima racks, this system doesn’t look all that theft-proof.  All the lock core does to secure the rack to the car is to lock down the plastic housing over the inner workings of the rack tower.  You’ve got metal going into plastic.  Probably a good blow with the hammer would knock the cover clean off, and then you’ve got the rack off in minutes.

Instead, I suggest you do as I did and drill a hole through one of the bike trays.  (I’m sure I just nullified the warranty on my rack, but life will go on.)  Now, thread one end of a nice fat cable through one bike (getting the rear wheel and frame), then through itself (i.e., one cable end loop passes through the other), then through both the front wheels, through the other bike, and around the car’s factory rail.  Then use a padlock to lock the cable to the rack.  Look:

The lock’s shackle goes through a) the hole you drilled and b) the end loop on the cable.  Here are a couple of close-ups:

It’s not perfect—the padlock can be broken—but it’s a deterrent, and costs you very little (after all, what cyclist doesn’t own the cable already?).  For extra security, thread a U-lock (e.g., Kryptonite) through the cable and around the factory rail.

Note:  please don’t sue me because you followed this advice and had something stolen.  Any reasonably educated reader would immediately realize that, whatever utility he may happen to gain from the preceding advice, it was all meant to be completely facetious, even the photo.  (Nelson—do you think, with this paragraph, I’m covered?)

Advice – Part 2

The following pertains to the Yakima rack with its environment-destroying, life-ruining round crossbars.  If you have a Thule rack, you can read this bit anyway, just for that delicious smug feeling.

The round Yakima crossbars enable you to easily rotate the front wheel fork mount so it lies flat when not in use, improving aerodynamics.  The problem is, it rotates too easily.  No matter how hard I tighten the wing nuts, the fork won’t stay put.  As has been noted by three of the five customer reviews on the Yakima website, this results in the wheel rocking back until it hits the roof of the car.  Yakima suggests putting the wheel at a 60-degree angle to “prevent the build up of inertia.”  Well, this is a start, but I doubt it’s enough.

What worked really well for me was to install one wheel fork to each crossbar, one right behind the other (which is the most aerodynamic arrangement anyway, as one wheel drafts the other).  The fork that’s mounted to the front crossbar should be rotated toward the back.  The fork that’s mounted to the rear crossbar should be rotated forward.  Do this with each wheel installed in its fork, and rotate them until they meet in the middle.  Now secure them (i.e., fasten them to each other) with a zip-tie or a kid’s hair band or a toe strap.  This will make it physically impossible for the forks to rotate on the crossbar.  (Look at that last photo … you can see the zip-tie there.)

Advice – Part 3

I don’t need to advise you not to drive into the garage with your bike on the roof—I mean, that’s obvious—but since this has happened to so many of my friends, I’m going to give you two foolproof ways to avoid doing it.  But first, just in case you’ve never seen the results of this mistake, look at this (a recent photo from a friend).  Talk about a rack being hard on your bike’s fork!

One way to avoid this fate is to buy a house built in 1929 with a garage sized to  a Model T Ford.  That way, it’s physically impossible to drive your modern car into the garage, with your bike on the rack or not.  If, however, you’re one of those lucky people with a large garage you can actually use, then I suggest you remove the rack from your car when you’re not using it.  The added advantage is that you’ll get better gas mileage without that rack on your car.  (Plus, you’ve lowered the theft risk to near-zero.) 

I’m not suggesting you constantly install and deinstall your rack.  I’m suggesting that unless you’re a die-hard racer with a real flair for carpooling, you probably don’t need the rack on your car most of the time.  If you’re only toting one bike around, just throw it in the back of the car.  If you’re toting two bikes, use a rear-mount bike rack.  If you’re driving to a stage race and really need the convenience of a roof rack, then throw the rack back on the car for your trip.  Once the rack has been set up, it’s quick and easy to take it on and off the car.

Conclusion

Chances are you already have a rack, already have the lock cores, will never buy a rear-mount rack, and don’t agonize so much over such simple things.  If so, I guess I envy you that.  But at least now I can look at my kickass Yakima rack, leaning against the wall of the garage waiting to be remounted someday, and think “Ohhhh yeahhhh.”

Why Cyclists Shave Their Legs

Q: What on earth is that ball of hair? A: It’s the hair I shaved off my legs.

On this blog recently, I quoted a magazine writer who lamented that a cyclist with “too much hair on his legs” had set up his bike inappropriately. A friend commented on that post: “Hey, what's wrong with cyclists having hairy legs?! ” As I shall get to, there’s really nothing wrong with cyclists having hairy legs—and yet, so many of them don’t. From time to time I get asked, by a cycling newcomer or curious non-cyclist, why it is that cyclists shave their legs. In this post I will attempt to answer that question, citing evidence from 45 responses to a survey I sent to my cycling friends.

Before we begin

Before answering the question, let’s look at it more closely. It’s actually several questions, nested together like one of those Russian dolls:

• What is a cyclist?
• Do cyclists shave their legs?
• Do those cyclists who shave their legs all do so for the same reasons?
• If there are various reasons, what are they, and what are the most common ones?
• Are these reasons good ones? In other words, should cyclists shave their legs?

What is a cyclist?

Some labels are more useful than others. “Hemophiliac,” for example, is very specific: it designates a person with a hereditary blood-coagulation problem. In comparison, the label “cyclist” is somewhat vague.

Let’s say you drive everywhere you go, even to the corner grocery, but one day your car breaks down and you borrow your kid’s bike for a quick errand, and then—while riding on the wrong side of the street—you get run over and killed. The newspaper will report this as “Cyclist killed by car.” You go down in history as a cyclist, whereas if you actually had been a cyclist, you’d have been on the right side of the road and everything would be fine. Conversely, when circumstances conspire against me and I actually have to walk somewhere, I’m always very careful because I’d hate to get run over and go down in history as a mere pedestrian.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s define cyclist as “somebody who rides a bike because he wants to, even when he doesn’t need to.” In my book, there are no other requirements or qualifications. I’m not the type to look with scorn at a slower rider, or one who violates some supposed bike culture taboo. In other words, I never say (or think), “And you call yourself a cyclist!”

The survey

To address the rest of the questions, I created a simple, anonymous survey and sent it out to several dozen of my cycling pals. Most invitees are either current or former racers; all are riders who could hang with my bike club’s weekend rides; ten are either current or former Cat 1s or pros.

The response was swift and enthusiastic, with 45 questionnaires completed within 24 hours. I asked five questions about leg shaving:

1. Did/do you race?
2. Do you shave your legs?
3. If you shave(d) your legs, what are/were your reasons for doing so? (I provided a multiple-choice list of commonly cited reasons and said to check all that apply.)
4. If you shave(d) your legs, what was/is your main reason for doing so? (Same list, but with only one answer possible.)
5. In your opinion, should cyclists shave their legs?

Here is a breakdown of the respondents to my questionnaire, in terms of racing experience. (Note: for all graphs in this post, do yourself a favor and click on the image to zoom in.)

Flaws in the survey

I should have set up the survey a bit more carefully, because it had its flaws. First, I excluded women, on the assumption that they all shave their legs anyway; I’ve since been corrected by a pal who maintains that “there are a lot of women in the sport who might not shave otherwise.” I should have had a separate survey for women, in which I could have included questions about what they think of leg shaving by men.

Second, I didn’t imagine that vanity could possibly have anything to do with a man’s decision to shave his legs. I now see, from the results, that I should have included aesthetics/vanity as one of the standard choices; that would have saved me a lot of data-massaging later. At least I included a write-in “Other” write-in response, or I’d still be ignorant of this rationale.

Finally, I didn’t think to ask the converse question, “Why don’t you shave your legs?” One of the more hirsute members of my club (who after much deliberation decided not to shave his legs for the recent Everest Challenge), offered this sample question:

Why don't you shave your legs? (Check all that apply)

• Since razors now cost $2 a pop, shaving your legs costs more money than your bicycle
• The line of where to stop shaving seems too arbitrary and confusing, leading to a partially shaved stomach
• The hair grows back in three hours, so what’s the point?
• Your leg stubble injured your wife, and domestic abuse charges are pending
• It would be too silly if your wife’s legs were hairy and yours weren’t
• Other (specify below)

And now, for the answers to my original questions, based on my own observations and the survey responses.

Do cyclists shave their legs?

I’ll start off by saying that all professional racers and top amateurs shave their legs, at least during the racing season. (I would be fascinated to be furnished with any information to the contrary.) Many of my survey respondents no longer race regularly, which is where things get more complicated: some continue to shave and some don’t, according to personal preference.

In my experience, leg shaving behavior has less to do with what kind of cyclist you are than with what kind of person you are. I know leg-shavers who barely ride, hairy-legged guys who can crush almost anybody, and various types in between.

Below is a pie chart of who shaves, and who doesn’t, among my cycling friends. I consider it noteworthy that, although only 13% of respondents still race regularly, 55% still shave some of the time, and 38% shave either year-round or during the cycling season.

Why do so many cyclists shave their legs?

In creating my survey, I provided as standard multiple-choice answers the reasons I’ve heard the most over the years:

• To facilitate leg massages
• To ease treatment of crash injuries
• To facilitate sunscreen application
• To fit in with the rest of the peloton
• To show the world I’m a cyclist

I also provided a comment field for respondents to write in their own reasons. That’s how I was able to treat aesthetics/vanity as its own category in the charts below. Here is a breakdown of the rationale cited when respondents were able to choose all applicable responses:

“Other” comprised vanity/aesthetics (nine responses), ease of cleaning (two responses), “just like it” (one response), Icy Hot application( one response), winning (one response) and aerodynamics (one response).

Here is the breakdown of primary rationale; i.e., respondents selected the single response that best matched their main reason for leg shaving:

Explanation and discussion

Myself, I found the survey results enlightening. The most common reasons for leg shaving I’ve heard, over the last couple decades, have been ease of treating crash injuries and facilitating leg massages. I’ve never really believed these to begin with, and now I know the real reasons.

Following is my commentary about these reasons for leg shaving. Following that I’ll get to the final question: should cyclists shave their legs?

Because of our massages

The gist of the massage argument is that if your legs are hairy, getting them massaged will lead to lots of ingrown hairs, which is painful and unsightly. I haven’t had many leg massages in my life, and the ones I did get were recent—that is, during my modern adult life when I could afford such a thing. My legs were hairy for these massages, since I quit racing right about the time I started earning a legitimate income. (I’m not trying to suggest a correlation or anything.) I never had trouble with ingrown hairs.

Meanwhile, shaving itself can lead to ingrown hairs, for reasons I can’t really fathom. Do the hairs turn around and bury themselves in order to escape the blade? (Sounds far-fetched, I know, but you’ve seen those fanciful Gillette animations where the hair lifts itself up to meet the blade, so the opposite phenomenon may actually be possible.) Meanwhile, there’s classic razor burn to contend with, and the unavoidable nicks. It’s not clear to me that these discomforts are worth suffering in the name of avoiding the (arguably specious) prospect of ingrown hairs.

Second, who really gets leg massages on a regular basis? Professional racers do, but how many amateurs? Who among us can afford the time and expense? Myself, I’d rather have a neck massage than a leg massage; my legs are seldom sore from cycling, but my back and neck take a daily beating from typing, conference calls, etc. It just may be that some of the cyclists who tout this reason are simply hoping they’ll be mistaken for somebody of means who has a full-time soigneur. (One survey respondent wrote in, “I wish I had a soigneur — preferably female over the gnarly old men who like to rub guys’ legs...”)

Crash injury treatment

As this argument goes, it’s easier to clean road rash when you don’t have hair to contend with. And, you need to cover the road rash with gauze, and the gauze must be securely taped; the tape tugs painfully at the hairs. There’s some related argument about hair increasing the chance of infection, but I’ve never understood it.

I have issues with this notion as well. For one thing, it would apply just as logically to shaving the arms, which is almost unheard of among cyclists. I did have a teammate once who shaved his arms, and he did crash a lot, but he also did other weird stuff like wrapping his arms in Ace bandages before a race.

The bigger problem I have with the crash protection rationale is that it assumes crashes are inevitable. Perhaps for professional racers they are, but the rest of us—especially those with a lot of experience—really can do this sport without a lot of crashes. If I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t be a cyclist.

Ultimately, leg shaving for crash injury treatment is, I think, incongruous: you’re shaving thirty to fifty times a year to lessen the potential impact of something you’re pretty sure will very seldom happen.

Fitting in

The desire to fit in with the peloton is understandable enough, so it’s not surprising this was, by a wide margin, the main reason cyclists shave their legs. The question, then, is this: how did leg shaving become the norm in the amateur U.S. peloton? Easy: the U.S. peloton mimics the professional European peloton. But should it? Those guys race like eighty times a year, in every kind of weather, at much higher speeds, and they have full-time soigneurs.

Upon reviewing the statistics, there’s something else I find odd about this leg shaving rationale: since 45% of my sample never shaves, and another 17% only shaves occasionally (for a specific event), the leg-shavers are actually in the minority most of the time. Since when do people take on behaviors to fit in with—a minority? The answer, I suppose, is that we’re seeking to fit in not just with the guys on our club, but the greater abstract peloton—perhaps the Platonic ideal of peloton.

Showing the world you’re a cyclist

During the last decade or so cycling has become a fairly mainstream sport in this country, but traditionally cyclists have been iconoclasts. For most, leg shaving has historically been one of the bolder ways of defying mainstream sensibilities. When I began racing in the early ‘80s, cycling was not widely accepted, much less respected, even in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. My brother Max fearlessly embraced bike culture, adopting a cycling cap and wool jersey as full-time casual wear. But even he wasn’t aware of leg shaving until we saw “Breaking Away”:

Cyril: “Hey … are you really gonna shave your legs?”

Dave: “Certo! All the Italians do it.”

Mike: “Ah, some country. The women don’t shave theirs.”

Of course, we were prepubescent kids at the time, and late bloomers at that, so leg shaving was years away. In fact, in high school I had to deal with the stigma long before the razor, as kids teased me in gym class: “Hey Dana, do you shave your legs?” They couldn’t fully harass me until I admitted it, because even they couldn’t be sure if they were seeing the results of shaving vs. just being a teenager trapped in a child’s body. I couldn’t decide what was worse—being a weirdo, or being way behind on my way to manhood—so I just stayed miserably silent.

I guess cycling has come of age, for now a smooth-legged cyclist is “just as normal as pumpkin pie” (to quote “Breaking Away” again). The look has become enough a part of cycling culture that a group ride is bound to have more leg-shavers than not, and being hairy-legged falls just short of making a statement. Now, leg shaving can be just as proud an image as the high school letter jacket, without the stigma that leg shaving (and cycling itself) once had.

Aesthetics/vanity

Over more than two decades of cycling-related dialog, I’ve very seldom heard anybody cite aesthetics, much less vanity, as a reason for shaving his legs. And yet, as you saw above, a number of respondents wrote in vanity or aesthetics as a reason for shaving, with 13% naming it as the main reason they shave. The write-in responses ranged from “aesthetics” to “looks better”; from “vanity” to the remarkably blatant “looks sexy”; and, my favorite, “Despite their initial thought that you're a freak, chicks dig it.”

Clearly, people are more candid when their input is anonymous. That said, the subject still touched at least one nerve: a respondent wrote, “Man - this caused me all kinds of self loathing and insecurity … gonna call my therapist now.”

Myself, I’ve never considered shaved legs to be aesthetically superior to hairy ones. It’s pretty much a wash, for me: a shaved leg has a cleaner, sleeker look, but a hairy one looks bigger. My pipes are pretty twiggy and can use any illusion of burliness they can get.

Should cyclists shave their legs?

I am not inclined to take on the role of arbiter in this matter. I am very strongly opinionated about whether or not women should shave their legs, but as far as male cyclists go, I really couldn’t care less. I see that I’m not alone in this position, based on the survey results. (Note: “No” was a possible answer, but not a single respondent selected it.)

That said, from a pragmatic standpoint hairy legs can be useful.

How? Well, several of my cycling friends are, like me, guys who did a lot of racing for a lot of years and have had their fill of the cultural trappings of the sport. Not only are we finally free of the endless training regimen, but we’re happy to be done with the drooling over bike catalogs, the long driving trips every weekend, and the constant battle against leg hair. But we still love to ride. The hairy legs, then, become symbolic of retirement itself, and give us an excuse to simply not take the bait when some young (or young-at-heart) racer-type throws down the gauntlet on us. And if we do decide to rise to the occasion, and manage to get the better of a chance rival, the victory is made that much sweeter by our shaggy presentation.

This cuts both ways, of course: if I decide to dust off my lungs and take on a serious race (which I’ve done three times in the last six years), I’ll add shaving to my preparations. After all, there’s a time to be taken seriously in the peloton, lest I give comfort to the enemy, and shaved legs really are an important part of the racer’s image.