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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Bomb Pop - A Bicycle Retrospective

Introduction

I’m enchanted with the spoken track “The Pontiac” on the Tom Waits album Orphans (Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards). I won’t try to describe it—just click here to listen. I played it for my daughter who said, “You should do your own, about your bikes!” So here it is.

Bomb Pop

So, first of all I had the Fuji Junior. It was a tiny little bright red ten-speed, 24-inch wheels, stem-mounted Suntour shifters with little plastic condoms on them. I was ashamed at the “Junior” part and painted over it with touch-up paint. Now, your uncles all had Motobecane Nomades, which kind of made me jealous at the time because they were French. They all had those shitty plastic Simplex derailleurs and shifters but my brothers pretended they were kickass. Your grandpa had a weakness for French bikes. His was this weird crappy Gitane, I couldn’t tell what color it was, I even asked my dad, he couldn’t say either. Even your Grandma Jude had a French bike, also a Gitane, women’s mixte frame, narrow rock-hard plastic saddle—she hated it, I only saw her ride it once.

So, after the Motobecanes, Uncle Geoff and Uncle Bryan upstaged me again with these Libertas racing bikes from Belgium. Now they were pure shit, terrible lugwork, little specks of excess flux the builders couldn’t be bothered to sand off, but the bikes had flashy head tube decals and really skinny tires and I was in awe.

My next bike was like sensible shoes, a Miyata 310, $265 plus tax in 1981—gosh, two decades before you were born. I tricked it out with Suntour Superbe Pro brakes and pedals, handbuilt wheels I bought off your Uncle Geoff: Phil Wood hubs and Weinmann rims, laced radially which was almost unheard of back then. Stronglight cranks, drilled-out chainrings which was pretty badass. Concor saddle which had just come out, kind of radical at the time, I had the Supercorsa which had steel rails. I sold that 310 to Joel Linsky for $515; his mom was furious.

Now your Uncle Max had the Univega Viva Sport, he took off all the decals, slapped on some Dia Compe 500G brakes, tried to pass it off as a Colnago.

My first pro bike was a Mercian Colorado, Reynolds 531 with an SL fork, a beautiful color they called champagne pearl, really gorgeous, a bit like the color of a fawn actually. Bought that from my pal Nico. A couple months later we were riding at night and I piled into a curb, bent the frame—crumpled the downtube below the shifter bosses. Heartbreaking.

I had another Mercian, white with red panels, gorgeous, and I had my first victories on that bike before selling it to your Uncle Max who’d fallen in love with it and couldn’t live without it. From there I got into more Miyatas, there was the ’83 Pro, then the ’83 Team I bought off of Towle, he got it from Andre Claussen, I traded that to your Uncle Geoff for the ’84 Team he’d become too short to ride after the car accident. I had eight Miyatas … loved ‘em all. Not that they were actually that good … kind of heavy, top tubes too short, and the 73 head angle wasn’t aggressive enough.

After my ’86 Team Miyata’s fork broke at nationals I bought the Guerciotti SLX from Dave Feingold for $400. It was a 10 Speed Drive team issue, red white & blue fade paint job, so I named it Bomb Pop. God I loved that bike. Long top tube, 74 head angle, 72 seat, low bottom bracket, it just handled so beautifully. Indexed shifting never worked on that bike so I ran it with the Simplex Retrofriction shifters. I had some of my best races on that bike. In ’96 I bought a brand-new Dura-Ace gruppo for it, laced up a fresh set of wheels. Two weeks later I was riding on the Golden Gate bridge, sprinting, and the fork broke. Steerer tube sheared clean off—I piled face-first into the concrete, headset bearings rolling everywhere, I needed a bunch of stitches. Still, that was one of my favorite bikes. Well, that was a long time before you were born.

Photos & notes

Here I’m on the Fuji during the 1981 Red Zinger Mini Classic. Look how small we are.

Here’s my dad’s Gitane.

Here’s my mom’s Gitane. Man, what a hateful bike. She didn’t even want the mixte-style frame but Dad insisted.

Here’s Bryan on his Libertas at the ’81 Mini Zinger.

Here’s that Libertas head tube decal.

Here’s Max  on his Univega, also from the ’81 Mini Red. Notice how his poorly pinned number is coming off.

Here’s the Dia-Compe 500G brakes Max had.  He was so proud of them. I can’t find a photo of the drilled levers, though.

Here’s the Miyata 310—I’m #62, straddling it—and also the Mercian Colorado with Nico on it (in the race leader jersey), at the 1982 Mini Zinger. I bought the Mercian off Nico later that year.

Here’s my dad’s Subaru (which did not run off gasohol, by the way) with (from left to right) Max’s Univega Viva Sport, Geoff’s Univega Superstrada, our dad’s Trek, and Bryan’s Libertas (which he got from Geoff after his own Libertas broke).

Here’s my college roommate on my ’86 Team Miyata.

Randomly, here’s a pair of pages from a bike magazine showing two of the bikes featured in this post.

Here’s Bomb Pop during its heyday.

I still have it, but it’s not safe to ride.

Acknowledgements and errata

Of course my daughter Alexa gets a shout-out for suggesting this post & the recording. I am grateful also to my daughter Lindsay for doing the excellent camera work, holding my phone very still with it trained on the slide show playing on my laptop while I did the audio.

There are a couple of severe goofs in the video that you probably laughed at already, owing to my needing to get this done in one take. First is complaining about the 83 head angle on my Miyatas being too shallow; of course I meant 73 (as 83 would be impossibly steep). I also stated that the head tube on Bomb Pop sheared clean off; of course I meant the steerer tube.

If you enjoy “The Pontiac” as much as I do, I’m sure you can’t help but be disappointed in my tale and moreover my delivery. What can I say? I’m not Tom Waits. But then again who is?

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Corn Cob

On a recent ride with my bike club, I got some ribbing about this blog from my friend Marty. (Marty can give me all the flak he wants, because the first words I ever spoke to him, back in’88, were “I have no respect for you,” in a heated moment after he beat me in a bike race.) Apparently referring to my tendency to blog at great length on trivial topics, Marty suggested I write a blog about corn cobs. Corn cob, in this context, refers to a rather small bicycle gear cluster in which each cog is just one tooth bigger than the next. This gives a racer great precision--but no range--in choosing a gear to pedal in.

"You could write an essay about each cog," Marty teased, "or better yet, you could write a sonnet, an ode to the corn cob!" So, here it is.


Ode to the Corn Cob

When I was nine I had a ten-speed bike.
I loved it, though it suffered from the curse ooooooooooo2
Of tires not as thin as I'd have liked,
And of a spoke protector, even worse.

We didn't call them spoke protectors though,
As "pie plate" better mocked how big they were. ooooooio6
They caused the largest cog to seem to grow--
A mean illusion, awful to endure.

A bigger cog meant lower gearing, see;
The stuff of weaker boys, embarrassing. ooooooooooooo10
We longed for smaller clusters, finally free
Of pie plates. Lack of metal was our bling.

At age eighteen I realized my dream:
I ran a straight-block corn cob, plate-less, clean. oooooo14


oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 
Footnotes & Commentary

Line 1: Bike

I got the bike when I was nine. It was a Fuji Junior, bright red, and it’s still on the road today, now piloted by my nephew Jake. That’s him (with his mom), on the very Fuji of my childhood, in the photo above. This was my first bike: my brothers and I were unique in a) being pretty late in getting our first bikes, and b) getting ten-speeds long before any other kids. What a glorious day that was when I had my very own bike to ride and no longer had to run alongside my brothers and their friends as they rode up and down our neighborhood streets.

I really did love that Fuji, and defended its honor passionately when my brothers called it the “Fudgie” and told me that it was made by “Fuji Heavy Industries.” My brothers also loved to tease me about my bike being called “Junior,” as opposed to their coolly-named Motobecane Nomades. It’s hard to imagine why I was so ashamed of “Junior,” but clearly I was, because at some point I actually painted over the decals with red touch-up paint. (As for Fuji Heavy Industries, they don’t make bikes. They make Subarus.)

The bike had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do with cars now (e.g., Honda Acura Integra Basilica XLS, Sport Series). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

Missing from the Fuji now are the toe-clips. I know I had them because—like everyone—when I first got them I kept forgetting to loosen the straps, tipping over again and again.

Line 2: Cursed

The bike was not cursed—I was. I wasn’t alone, of course; also cursed was every other kid who was painfully aware of the uncoolness of his bike based on its not resembling a pro racing bike in every detail. Kids—heck, humans—make a lot of trouble for themselves scrutinizing everything and placing it within a rigorous, heartless hierarchy like this.

Line 3: Tires

The original tires were 24 x 1¼ inch. (The small wheel diameter made it possible for the frame to be a reasonable 18 inches while still allowing me to straddle the bike.) I dreamed of tires that were only 1 1/8 inch wide, which is what my brothers had by then. Oh, how they lorded that eighth of an inch over me. I became fairly obsessed about it. Eventually my brother Geoff crashed his bike (I believe he was riding at night and hit a brick) and totaled his front wheel. Unable to find a replacement 24-inch wheel, my dad bought a 600C, which had an aluminum alloy rim instead of steel and was thus much better. Not wishing to reward Geoff for his foolishness, my dad put the 600C wheel on my bike and Geoff got my old wheel. This was all well and good until the mandatory bike shop safety inspection a couple weeks before my first bike race, the Red Zinger Mini Classic, in 1981. My bike failed the inspection due to worn-out tires, and the shop only carried the 600C tire in the 1 3/8 inch width! Man, that is really fat. The mechanic lectured me at length about how tire width really doesn’t matter and skinny tires won’t make you go faster. His unspoken assumption was that aesthetics shouldn’t matter to a kid—but why not? I guarantee his tires were nice and skinny! To my great relief, my dad found a 600C x 1¼ inch tire in Denver for me.

Line 6: Mockery

Not all the mockery was in the direction of pie plates in general. Much of it was directed at my pie plate in particular, which my brothers convinced me was even larger than theirs. That my bike was different from theirs singled it out for all kinds of contempt. It didn’t matter that their French bikes had those awful plastic Simplex shifters and derailleurs. To this very day, despite having spent his teen years as a bike mechanic wailing about the awfulness of French bikes, my brother Bryan won’t concede that my Fuji was better. “Are you kidding? Never!” he says. “The Motobecanes were elusive, romantic French bicycles, with light-weight derailleurs and wedge-shaped tires! I remember loving that Nomade like it was a girl. Your bike was made by a Heavy Industries factory in Japan, mine by French people, who made racing bicycles, and knew about love and stuff.” My dad had bought the Motobecanes at Basque Sports in Boulder, and every time we drove by the store in the car, we’d all chant its name, both in homage and because it was such a hard name to pronounce. The “–sque” butting up against the “S” in “Sports” created a hissing effect that, since we couldn’t avoid it, we ultimately accentuated: “Basques-ssk-ssk sports-ssk-ssk.” (Nobody ever knew or cared where my Fuji came from.)

Line 8: Awful to endure

It wasn’t just the size of the pie plates that rankled us. I couldn’t find room within the sonnet to address the issue of pie plate rattling, so I’ll mention it here. Mine didn’t give me much trouble, but my brothers’ pie plates rattled like crazy. Finally Geoff couldn’t take it anymore and figured out a solution: he took a length of surgical tubing, maybe half a centimeter in diameter, sliced it lengthwise down the middle, and ran it along the edge of the pie plate, so it was held in place by the spokes. This worked for awhile, though the tubing tended to peel off eventually. He solved this by sewing it on there with kite string or dental floss or something. Eventually the tubing turned yellow and brittle in the sun, making the pie plate look more ghastly than ever. As you can see from the photo above, the pie plate on my old Fuji is going strong. I doubt it has ever occurred to Jake to despise it.

Line 9: Gearing

It seems intuitively obvious to me, as it did when I was a kid, that a larger cog indicates personal weakness. When I really think about this, I see that math is involved, and it wasn’t until I read my sonnet to my wife, Erin, that I realized how much I take for granted when it comes to the proportions of bike components. Imagine: she can look at a large freewheel and not pity the bike owner at all! But then, she didn’t have, as a pre-teen, a gear chart taped to her stem, showing which front/rear gear combination represented the next highest or lowest gear. Bryan, at fourteen or so, actually wrote a computer program to plot the gear inches on a logarithmic scale. Gear inches refers to the number of teeth on the chainwheel up front, multiplied by the wheel diameter in inches, divided by the number of teeth on the rear cog. Any teenager I rode with then knew by heart not only that, say, 52 x 13 was a 108-inch gear, but exactly how fast that gear would propel him at top cadence. Bikers were nerdier then, I think.

When I started racing, my brothers helped me strip down my bike, ditching the reflectors, replacing the stem-mounted shifters with down-tube ones, and removing the so-called “chicken” or “suicide” levers, those brake-lever extensions that made it possible to brake while riding on the tops of the handlebars. I distinctly remember Geoff, at age thirteen or so, sawing off the chicken-lever stubs with a hacksaw so the bolts would sit flush. We/they also removed the chain-guard on the crankset, which now strikes me as a step down aesthetically (it was a giant, pretty, chrome thing, and I remember well how often I had a grease print of the chainring on my pant leg after the chain-guard was gone). The rear mech is a Suntour V-GT Luxe, which my dad installed along with a larger freewheel to give me—you guessed it—lower gearing, which of course was a bit humiliating. Why me? Was I such the runt that I alone needed lower gearing? Oddly enough, the larger freewheel actually made the pie plate look smaller—but just try telling my brothers that. The bike never did shift very well after that “upgrade,” which is why in races I’d often get dropped in either the highest gear or the lowest. This doesn’t mean I didn’t get dropped when using other gears—I mostly used those two gears, and always got dropped.

Line 14: Straight-block

When I upgraded from the Fuji to my first Miyata, I went from a 32-tooth large cog in back to a 28, and I was thrilled at the sleeker, racier look. It still had a pie plate, but it was aluminum, and not as shiny, thus less conspicuous. A couple of years later I bought some wheels from my brother Geoff that had the same 28-tooth cog, but with no spoke protector. That was a huge step forward; I think my ego doubled that day. At age fourteen I started racing in the United States Cycling Federation races, where your smallest cog couldn’t be smaller than 17 teeth—far lower maximum gearing than I’d been riding in the Mini Zinger. (The idea was to save the youngsters’ knees.) It was practical to run a straight-block freewheel with that limitation; even with only six cogs, you could do 17-18-19-20-21-22, with 22 being a totally reasonable gear for getting up just about any hill in the Boulder area.

The next year I moved up an age group and was allowed to have a 15-tooth cog, and I went to the new Suntour 7-speed freewheels, and had an almost-straight-block of 15-16-17-18-19-20-22. Still, a 22 was the freewheel cog equivalent of sensible shoes, and I wanted something more bold. Finally, I switched to Shimano gear cassettes and for the first time could easily create custom combinations for specific races; for example, if I was racing with the adults I could use a 12-tooth cog. At last, I could build the highly impractical gearing combinations that fully satisfied my vanity: for criteriums or bike club photo-shoots I’d set up a 12-17. (Shimano wasn’t doing 7-speed yet.) What a rush that was as a teenager, to look down and see not a giant cluster with a humiliating pie plate, but this tiny little freewheel, a man’s freewheel, a svelte cluster fit for a real racing bike, and above all a highly visible manifestation of my strength. It was like the bicycle equivalent of giant muscles. It never occurred to me that to most people, perhaps even to you, it’s just a bunch of damn sprockets and whatnot that don’t really mean anything.

So did I outgrow all this macho nonsense? Of course not. I still snort at pie plates (though they’re made of plastic now). After a couple of months of dating Erin (back in ’92) I quietly removed the pie plate from her mountain bike. (She never noticed.) As for gearing, the modern-day equivalent of a giant rear cog is of course the triple front chainwheel, which accomplishes the same thing (i.e., addresses the same weakness). A triple requires a longer derailleur cage, which I equate—with a shudder—to that old V-GT Luxe on the Fuji. If a friend, new to cycling, asks me about triples, I’ll tell him they make sense given the hills around Berkeley. But a triple for my own bike? Are you kidding? Never!
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