Old Yarn - The Day I Learned Bicycle Gear Shifting

Introduction

Here is the fifth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” “The Enemy Coach,” and most recently “The Brash Newb”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Trigger warning: this post is long. It is a rambling tale that doesn’t skimp on any details. And no, it won’t teach you this weird little secret your doctor doesn’t want you to know. It won’t give you the social currency you’d get from talking with colleagues about the last episode of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Season 2.* So if you’re cool with bike lore of no particular interest to your social network, then read on. But if you’re impatient and/or won’t read anything you can’t summarize in a tweet (I refuse to say “X”), go somewhere else.

(*As much as it sounds like I made up this TV show, I didn’t. It’s the fifth most popular show on Netflix right now. The center cannot hold.)

Learning to shift – late summer 1978

As I mentioned last week, one of the cooler things my dad ever did was to buy my brothers and me 10-speed bikes long before any other kids had them. In fact, these were the first bikes we ever owned. This yarn is about the day—in fact, the very moment—I learned how to shift gears. If that sounds really boring, don’t worry: I’m here to entertain, not to edify. This post describes, among other things, three bike crashes and one near-death experience. (Why isn’t this post mainly about the near-death experience? Because that didn’t change my life. It just put it briefly in jeopardy.) (Full disclosure—if I can be permitted to directly follow a parenthetical with another parenthetical—this post doesn’t feature any really gory crashes. For that, click here or here.)

The peculiar thing about getting this ten-speed for my ninth birthday was that my dad forbade me to touch the gear-shift levers. I asked why my bike even had them if I wasn’t supposed to touch them. “Don’t worry about that,” was all he said in reply. This was pretty typical of my dad. He didn’t really like dialogue. He absolutely loved a good monologue, so long as he was delivering it and on a topic of his choosing (for example, the design of an interferometer he was building), but had little patience for pushback or even pointed questions, which could seem like insubordination. So I just kept my mouth shut and, in the ensuing days and weeks, even months, rode the bike around in first gear all the time. Yes, I was that well-behaved and craven.

I don’t know exactly why my dad prohibited gear shifting, but it’s not hard to guess. His opinion of his four sons wasn’t exactly rosy. It’s probably Geoff and Bryan’s fault. They’re twins and the oldest. Family lore (passed down from our mom) has it that our dad originally had high hopes for his kids, figuring we’d all be the genius offspring he richly deserved, but these hopes were dashed early. When the twins were still babies, he caught them trying—and failing—to throw all their blocks out of their crib. They weren’t clever enough to align the blocks properly to fit through the slats. These dumb babies were just banging the blocks against the slats, perpendicular to them. Disgusted, Dad brought our mom over to witness this atrocious stupidity. Did she wonder if jettisoning the blocks was even the goal of these babies, vs. enjoying the chock-chock-chock sound they were making? Or was she tempted to explain to her husband about realistic infant development milestones? Apparently not. It seems nobody ever corrected my dad, and from that day forward he had to live with the sad “truth” that his kids just weren’t up to snuff. (Other family lore has it that he said to me once, “You’re not very bright, are you.” It’s tempting to dismiss this anecdote except there were five witnesses. Could we all be wrong? Well, actually, yeah, but not necessarily.)

Where bicycles were concerned, our dad was particularly pessimistic about our capabilities. As described here, all three of my brothers and I distinctly recall our dad’s reaction when Max (who’d drawn the short straw) asked if we could register for the Red Zinger Mini Classic bike race. “You boys are too stupid to race bicycles,” he declared. “You’d get yourselves killed.”

So why did he even buy us cool ten-speeds, if he had such a low opinion of our cycling prospects? I put this question to my brother Max. His reply was along the lines of, “Typical one-speed kid’s bikes disgusted Dad. No son of his would ride anything so vulgar. We had to be on proper ten-speeds whether we deserved them or not.”

Now, I realize I should be careful not to drag my brothers too far into my own story as regards the gear-shifting prohibition. I don’t specifically recall them being included in this, so I asked Bryan about it. “I think we were allowed to shift,” he said. “We probably ruined that for you with our own screw-ups.” He proceeded to recall how he tried to fix one of the brakes on his bike. He loosened the cable-fixing bolt, perhaps for diagnostic purposes, and pulled the cable out. Back then the cable would feed through a very narrow cylindrical aperture before being bolted down. Since this is the same dumb kid who as a baby couldn’t even throw a block out of his crib, you won’t be surprised to learn what happened next: he couldn’t get the cable back in. In fact, when he tried, the individual steel strands broke free from one another, fraying hopelessly. Bryan broke down in despair, convinced that he’d entirely wrecked his bike. Not only would he not have it to ride anymore, but he’d be in big trouble with Dad.

If getting in trouble for bike problems strikes you as preposterous, you obviously never met our dad. He was so devoted to his career, any extra parenting demands that pulled him away from his work during an evening or weekend was like a crisis. Nothing, it seemed, peeved him more than extra child-rearing tasks. We would actually be in trouble for getting a flat tire on our bikes. This was construed as an act of moral turpitude, like we were trying to throw our dad’s world into a tailspin by running over something sharp. It’s like nothing was an accident … every mishap was an act of treachery. All this being said, there was a positive side to our dad’s oppressive reign, which is that we learned how to fix our bikes ourselves, so that our “crimes” could be kept secret.

But of course, this frayed cable incident occurred long before Bryan developed any proficiency as a mechanic. At the time he bemoaned his plight to our babysitter, H—, who took pity on the boy and intervened, calling our dad at work to soften the blow. The upshot was that Dad didn’t get angry with Bryan (or at least kept it to himself), but he also didn’t get around to fixing the bike for what felt to Bryan like a year. Needless to say, until the bike was fixed, Bryan was forbidden to ride it. Our bikes always had to have two working brakes.

I told this story to my younger daughter, who incredulously asked, “Why wasn’t Uncle Bryan allowed to ride with just one brake? One is plenty!” Now, before you decide that her attitude marks me as an incompetent parent, let me just say I keep a pretty close eye on the family fleet and proactively make any repairs necessary. The only time my daughter has ridden with only one brake is when she was off at college and burned through a set of brake pads on her Breezer while I wasn’t looking. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true because she sometimes borrows my mid-‘60s Triumph 3-speed, whose coaster brake occasionally fails for reasons I cannot fathom (much less fix). But that’s pretty rare. In general I am a stickler for bicycles having two working brakes.

(Here is a drawing, by my daughter, of her Breezer. It’s not pertinent to the story, but when your kid pays such a loving tribute to her bicycle, you kind of want to share it.)

Now, being committed to truth in these pages, I must disclose something: my dad’s strict rules notwithstanding, I myself became quite reckless about the two-brake rule, a mere three or four years after having so obediently followed the no-shifting protocol. Perhaps something about an over-strict parent encourages a wholesale abandonment of that parent’s policies. I was around twelve when I bought a 3-speed bike, a basic Sears model, used. Yes, Sears made bicycles. Don’t believe the Google AI Summary on this. In fact, here is a photo of a Sears bike that is the spitting image of the one I had.

Just as in the photo above, my Sears had two handbrakes (and I don’t know what this says about its age as compared to my Triumph). The rear brake stopped working (probably a broken cable) and I don’t think I even considered fixing it. By this point I knew how, but it just didn’t seem important when I still had a perfectly good front brake. (I also didn’t bother replacing the broken gear cable connecting the Speed Switch shifter to the Sturmey-Archer internal 3-speed hub, so this bike was always in third gear, which was the highest. For this reason its nickname was the Third Speed. Why do I mention the brand of hub? Well, so I could include some eye candy here.)

Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, so, I didn’t bother to fix that rear brake. Nor did I consider riding more carefully. Quite the opposite, in fact. Exhibit A: my bike ride to Mr. Tomato’s Pizza to meet some friends. Mr. Tomato’s was at the bottom of the gently down-sloping parking lot of the Basemar shopping center. It had a huge picture window, and from a distance I recognized my friends sitting right in front of it. I decided to give them a good scare, and started sprinting toward them as fast as I could. My plan was to slam on the brakes (er, brake) just in time to keep from crashing through the window. Two things failed to occur to me. One was the possibility of a pedestrian walking along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There was an overhang above this sidewalk, supported at intervals by big pillars that could easily obscure a shopper from view. The other thing I didn’t consider was the possibility of my one brake suddenly failing. This is what actually happened. Just as I hammered the brake, the cable snapped. There was absolutely no way to stop and I was less than ten feet from that giant window, carrying great speed.

It seemed as though all was lost, but just before impact I spied one of the pillars, which fortunately had a round cross-section and a smooth finish. I wrapped that pillar in a bear hug to at least keep myself from crashing through the window. Amazingly, as my momentum spun me and my bike around the pillar, the bike ended up pointed along the sidewalk at the moment it escaped my legs. It went shooting off forward, straight down that sidewalk, still at great speed.

So wonderful is the design of a bicycle, it can travel a great distance with no rider, as my brothers and I had learned to our delight earlier that summer. Not wanting to damage our ten-speeds, we’d conjured up a beach cruiser whose sole purpose was rider-less travel. (Its Ashtabula one-piece crankset assembly had fallen out so we couldn’t pedal it around anyway.) That bike was called Ghost Rider, or Ghostie for short, and we spent many an afternoon getting it up to speed, one guy riding it and several others pushing, and when we couldn’t get it going any faster, the rider would jump off the back and send the bike flying down the street. It could go for several hundred feet before either tipping over or drifting into a parked car. Well, in front of Mr. Tomato’s my 3-speed surely set a new record, since its speed was at least double that of a kid running. It was amazing to behold it flying down the sidewalk along the storefronts. Fortunately it was a slow business day for that mall, with no foot traffic. Equally astonishing was that I was completely unscathed other than perhaps slight damage to my hands and arms, similar to rope burn. My friends regarded me through the window with complete bewilderment, slack-jawed and disbelieving. I guess the point of this story is that my dad’s lack of faith in my intelligence wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

Of course my dad never know about my near-death experience at Mr. Tomato’s, or indeed of most of the crashes my brothers and I had. But the very first days of owning our bicycles were not promising. The problem was, we suddenly had this new hardware but lacked the know-how to use it. As weird as this may seem, our dad made zero effort to teach us how to ride, and in fact I am deeply puzzled as to how he even expected us to learn before being presented with these sophisticated ten-speeds. Did he just think people are born knowing how to ride a bike?

Which brings me to how my brother Max and I did learn, or at least were given one lesson apiece, on how to ride. No parents were involved, of course. Max went first. It had come to pass that Geoff and Bryan realized Max lacked this important skill, and talked their friend R— into loaning out his bike for the lesson. It was a typical kid’s bike in that it was a one-speed with high-rise handlebars and a banana seat. (We had a whole saying around this, that we would chant in mockery of these inferior bikes: “High-rise handlebar with a roll bar, banana seat, small wheel in front, big wheel in back, cool-dual frame, rusty old chain, with a slick, streamers from the grips and flower pedals.” I fact-checked this with Bryan and he remembered like half of it, and I added a couple details, and Max knew the rest. “Cool-dual frame” probably pertained to the two extra top-tubes of the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a popular model in those days. A “slick,” as Max eloquently put it, is “a rear tire with no tread for monster skids.” “Flower pedals” refers to “dust caps on the pedals that looked like daisies.”)

Actually, R—’s bike was somewhat unique in that it was an official licensed Boy Scout bike. But that’s neither here nor there. The more important detail is the single instruction that Geoff and Bryan gave to Max as they put him on the bike at the top of Howard Place, a long downhill: “Whatever you do, don’t turn!” Max and I remember it like it was yesterday. So ridiculous. I mean, what was the guy supposed to do? They didn’t tell him how to brake. They just figured that his future would work itself out somehow, after he’d built up all that speed! They set him off, gave him a good push. Now, I just did some research with Google Maps, and this street ran about 450 feet at an average grade of 5.5%. With help from ChatGPT (because I’m lazy, not because I needed it) I just calculated that by the time Max crossed Ithaca Drive (which Howard Place T’s into), he had to have been going at least 20 mph. He dutifully followed the instruction not to turn, so it’s a good thing there was no traffic on Ithaca to run him over. Instead he crashed over a curb, with so much velocity the bike kept going, and then hit a low fence that stopped him so he tipped over into the grass, remarkably unhurt. He leapt to his feet, delighted, and cried, “I can ride a bike, I can ride a bike!”

Alas, that was Max’s only lesson before receiving his ten-speed, months later, on his birthday. I guess he just assumed his skill was still there. He jumped on the bike and managed to pedal it not only to the end of our street, Hillsdale Way, but to negotiate the right-hand turn onto Howard Place (the same street I mentioned earlier), which is a cul-de-sac. He rode to the top, managed to turn the bike around, and then came barreling back down. In trying to make the left-hand turn back on to Hillsdale, with my dad and my brothers and me watching, he clipped a pedal and crashed. He got up, winced at his road rash, and checked over the bike. A big divot of foam rubber had been ripped out of the brand-new saddle. Regarding this, he thought to himself (as he related to me yesterday), “Well, I guess now this bike is really mine.”

Did I do any better? Alas, no. My lesson was a year or so later. Perhaps having been spooked a bit by Max’s disastrous first effort, Geoff and Bryan didn’t start me down Howard Place. Instead, they put me on my friend P—’s bike, another lowly one-speed, at the top of a steep driveway facing Hillsdale. They gave me a big push and I flew down the driveway, absolutely frozen in terror, went straight across the street, and crashed into the curb on the other side. I hadn’t built up nearly as much speed as Max had, so the curb stopped the front wheel cold and I flipped over the bars. I didn’t quite clear the sidewalk and landed roughly on it, but was no more hurt than on any other day, what with all the various skirmishes kids faced during that era of free-reign bullying. But I can’t say I’d learned any biking technique at all.

So when, about six months and zero follow-up lessons later, I got the Fuji Junior, I really didn’t know how to ride. But there was no way I could just stand there and look at the bike, with my dad seeming so expectant (apparently notwithstanding Max’s fiery wreck on his bike’s maiden voyage). So I just winged it, riding down the sidewalk, pedaling furiously because the one thing my brothers had managed to get across was that speed was the key to balance. I made it about two houses down before veering off course, heading straight for a mailbox. I managed not to run into it, but raked my back across it rather painfully. Somehow I kept the bike upright, and I guess by that point I had the hang of it. But this first ride on the Fuji Junior couldn’t have impressed my dad, and may have reminded him of Max’s similar misadventure, and this is perhaps why my dad decided to declare my bike’s shifters off-limits. Maybe he felt I had my hands full just learning how to steer the bike. Fortunately, I did figure out the brakes.

Well, once my fear abated, I fell madly in love with the bike. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages (in the notes to my “Corn Cob” poem), my Fuji 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., Subaru Outback Expert Sport-Trac, L.L. Bean Edition). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

One day when the bike was still new, I rode all morning, from my house up to the end of Howard Place and back down, then all the way down Hillsdale and back up, then back up Howard and back, over and over again, whistling the whole while because I was so happy. I happened to notice Mr. S—, who lived on the corner of Hillsdale and Howard, looking at me funny. He was out working in his yard and every time I went by he glared at me. What was his problem? I just shrugged it off. Well, later that day, another neighbor, Mr. D—, confronted me, asking if I’d vandalized Mr. S—’s house and yard. I was like “WHAT?!” It happens that Mr. S— had described at length to Mr. D— how I’d vandalized his place, and then rubbed it in by riding by again and again, whistling merrily to showcase my Schadenfreude as I watched him clean it up. I was mortified at this totally false accusation, and declared my innocence to Mr. D—. He advised that I’d simply have to go over there and knock on Mr. S—’s door and explain that I wasn’t the vandal. This I did, despite being a very shy kid, and I was so upset I was crying throughout my denial speech. My river of tears, it seemed, was mistaken for remorse and contrition by Mr. S—, who clearly didn’t believe my story of riding by again and again just because I liked to ride. At least my blubbery speech mollified him sufficiently that he didn’t see fit to involve my parents. This was a big break, because my parents never seemed to believe in my innocence, either. My mom once made me go apologize to yet another neighbor for being part of a cruel pack of kids that relentlessly teased her dog, even though I told my mom over and over that I wasn’t involved. Can you imagine how soul-crushing it is to apologize for an act of animal cruelty you are entirely innocent of?

Okay, time to move on. It was the toward the end of the summer when, on a day I now see as momentous, Max taught me how to shift my bike’s gears. We’d pedaled up Table Mesa Drive and were about to descend Vassar Drive, which is a 5.5% grade. Max, surely tired of waiting for me as I coasted down such hills (first gear being way too low to be of use), pointed at my stem-mounted shifters and told me, “Grab those two levers and push them all the way forward.”

Now, you probably think we’ve finally reached the crux of this story, after so very many diversions, and will now get to the really important, life-changing bit, and that’s almost true, but first I need to pause yet again to explain about these shifters. If you’re old enough to have used old-school stem- or down-tube-mounted shift levers, and remember how they worked, you may have raised an eyebrow just now when reading about Max’s instruction to push both levers forward. On almost any ten-speed-type bike, pushing the right lever forward would put the chain on the smallest cog in back (making for a higher gear, exactly as intended), but pushing the left lever forward would put the chain on the smaller chainring up front (making for a lower gear, at odds with the rest of the shift). You’d also wonder why, since I always rode in my bike’s lowest gear, both levers would have been down at the moment Max issued his instruction. On almost any bike, this would have meant my chain was on the big chainring, corresponding to the higher gear range. The only way you might have thought, “Oh yeah, of course, this makes sense” is if you’re the kind of bizarrely knowledgeable bike maven who would recall that the Suntour derailleur line-up of 1978 included the Spirt model, which worked backwards from most other derailleurs. As it happened, Max’s instructions were perfectly accurate for putting my bike in its highest gear.

And this begs the question: if my front derailleur (and thus left shifter) were essentially backwards from most others, how is it that Max’s instructions were correct? Wouldn’t he have assumed my bike worked the same as his? When I started this post, that question wouldn’t stop nagging at me. Now, if you’re wondering if I’m just remembering it wrong, think again … after all, this was a life-changing moment, forever seared into my memory. The highly specific action gave me, even before the gear shift actually took effect, a very powerful feeling. I knew that these gears were the key to somehow going faster, though I didn’t have any idea how (because when you think about it, the behavior of a bike’s gearing only makes sense after the fact, when you know empirically how gearing works; before that, the notion of differently sized cogs and chainrings affecting a bike’s speed is highly, highly abstract). The idea that I was somehow about to unleash great speed was tantalizing, and to achieve this by taking one hand, applying it to two levers, and pushing them both all the way forward in one go … it’s like pushing the throttle control forward on a fighter plane, or, better yet, remember the opening scene in “Risky Business,” when Tom Cruise’s character pushes all the levers on his dad’s stereo’s graphic equalizer all the way up, so he can totally rock out? It was just like that.

Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I had to find out if it was possible the front derailleurs on my brothers’ bikes, meaning Simplex derailleurs (these being Motobécane Nomades), might have also been backwards. This could have been a convention, after all, because this arrangement just makes sense. You have one consistent rule—pushing lever forward = higher gear—instead of the conflicting rule of pulling the left lever down = higher gear while pushing the right lever forward = higher gear. This conflicting behavior stymies cycling newcomers. On my wife’s road bike, I actually put “H” and “L” stickers on the down tube near the shifters to show which way to move them. It’s one of the more confusing things about pre-pushbutton shifting.

I couldn’t reach my brothers right away so I consulted ChatGPT. It assured me that, in fact, Simplex derailleurs were also backwards (vs. more modern shifters), just like the Suntour Spirt. GPT confidently declared, “The circa 1975 Simplex shift lever was pushed forward (toward the front wheel) to move the chain to the big ring. As a result, the lever would end up in a vertical or forward-leaning position when in the big ring.” Had it stopped there, I might have been fooled by a classic AI hallucination. But GPT went on to say, “This action corresponded to pushing the shift lever forward (since the shift lever pulls cable as it rotates forward).” Of course this is wrong. The shift lever pulls cable when you pull it down. So I asked it to furnish photos and diagrams. It provided a photo of a mid-‘80s Shimano Dura-Ace front derailleur (useless); a drawing of a Simplex rear derailleur (also useless); a photo looking from the left at a ‘90s-era triple crankset (ditto); and a photo of a bottom bracket with chainwheels in the background (noticing any trend here, i.e., useless?). Then it described these visual aids in exhaustive, needless, and useless detail.

I pointed out its error, challenging the notion that pushing a shift lever forward would ever tension the cable, whereupon GPT completely backpedaled (pun intended, couldn’t resist) and recanted everything it had said earlier, saying, “You nailed it!” and providing a totally new answer to my original question: “No, Simplex front derailleurs (like the Prestige models used on Motobécanes in the mid-1970s) were not reverse-spring designs like the SunTour Spirt.”

But wait, I’m not done. Disgusted by ChatGPT’s blithe ineptitude, I asked it to furnish a diagram and a photo to illustrate its revised explanation of Simplex’s shifting. Look what it came up with:

Can you believe that? For all its detailed description (running over 1,600 words in all), ChatGPT apparently had no concept of the cable actuation. Look at the arrow pointing from the “Cable” label … it has no head, goes nowhere! No cable is shown! And look at the arrow showing the motion of the lever: it’s 90 degrees off of the actual motion. And since when is the lever mounted directly to the derailleur? Where would the cable even be?

Actually, in fairness, I know of at least one front derailleur that was actuated by a handle instead of a cable. It was on an ancient Schwinn Collegiate that I bought from a police auction. The rear derailleur had a normal shifter and cable setup, but that front derailleur had a handle. At least it did, for a while, until my pant leg caught it one day during hard pedaling and ripped it clean off the bike. But this wasn’t a Simplex derailleur; I’m pretty sure it was a Huret (though it was labeled “Schwinn Approved” in keeping with the fiction that this was an all-American bike). That derailleur looked something like this:

Getting back to ChatGPT, its drawing wasn’t even the worst of its crimes. Look at this fake photo it generated of what it imagined that Simplex front shifting system looked like:

I thought for a second this was an actual photo of some bizarre ill-fated real-life setup, but look at the ersatz brand stamped into the shift lever, in a nonexistent alphabet. The entire rendering is just grotesque. In fact, for me, and I suppose anyone else who has great familiarity with bicycle components, this mock photo is deep into uncanny valley territory, to the extent it’s almost nauseating. Also note how the derailleur cage doesn’t clear the chainring teeth. Artificial intelligence my ass!

Suffice to say, Simplex derailleurs of that era weren’t backwards and nothing can explain Max’s spot-on instructions. When I asked him he simply admitted, “I don’t have an answer for you. Geoff and Bryan probably made the observation so it must have been common knowledge. I know I didn’t discover that on my own.” Bryan theorized that Max had taken my bike out for a few joy rides and discovered it that way; Max could neither confirm nor deny this. The perfect accuracy of his instruction shall have to remain a mystery.

But oh, when I pushed those levers forward, and that bike went from first to tenth gear … it was breathtaking. I mashed the pedals with everything I had, working hard to get on top of that 52x14 top gear, until I was just flying down Vassar. I’d had no idea just how effective pedaling in “the big meat” (as a bike’s highest gear is known by racers) could be. It’s like if you had what you thought was a Fred Flintstone car, propelled by your feet paddling the ground, and then one day you discovered that this car had an engine. What a game-changer. It was like I went from patsy to made man in the span of a minute.

Not only did this sudden knowledge change my cycling, but it forever changed how I regarded my dad’s authority. Not only would I use all my gears from that day forward, but I’d have this secret I’d be keeping from him. It was impossible for me to revert to the lowly, gutless, quaking obeyer of rules; I was like, fuck that guy! He kept this gearing magic from me! He kept me down! I felt like Toecutter in Mad Max: “The bronze, they keep you from being proud.”

As it turned out, I never did get in trouble for defying my dad. An absentminded fellow, he evidently forgot he’d ever issued that prohibition. Or who knows, maybe on some level he wanted me to take some initiative. But most likely he’d intended to one day teach me all about shifting, but just forgot. Maybe he’d have thought a little harder about this if he’d had any inkling that his silly rule, coupled with Max’s intervention, would turn me into a lifelong rebel…

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Cycling Smackdown - Man vs. E-Bike

Introduction

If you’re a cyclist, you are probably now accustomed to being passed up by non-cyclists on e-bikes. When this happens, you may be puzzled, for a fraction of a second, by how some non-racer-type in a big puffy jacket sitting bolt upright on a humble commuting bike is so much faster than you, and then you realize. My eyes still dart to the down-tube of the person’s bike, to confirm the presence of a giant battery pack, as if to reassure myself that the universe still basically makes sense (if it does).

Mind you, I am 100% in favor of e-bikes … for adults. Especially for commuting. But I am also 100% not in favor of kids on e-bikes. If you agree, and particularly if you don’t, read on.

Cycling Smackdown – Man vs. E-Bike

I was on a solo road ride. I was not happy. I felt old and slow and fat. This isn’t very charitable and you likely wouldn’t call me fat, especially if I remembered to suck in my gut if I thought you were looking at me (but then, why would you be?). But being fat and feeling fat are entirely different things. I think anyone can feel fat. As a cyclist whose midsection used to be concave, I am admittedly unfair with myself.

I almost cut the ride short. I’ll confess I was indulging in a disgraceful amount of self-loathing and self-pity. Some days you have it, some you don’t, and I was really lagging, dragging a baggy, deflated ego behind me. I guess that’s the problem with ever having been really fast on a bike … you can’t help but compare. But enough of this.

At about the halfway point of my 30-mile loop, I turned onto Happy Valley Road to do “Half Happy,” which is halfway up what would be a pretty tough climb if you didn’t take the merciful turnoff down Sundown Terrace. The grade starts out at 1% for a tenth of a mile, then dabbles between 2% and 5% until a final really steep bit and then the turnoff. Half Happy is 2.5 miles at an average grade of 3.5%. (You can view the Strava segment here.)

As it happened, two teenagers on e-bikes turned onto Happy Valley Road just after I did (coming from either Happy Valley Lane or Hester Lane, just after Highway 24). One of the kids was on the kind of total cop-out e-bike that doesn’t even pretend to be a proper bicycle and that nobody actually pedals (see photo above). It’s more like a mini-bike, with the fat tires and the manual throttle. The kid yelled at me, something I didn’t quite hear (not expecting to be accosted). I said, “Huh?” and he yelled again, “You wanna race?!”

In the same millisecond that I parsed the question, I answered it. This was long before I devoted any thought to actually considering his proposal. It turns out my lizard brain is able to direct my vocal chords, tongue, and lips without needing to engage my neocortex, because I was surprised to suddenly hear myself yelling, “Yeah, I’ll race you! Let’s GO!” My naysaying inner voice—that is, the wimp in my brain that had been complaining the whole ride—said, “Oh boy. This is not going to end well.”

But my arguably better brain, the impulsive one that at least isn’t so pathetic, shouted down the inner voice, yelling (silently, internally), “GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!” And for better or for worse, this wilder, bolder part of my brain was, at this time, in charge of my body. I launched the hardest attack I’m capable of.

Here is where we started our race:

This is of course the part of the story where, according to classic narrative tradition, I am supposed to say, “I threw her in the big ring.” If this were fiction, that’s how I’d structure it. But full disclosure: I was already in the big chainring (i.e., higher gear range) because the climb is only 1% at this point. Nevertheless, as I accelerated, out of the saddle, I shifted up a few gears on the back so I could really dig in. It was crazy: out of absolutely nowhere, I just had this enormous rush of energy, like I was a surfer who’d just caught a 40-foot wave. I was flying! I glanced at my bike computer: I was doing over 25 mph!

The two kids, who’d been flanking me on either side, were quickly falling behind, and one of them—to my delight—yelled, “Oh, SHIT!” Needless to say, now I was fully committed and as the climb got steeper I had to go harder and harder. My suffering increased exponentially as the grade went from 1% to about 4%. I was still hauling ass in the big ring, and couldn’t believe how much energy I actually had. I felt strong like bull! But how long could this last? Of course I didn’t want to just start well and fizzle, because as we all know, he who laughs last laughs best.

Why did I even care about this pointless duel? It’s because, like I mentioned earlier, I hate to see kids on e-bikes. Why do their parents think kids need this product? Kids throughout time (well, at least for the last hundred years or so) have gotten around just fine on regular bicycles. It’s a great form of exercise and, given that riding a bike replaces walking or running—undeniably slow, hard, and inefficient ways to travel—kids have historically loved the increased speed and range that a good old fashioned bicycle can provide. Perhaps modern helicopter parents (or recovering helicopter parents), having habitually driven their kids everywhere, have finally had enough, and now refuse to drive them—but feel guilty about adding difficulty to their kids’ lives, and thus get them e-bikes to cushion the blow. Or maybe these parents think the kids will have more energy for studying and extracurricular activities if they don’t have to pedal their way around. Maybe these kids are so oversubscribed that they don’t have time to ride regular bikes from one activity to another. Or it could be these parents are not only sedentary and out of shape themselves, but lack the imagination to think of their kids as able-bodied people perfectly capable of pedaling their own asses around. Whatever the case, these parents are clearly defective. The kids, for their part, are lazy and shameless. If, when I was a kid, my parents had offered me an e-bike (had such a thing existed, and had they been defective parents), I’d have been offended. Thus, when I see a kid on an e-bike, it’s as galling as seeing a cat on a leash, or a dog in a stroller, or a toddler with an iPad.

How could I keep this pace up? Could I keep this up? A boss once advised me, when I had an important decision to make, “Go with your gut”—but then, after a moment’s reflection (and likely remembering the business zeitgeist of the moment), he added, “but make sure your decision is data-driven.” Well, which is it? I guess you can do both: decide what to do based on intuition, but then keep yourself honest via whatever objective metrics are at hand. My decision to pick up the gauntlet having been purely impulsive, it was now time to look at the data side of things. I figured the e-bikes, if they hadn’t been tampered with, were configured not to go over 15 mph, therefore as long as I could average higher than that, I could hold the kids off. The climb was close to 5% in places so my speed dipped below 15 here and there, but overall this pace seemed doable. I now know this analysis was flawed: having reviewed my own research on this, and corroborating this with friends, I’ve confirmed that Class 2 e-bikes such as these kids were riding will actually go up to 20 mph. Fortunately, my oxygen-starved brain couldn’t really do math (e.g., calculating how long I could go below 15 mph and still maintain that average), so I had to err on the side of going as hard as I could anyway, numbers be damned.

I allowed myself a glance back to see how my opponents were doing. The kids were still at it, but my gap was pretty good. The really peculiar thing was how blasé their effort looked … until I considered what “going hard” on an e-bike means. On a traditional bike, of course, the rider is out of the saddle, his body thrashing as he rocks the bike, generally with an agonized expression. Often his mouth will gape open; sometimes I wonder, during an all-out effort, if I’ve managed to unhook my jaw the way some snakes can. But on a Class 2 e-bike the pedals are practically just for show, and once you’ve twisted the throttle to full-on, there’s not much more you can do … the bike is doing all it can, and its capability is governed not by pluck, grit, determination, or anything glorious like that, but just by the limit of its design (i.e., its governor). There is no “digging deep” on an e-bike … the outcome in a man-vs.-e-bike contest is in the hands of the real cyclist. I focused on the road ahead and kept the pressure on. My legs and throat were burning, but by God, I kept the speed up. Stroke after stroke, my legs kept turning over the big gear. It was like those trick birthday candles that relight themselves every time they’re blown out.

Protracted suffering ensued which there is no point describing other than to say it seemed to go on and on. Finally I got to the really steep part, just over two miles since the start, and still no annoying teens had buzzed by me. I looked back again … and they were gone. (There can be no fixed finish line in such an impromptu race; suffice to say, I gave the kids all the runway they wanted to try to beat me.) Looking down at my bike computer, I noticed I’d actually increased my average speed for the whole ride! On a climb! Frickin’ glorious. The hapless teens, through their hubris, had done me a solid!

In a perfect world, those teenagers would declare my victory “iconic,” and—inspired by what’s evidently possible even for an ancient guy like me—they’d go get real bikes and become athletes. But surely the more likely scenario is they’ll tell their parents their e-bikes suck, and demand better ones. Or, they’ll go on YouTube and learn how to disable their bikes’ governors. But whatever their story is, I’m sure I have the better one to tell!

Epilogue

At what point did the kids give up? Who knows … but if they’d stayed at it all the way to my turnoff, they’d necessarily have beaten me. Going back to the data, I see that the KOM for this Strava segment, set by a far faster rider than I, was at an average speed of 19.4 mph ... that is, below what the kids’ e-bikes were able to sustain. I find it remarkable that the kids quit the effort even though it didn’t cause them any pain or suffering. I guess they weren’t being “data driven.” Maybe without the opportunity to consult ChatGPT, they just didn’t know what to do...

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Epic France Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part I

Introduction

I did a week-long fully-supported bike trip through the French Alps with three friends. We hopscotched from one fancy hotel to another, with a full staff in vans supporting us the whole way. The trip was called the Epic France Trans Alps, and basically took us over every major Alpine mountain pass featured in the Tour de France. Not just this year’s Tour, but all of them. That’s 18 categorized climbs, half of them “Hors Categorie,” aka HC, which means “so difficult they cannot be classified.”

If you think this sounds hard, you’re right, though I’m suffering worse now that I’m on an airplane, in coach, headed back to my worldly responsibilities, and the person in the seat next to me has really bad breath. I’m about to start looking for a parachute…

This ride report will dispense with my usual formula of recounting the food and then the riding. There’s just too much to report, and I doubt you overmuch care what order we did anything in. This is just a highlights reel, and every couple thousand words I’ll cut it off and call it a post. (Readers complain I go on too long….)

Rental bike

The airlines are apparently cooler these days about not charging for bicycles, but they don’t take liability for any damage. Plus, I’m lazy, so I rented a bike. On the first day, we supplied the staff mechanic with pedals, saddles, bike computers, etc. and made sure the fit was right. We’d sent in our measurements in advance, and sure enough, the bike fit me pretty darn well. The tires looked really fat, and seemed awfully soft, but I’m told that’s the modern style. I asked three different randos if the tires felt too squishy to them, and they all said naw, it’s fine.

In case you’re a tech weenie, here’s the bike. I’m not going to geek out on the details other than to say it has a carbon frame, hella aero wheels, disc brakes, 12 cogs in the back, a compact double up front, and SRAM electronic shifting. The shifting hasn’t changed much since I first reported on it, here. Over the course of the week, I threw my chain three times, but in each case I was able to shift it back on via lever-taps, without needing to stop. (I did have to restart my heart each time.)

Wine with lunch?!

Since the first ride would just be an hour or so (to shake down the bikes), we had lunch in the hotel restaurant instead of having a picnic on the road. I’ve never done one of these supported tours before, so I kind of go with the flow and just play along like I know the drill. (I know—story of my life, right?) So when the waitress opened a bottle of wine for the table, and my pals elected to partake (“We wouldn’t want to waste it,” Ian said), I went along. I know drinking before hard exercise is absurd (even a small amount that wouldn’t affect motor skills), but I figured what the hell, I’m eating all this great bread anyway, it’ll sop it up. I was a couple sips in when we noticed waitresses rushing around removing wine bottles from the tables. “A mistake was made,” one explained to us, though she stopped short of removing our bottle since we’d started in on it. I guess the wine was only for the staff, not the riders. Oops.

When dessert arrived—crème brûlée—the others turned it down, not wanting to still be digesting as we tackled the Montée d’Avoriaz. I said screw it—I paid for this dessert, and it’s gonna be tasty. I’d muddle through the ride somehow, I figured.

Col des Égos

I knew this first ride would bring out the egos. There were two week-long tours running simultaneously, with the same staff and hotels, but different routes. The Epic one I signed up for has longer days and more climbs than the Trans group would do. Then, within each tour there was an A group and a B group. (My old scoutmaster would have called them “the kickass group and the pick-ass group,” bless his twisted, deeply suspect heart.) I was surprised that fully 15 of the Epic riders declared themselves Group A. Some of these guys looked a little old to me. Sure, they were fit and trim, but come on … it won’t be long before they’ll be offered wheelchairs at airports. I’d assumed going into this tour that I’d be bringing up the rear, hopefully not making everyone wait too long, but now I wasn’t so sure. One thing I did know: everyone was going to go super hard on this opening ride, to strut their stuff. It’s just how the male ego works. Except mine: I vowed (silently) to behave.

In the event, there was little temptation for me to hammer. My (albeit world class) stomach was working pretty hard on all that bread and crème brûlée, and surely the wine didn’t help. Meanwhile, I’d discovered that riding out of the saddle was tricky because my tires were, I now realized, severely underinflated. As I rocked the bike, there was a slight handling latency, the front tire buckling just a bit. It was like trying to sleep on a downy airbed, one of those weirdly thick ones, that when they invariably lose air start to sway a bit, like you’re onboard ship. In fact, my bike and I both felt a bit woozy in general. It was like some foggy, slow-motion dream, rider after rider rolling by me. This one guy passed me in a switchback and said, in a Mr. Rogers voice, “Coming through!” There was something so politely triumphant about it, it kind of rankled, especially since he was so damn old. He looked like he could be 40-something from the neck down, though looking at his face you’d think late sixties at least. But I wasn’t about to mount any resistance to his bold move. I just watched him pedal away and thought: enjoy yourself. Enjoy stomping me. Enjoy your $9K bike. I’ll be back here practicing my resignation skills, being the shit one once again.

As slow as I was going, continental drift was in my favor and I eventually made the summit. Here we are doing a photo op: the East Bay Velo Club 4, plus a couple of new pals, both (conveniently) named Michael. (I thought of not using any names here, but everyone is on Strava and if some serial killer wants to stalk wealthy cyclists he could easily do it without this blog.)

See the Michael on the right, in the neon? We chatted with him at lunch. He’s recently retired, does a fair number of these tours, and rides an old bike with a steel frame that can be disassembled like a sniper’s rifle. He was nipping at my heels all the way up the climb. I figured him for about 60 but came to learn he’s 71 years old, and still tough as nails.

I figured if I tried to descend back to the hotel with such squishy tires I’d probably roll one, so I found the van and asked the mechanic to take a look. Each tire had just 40 PSI! Boy did I feel like an idiot. Once I got those bad boys topped up at 80, my rented Felt felt like an actual road bike, no longer like a beach cruiser. The descent was glorious. Smooth, flow-y road, amazing scenery, an expert guide with perfect lines to follow. Comparing notes, Craig and I were just giddy.

Dinner

The format of this tour makes a lot of sense, for the ride and my report: if you’re sick of cycling, either because you’re knackered from a hard day in the saddle or from reading too much tedious text on the topic, suddenly there’s this great meal in front of you. We started with this:

France has clearly not (okay, has only recently) gotten the memo about cured meats being carcinogenic. (Then again, they’ve never taken the tobacco threat seriously either.) We ate cured meats roughly three times a day throughout the week, even K who is otherwise a vegetarian. It’s just so good, you never say no to all manner of charcuterie, ham, bacon, you name it. Perhaps it’s a regional specialty. That’s what I decided, anyway; I can’t be bothered to look it up now.

Here is the entrée, some kind of amazing roast pork. I must confess I’ll probably never feel perfectly natural sitting at a table and having something like this set in front of me. That’s just not how I was raised. Don’t get me wrong, my mom is an amazing cook, but our pantry always had different stuff. When was a kid, Mom would use oatmeal to stretch a pound of ground turkey to make burgers for six. Once my patty squirted out of the back of the bun and I didn’t even notice. The only beef we ever got was liver because serving it was considered a mother’s duty back in those days. We got pretty cool cheeses from some co-op, but they were all the melting, cooking kind—not like these soft French ones. Hell, we grew up drinking powdered milk. So when I had this incredible roast pork dish on my plate there was a small part of me that feared someone would suddenly rush out from the kitchen and say, “Stop! A mistake has been made! You must give that back!”

Here’s the dessert, a little cake doodad, possibly flourless, with flawless ice cream. Since we’re on the topic, here is my recipe for flourless chocolate cake.

Breakfast

Wait, you’re thinking: this report has so far delivered only 16 miles of actual cycling action, but at least 6,000 calories of food lore, and now you’re gonna talk about breakfast? Seriously?

Well, yeah. This is kind of what travel is for. As different as the Alps are from the Sierra Nevadas and the Rockies (and don’t worry, I will eventually get into these differences), the French terrain is far more similar to the American than their food is to ours. I can only imagine that a European traveler to the U.S. would be endlessly appalled by the garbage we serve up. A grocery store baguette? Forget it, it’d go straight into the garbage. And a croissant? Spongy, insipid, indestructible, ageless. Eat an American motel breakfast pastry and you’ll end up with a gross film on the roof of your mouth. And don’t you dare eat scrambled eggs from a steam tray … they’ll be soggy or dried-out or somehow both, and won’t taste a thing like an egg, which they’re not—they’re surely poured from a carton. That’s the US hospitality industry for you. Meanwhile, I stayed at an airport Holiday Inn Express in Geneva and had an entirely serviceable continental breakfast. Sure, the croissant wasn’t brilliant, but on the balance was quite worth eating. So I’m going to spend some time on the food in these posts.

This is the croissant I had at my first official tour hotel breakfast. Light, airy, buttery, and flaky enough to make a mess on my plate.

Bread in general can be intolerable in the U.S. Anything you’d get with a so-called continental breakfast in most places would just make you want to cry. Sure, we have great one-off bakeries in the Bay Area, but the quality control if you randomly toured the country would be abysmal. In contrast, you really can’t go wrong in Europe, in my experience. I fearlessly had a pre-made sandwich at the Geneva airport and another at the Zurich airport, both on rather good bread. And it wasn’t just the bread: one of these sandwiches was a Caprese. Can you imagine ordering a Caprese sandwich at an airport in America? The tomatoes would be pink and mushy, the bread like cardboard, the basil flavorless, the fresh Mozzarella soggy and limp. You’d probably start crying. I certainly would.

On the flip side, my pals and I observed something really bizarre at every French hotel we ate at: as good as the bread was, there was never any butter. WTF? Doesn’t everybody love good butter for their great bread? (Exception: I did find one little block of Président brand butter at one breakfast, which I’d thought was cheese. Maybe the hotel did, too.) Even olive oil was never offered, and if the bread hadn’t been so good we’d surely have complained (I mean, other than to each other). At our last dinner there was one little oil/vinegar dispenser going around, but literally just one, and the absolutely world class waitstaff seemed really flummoxed: perhaps not by not having more of these dispensers, but by this one having shown up out of nowhere seeding discontent at neighboring tables.

Meanwhile, I cannot understand the French hotel industry’s inability to cater to Americans’ coffee tastes. Every coffee shop in America has some version of a basic house coffee. Isn’t Starbucks showcasing this globally now? Plus, the archetypal large mug of coffee is featured in countless Hollywood movies that are exported around the world. The concept is not complicated: we drink a dark brown beverage, brewed from coffee beans, in quantities of 12 to 24 ounces, and we call it, simply, “coffee.” It is not cappuccino or espresso or any other kid-size micro-beverage that you drink like it’s a shot of booze. I thought we had this coffee mismatch solved after World War II when Europeans saw our American soldiers watering down their dinky coffee-bean-freebasing drinks and took to calling this larger beverage an Americano, but nobody in the Rhône-Alpes region seems to have heard of this. The machines have all these buttons with weird names like “Café Long” which doesn’t mean anything in any language, or “Café Noisette” which sounds like it would be “noisy” but actually literally translates “hazelnut” which the ensuing beverage did not have the slightest flavor of. Over the course of the trip I tried six or eight different fancy digital coffee machines and a few humans and never did get a normal cup of coffee, not even an Americano. Most of what I drank tasted mainly like foamed milk and at no point did I manage to get the simple black coffee I was looking for. It’s like some vast conspiracy to deliberately fail to understand this simple concept of what non-fussy, non-micro, basic-ground-coffee-bean-based beverages are supposed to be. I never even saw a normal mug, except this one in my hotel room (the purpose of which was not clear, but which I liked due to the cyclist pattern):

To be continued…

Well, I see I’ve pretty much run out of room here, or more to the point you’ve run out of patience. Tune in next time when I promise to get as far as the Col de Joux Plane, the Col de la Columbière, the Col de Croix Fry, and surely another meal or two.

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From the Archives - The Bars: a Family Saga

Introduction

This tale, from my archives, concerns an emotional tug-of-war between my father and me which ended up putting my innocent 15-year-old nephew John in harm’s way. Here are John and his father looking none too pleased about it.

If you love bike lore, there’s plenty here to dive into. If you don’t, but enjoy a good tale of intergenerational family turmoil and/or have a yen for Schadenfreude, read on. If you don’t care about bikes or families, click here.

The Bars – September 2008

The family saga begins with this email from my brother:

From: Bryan Albert

Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 1:57 AM

To: Dana Albert, Geoff Albert, Peter S, Mom, Joanne J

Subject: RSVP

Guys,

Guess what? I'm going to tell you about our big RSVP ride, the Ride from Seattle to Vancouver and Party. [Much detail about the route, etc. omitted here; they did “only” the first day, a 108-mile trek from Seattle to Bellingham.] The ride was great—the weather was awesome, even getting good and hot at some points. [More detail omitted here, including details of sprinting to all the city limit signs, which is SOP for all our family rides throughout time.]

The ride was not without incident, however. Sometime before noon, while climbing up a small hill, John announced that there was something wrong with his bike and that we ought to pull over. To my horror, he demonstrated that his handlebar had cracked and was about to break off altogether! All those sprints flashed before my eyes, and I was very grateful that it decided to break on a climb and not some high-speed sprint. Can you imagine? That would be a crash for sure! So what’s up with that—handlebars aren’t supposed to break, are they? These weren’t even the drilled bars [i.e., holes we drilled so the brake cables could run inside … very cool but widely considered a foolish practice for reasons of safety].

Anyway, it was clear that we wouldn’t get far before the whole right side of the bar would fall off and his buzz would be seriously shackled. He’d have to ride along holding the bar up so that it didn’t get stuck in his wheel or something. He’d probably end up throwing his back into a spasm, and he’d never ride again. So we arranged with Jean [Bryan’s wife] to stop at the next town and effect repairs. The whole way there I was contemplating what might work... Anyway we hit the thrift store first, then the hardware store. I eyed a used golf club at the thrift store that I might break into splints. John might have liked that, with the golfing theme and all—I could have even left the club end of it hanging off like a medallion or something. But I finally settled on a hickory hammer handle, which I lashed to the handlebar with a webbing strap. It wasn’t pretty, and John didn’t hammer any of the remaining sprints (though he did power to victory on one sprint from in the saddle, having gotten a good jump on me), but it did get him home without incident. So that was cool.

[The rest of the story is my response to his email, which I wrote with an eye to one day reaching a far more general audience, as I’m now doing.]

On Sep 12, 2008, at 5:46 PM, Dana Albert wrote:

Bry,

What a great story! What a great time you guys had. The misadventures make the experience that much more memorable. Think of how the Donner party would have sunk into obscurity had everything gone smoothly. (Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit here.)

That’s crazy about John’s handlebar. I have to admit I feel some guilt about that handlebar cracking, since I put those bars on the bike for John. I was actually relieved to look at the photos and see that it was the starboard side of the bars that broke. Why, you ask? The fact is, those bars were bent when I put them on there (though on the port side), and I knew it. (You can see it in the photo in fact.)

That bike, when I bought it from my teammate, sported these Scott Drop In bars, which instead of stopping where dropped handlebars normally do, have longer ends that turn in 90 degrees and provide a second platform for the rider to put his hands on. When I started working at Square Wheel in 1990, those Drop In bars were getting a lot of attention as Greg LeMond had just won the Tour de France with them. The shop owner predicted I’d purchase a set within two weeks. I said, “Oh yeah? I’ll bet I won’t.” I didn’t, and within the year nobody else was using them anymore either. [In fact they’ve been called the #1 all-time worst piece of road tech by BikeRadar magazine.]

So when I got that bike I had to come up with some different bars for John. No nephew of mine is going to go around with those ridiculous Scott Drop Ins. Fortunately, I had two pairs of Cinelli bars, either of which would work with the bike’s stem. (They wouldn’t work with the more modern stems of my current fleet so they were just malingering in my old gear stash.) One pair of these bars was old and slightly bent. Another pair was newer and not bent. At this point you’re guessing, “Oh, so Dana simply gave John the old bent pair because children don’t deserve the best.”

Logical though this guess might be, it simply wasn’t the case. As a matter of fact, I’d been riding the old bent bars on my main road bike for years, and had been using the newer pair on my rain [i.e., backup] bike. The reason is, when I ordered the new bars, intending to put them on my main bike and exile the bent bars to the rain bike when I was first building it up, I had no idea Cinelli had lost its mind and ruined the design of their Model 66 Campione del Mundo handlebars. It is difficult to describe the folly of this move. The best I can do is to compare it to Coke’s decision, in the late eighties, to change its formula. 

If you ask any road cyclist worth his salt, he’ll tell you (albeit in his own words) that for at least twenty years, the Cinelli model 66 was the platonic ideal of handlebar, the thing that they really just got absolutely right. If ever there was a time to leave well enough alone, to not touch a thing, this was it. Studies have shown that a cyclist casting his eyes upon a bike that had the original 66 bars on it would experience a measurable feeling of good will, of soothing reassurance in our unstable world. By “measurable” I mean that you could monitor this guy’s blood pressure and his pulse as he gazed at the bars, and both would go down. Brain scans would show the same changes that you’d expect to see when somebody looks upon a sleeping cat.

But Cinelli couldn’t leave well enough alone, so in the late ‘80s they came out with the Perfections. The Perfections were really similar to the original 66s, except that they had slightly longer reach. And you know what? They really were slightly better! This was the equivalent of an absurd risk that managed to pay off, in a very minor way. (Kind of like Tiger Woods completely retooling his golf swing even though he was already the best golfer in the world—everybody thought he was crazy, but he came back very slightly better.) Now, I never got the opportunity to own a pair of Perfections, because they weren’t on the market very long for some reason that nobody has ever explained. But no problem, I thought. The regular 66s were good enough for Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault, after all. I’d just buy another pair of them. 

[Here are a couple of photos of the Cinelli 66 bars. The first might actually be the Perfections. The second are on Bryan’s Team Miyata ... he still has two of these bikes, both with 66 bars!]

I got the new model 66 bars mail-order, and when they arrived I was horrified to discover that Cinelli had changed the bars yet again, and this time they were a disaster. Perhaps in response to the more modern brake levers, which have longer hoods, Cinelli had shorted the reach on their bars, significantly. The result was a handlebar that looked like the ones that came on department store ten-speeds (back before mountain bikes, when there was such a thing as a department store ten-speed). What was Cinelli thinking? It would be like if for the next James Bond movie, the director decided instead of Daniel Craig it would star Vanilla Ice. So these new Cinellis were totally wrong for my flagship bike, and I continued to use the old bent ones.

 This brings us to the sad tale of how those older bars got bent. Now, I can’t exactly remember what year this was, but I’m thinking 2001 or 2002. Erin and I were living in Albany [CA]. Dad was out visiting, and I decided to take him on a bike ride. Nothing really hard or anything, of course, but just a little cruise through the Berkeley campus, maybe up Old Tunnel road. I’d let him ride my road bike since it’s lighter and more efficient and what he’s used to, and I’d take my slower, heavier mountain bike. It seemed like a fine plan.

Of course, I had to take certain precautions. The last time I’d ridden with Dad was in ‘87 or ‘88, in San Luis Obispo, when Geoff and I loaned Dad the Twelve. The Twelve was our spare bike. Having a spare bike was, for people in our tax bracket, the height of decadence. It was a Miyata 912, which was decent (but not pro quality) road bike. We bought it solely for the use of our guests, and even had a quick-release seat binder bolt for quick adjustments. It had these low-profile Ultegra pedals, with toe clips. They were a bit tricky to get your foot into, and—worrying about Dad’s dress sneakers not fitting well—we loaned him a pair of cycling shoes. What a mistake. I have this vivid memory of him flailing to get his foot in, the pedal spinning around and around, the bike lurching this way and that. I don’t think he crashed, but it was scary to watch, and I think he was embarrassed. So when loaning him my road bike this time, in Berkeley, I took my clipless pedals off and put on these big mountain bike pedals with spacious, roomy toe clips that would easily accommodate even the bulkiest shoe.

Well, it wasn’t enough. Riding along Martin Luther King Jr. Way toward a stoplight, Dad was suddenly unable to get his foot out of the pedal fast enough. I’m not sure how this happened, because he had used toe clips on his own bike for decades and should have been an expert with them. Maybe it’s just some kind of jinx. Anyway, he wasn’t going fast and thus wasn’t hurt, but he ripped my bar tape all up, scratched my brake lever, and, yes, bent my bars.

Now, at this point I wasn’t angry or irritated with him. Nonplussed, sure, but mostly concerned. But he was okay, and we rode home. Now, it did cross my mind that a person in his position might say, “Gosh, Dana, I’m sorry I crashed your three thousand dollar racing bike and messed it up.” Then I could graciously say, “Oh, don’t even worry about it, I’m just relieved you’re not hurt.” But this didn’t happen. Instead, the minute we got home he went out to his car and said, “Is there a Sears around here?” I asked why, and he said that he ripped his trousers in the crash and had to replace them. And indeed, they had a little rip. But his eagerness to drop everything and head over to Sears at that very moment to replace his pants seemed fishy to me. I mean, what’s the rush? Didn’t he pack any other pants? Or was this a little hint that, since it was my bike that crashed him, I should pay for his pants? And moreover, who buys pants at fricking Sears?

I wasn’t about to offer to buy him a new pair of damn pants. Was this my fault, for failing to recognize that a guy who has ridden a ten-speed bicycle with toe clips since before I was born should not be trusted to ride my bike? Or should I have warned him, as we approached the intersection, that he should start working on getting his foot out well in advance just in case he encountered difficulty? Besides, it’s bad enough when your dad buys his pants at Sears—I’ll be damned if my money is going to pay for them.

There was this awkward silence. He seemed really ticked. So I said, “You know, I have some pants I can give you that look exactly like those ones.” And it was true. Many months earlier I’d been at Ross Dress for Less and found some pants called Bugle Boy Basics that don’t have to be ironed. It was an impulse buy because they were like $8, but afterward I had some misgivings—I mean, what kind of grown man wears pants called “Bugle Boy Basics”?—so I wasn’t loathe to part with them now. The funny thing is, they really did look absolutely identical to Dad’s Sears pants. Probably made by the same six-year-old Bangladeshi for the same four cents, I was thinking. But then Dad pointed out, “I see that they’ve done some treatment to these, probably with formaldehyde, to prevent wrinkles. These would probably give me an allergic reaction.” (I am not making any of this up.) I’m not sure what my expression was at this point, or whether or not Dad noticed it, but upon a moment’s reflection he said, “However, the hair on my legs may be bushy enough to protect my skin.” With that he put the Bugle Boy Basics in his car and I never saw them again. (The next day I noticed that he’d mended his Sears pants.)

So, every single time I rode my bike after that, and noting the bent-in bars, I thought of Dad crashing my bike, not apologizing, subtly suggesting that I pay for his pants, taking my Bugle Boy Basics, and not needing new pants after all—and got just a bit irritated. This irritation became compounded, because the memory of how these bars got bent became intertwined with another father/son episode that happened during that visit. I was pulling up to the curb in front of our house in the Volvo, Dad riding shotgun, and I got a little too close to this concrete outcropping in the curb. It juts way out because of some gnarly tree roots, and it had given us trouble before, and also since. The outcropping just barely reached the car, catching the trim on the lower part of the doors, and it just pushed the trim straight back along the car’s body, maybe a couple of feet. It made a horrible noise, like a robot shrieking.

I finished parking and leapt out of the car to examine the damage. It was not extensive: the trim wasn’t even all the way off the car. When I saw how little the damage was, I kind of laughed. Not a this-is-funny laugh, but a relieved “whaddya know!” kind of laugh. But Dad looked kind of pissed. He glared at the side of the car as I zipped the trim right back on there. He gave me a withering look, and I withered. And at this point I slipped unintentionally into one of those split-second fantasies, like the one about him apologizing about my bike. In this fantasy, he registered my withered look, realized he was being a bit harsh, and said, “Aw, don’t worry about it. Happens to the best of us.”

But of course this was a fool’s dream. What Dad did say, rather angrily I might add, was, “You are real lucky you didn’t do more damage.” That “real lucky” gets me. Dad is so punctilious with his grammar that “real” as an adverb must have been used for effect. Indeed, within his precise vernacular this almost works like a swear word. It’s the Harrison Albert version of, “You are good and god-damned lucky....”

(It’s noteworthy that when Dad crashed my bike and bent the bars, I did not say anything like “you are real lucky you didn’t do more damage.” It wouldn’t have occurred to me. And even if he had crashed my bike after the car incident, I couldn’t have said this because these kinds of indictments don’t run both ways in our relationship. He never hesitates to criticize me, but whenever I’m presented with his failings—which are deeper and darker—I always, always bite my tongue.)

I stood there, reeling, wondering why he was so upset. After all, it wasn’t his car, and besides, it wasn’t even damaged. So what was the problem? After much reflection, I’ve decided the problem was twofold. One, his son is so lame, such a lousy driver, that he failed to account for the broken curb and went and hit it. And two, this lousy son, due to a bottomless well of freakish good luck, doesn’t even have to pay for his failures. It’s like Dad was disappointed that this accident didn’t prove to be my comeuppance.

This notion Dad has of other people’s unfair good luck has precedent. He’s fond of saying, when noting somebody’s wealth, “He really landed with his nose in the fat.” No pulling up by bootstraps for him; no, just unearned good fortune. This would be laudable if he applied it in a general way to people of privilege like us, acknowledging that our own hard work in life comes on top of a mountain of circumstantial luck, like being born in America to a middle-class family in a good community with decent schools and plenty of opportunity. But Dad doesn’t seem to recognize his own overall good fortune, preferring to focus on specific incidents—the “knuckle-dragging cretin” boss who wouldn’t give him a promotion, the university dean who wouldn’t give him tenure because he (Dad) wouldn’t socially promote the dean’s son, the Navy ROTC overlord who interfered with his application, etc.—that show how he never got a fair shake.

And then there’s the case of the drinking glasses. When Dad visited Erin and me in our San Francisco apartment a few years before, he purchased a dozen drinking glasses from the restaurant supply store down the street, for something like ten bucks. Then, his visit became awkward right at the end, because I got in an argument with him about his stubborn refusal to buy health insurance. (He was about 60 at this point, still too young for Medicare.) He was arguing, amazingly enough, that he didn’t need insurance, that it wasn’t worth the money. It was rare for me to disagree with him, much less argue about anything, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. So he ended his visit abruptly, and in his haste to pack up and drive off he forgot his box of drinking glasses.

I was a bit chapped at having to mail them to him, especially since I’d have to pack them really carefully, which would be a lot of hassle. But then I had this great idea: I’d kill two birds with one stone by mailing the glasses without any padding whatsoever: just sitting in the box, nothing but that single layer of cardboard protecting them. And, the masterstroke: I wouldn’t insure them. He’d get this box of totally smashed glasses, I mean just fricking powder, and he’d call me up and say, “How could you not pack them carefully, with some padding?” I would shrug it off and wait for him to ask about insurance, which I could casually mention I didn’t bother with. When he erupted afresh about this, I could say, “Wait, let me get this straight. You won’t pay to insure your own health, but I should insure these cheap drinking glasses? I’m a little lost here. You valued those glasses more than you own life?!”

Alas, my plan backfired. He called me up and said, “A miracle has occurred. The glasses arrived intact.” This incident would have naturally struck him as more proof that some people are simply blessed, and can stroll blithely through the minefield of life without even looking where they’re going and be just fine, whereas other people like him were constantly beset with unfair challenges and setbacks.

And that’s how I came to associate the concrete outcropping of the curb with Dad’s preexisting sense that nothing I’ve achieved in my life is my own doing—that I’m one of those guys who fall with their nose in the fat. When Dad crashed my bike, it was one more example of the bad luck that follows him around. When I screwed up with the car, and when I foolishly mailed something with neither padding nor insurance, I got away with it because I’m just lucky. It’s no exaggeration to say that every time I drove up to my house and saw that broken curb, I thought of Dad’s stern words.

Some time after Dad’s visit to our Albany home, my wife Erin drove up to the curb and did exactly the same thing I had, only this time the curb outcropping zipped the trim all the way off the car, and it got a bit bent and I couldn’t get it back on there. I tried as hard as I could to keep a straight face as I said to her, “You are real lucky you didn’t do more damage.” By this time it had already become a running joke.

Erin knows there’s nothing she can do to prevent this curb/scorn association, but when I mentioned at one point that every time I rode my bike I thought of the crash/pants episode, she said, “Dana, this is obviously bothering you, why don’t you just ditch those bars and get some that won’t bum you out every time you look at them?!” She had a point. So I finally swapped out the old bent bars for the new, inferior ones. Sure, the curve of the new bars wasn’t as elegant, but that’s just a bike industry problem … it doesn’t bring home bad blood, doesn’t cause me to hear “you are real lucky” or “a miracle has occurred.” And when it came time to get John’s bike ready, I naturally gave him the better bars, with the original design—the ones I’d have wanted if they didn’t make me think of Dad’s reproach. After all, John wouldn’t have any negative associations with these bars, and he deserved the proper, perfect Cinelli bend.

So, now I’ll be sending you the newer Cinelli bars to get John’s bike running again.  Of course the young lad will have to make do with the inferior curvature, like the bars on a damn Huffy, but shoot, these young whippersnappers don’t know a proper handlebar bend from Shinola. I wonder if John had even realized that the left side of those original bars was bent in. Anyway, I’m so glad he noticed that the right side had cracked, before catastrophic failure. You might say that he is real lucky....

Love,

Dana

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