From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XVIII

Introduction

This is the eighteenth and final installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. (No, it’s not really the final one, so far as I know. Just seeing if you’re awake.) Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, and Volume XVII is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another, and can be read in order of importance, in First World Order, in the order in which they were received, in any other order you like, and/or not at all. (Note: I do not recommend that last option.)

What are Bits & Bobs, in the context of this blog? They’re like the bits of film left on the cutting room floor after a movie is made. Except you know what? That’s a nice metaphor but completely false. These are not leftovers but pertinent snippets from letters I wrote people. Some of the letters were actually printed letters, on paper, couriered by the post office. Others were of course emails. I only selected stuff that I figured any audience might find entertaining, especially nuns. Obviously snippets like “my flight gets in at 7:46 p.m.” would be excluded. (“Especially nuns?” No, I don’t know why I put that.)

Pay attention to the dates. These bits and bobs sprawl all over the place—or, to be more accurate, all over the time.

March 8, 1990

You know, there’s actually a very good reason for procrastinating on a [school] paper. The writing process is very complex, and very personal. What you write has everything to do with your life experiences, and I figure the longer I wait before writing, the more life experiences I’ll have to go on. Something could happen to me right now, for example, which could change the next paragraph of this letter. So it is with my paper. It’s not due for several more days and I’m still young … I should wait.

November 6, 1992

I sprained my right index finger about three weeks ago. I was at the bike shop after-hours truing a wheel and a customer suddenly bobbed up in front of me. Somebody must have left the shop door unlocked, and the customer ignored the “EMPLOYEES ONLY” sign. Scared the crap out of me, and as I flinched my finger went right into the spinning wheel. A few days ago , since it wasn’t healing, I jerry‑rigged a cardboard splint for it, but that didn’t help. Finally I broke down and saw a doctor. Well, a nurse, anyway. She seemed more concerned than I had been, and gave me a real splint which I’m supposed to wear for six weeks! I talked her down to three weeks, but the splint is still a major hassle since it holds my most important finger in a basically straight position.

“But wait,” you’re saying, “this letter is typed—how do you do that?” Well, I have to be able to type, since I have at least fifty pages in papers due before the end of the semester. The splint really does concern me (or rather, it did, as I shall explain). It’s a two‑centimeter‑wide aluminum plate (padded out with foam rubber) which extends beyond my fingertip, and the aluminum is curved at the end. I tried a number of typing drills—the word “jumpy” being the best challenge—and the splint would indiscriminately strike the “u,” “h,” “m,” or “n” key when I was trying for the “j.” The word “jumpy” came out anything from “hynpu” to “nhmph” or even “hunmjhupuh.” What would I do? Without the ability to type, I’d have no papers to turn in, thus failed classes, no graduation, no job, NO FUTURE. Something had to be done. It was then that I remembered the motto of the Marine Corps: Semper Fidelis. No, wait, that wasn’t it. What came to mind was a little saying I’ve somehow attributed to the Marine Corps: “Adapt, Overcome, Improvise!”

I remembered a small worn‑out mechanical pencil eraser I’d replaced a few days earlier, and dug through the trash until I found it. It’s perfect: hard rubber, about seven or eight millimeters in diameter, and maybe five millimeters thick. I glued it to the end of the aluminum splint, and you can see the results. I’ve been typing at about ninety percent of my normal speed (that is to say, about seventy or seventy‑five words per minute). While it’s somewhat trickier than normal typing, I really don’t mind it. The only minor problem is that every so often—once in three hundred words or so, perhaps—the eraser stub gets caught in the intersection of four keys, and hangs up, trapping my splinted finger. This gives me that same queer, shocking sensation as being clotheslined or when the front wheel of your bike somehow locks up.

November 10, 1992

A question my friends like to ask me is, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” I tell them, “I’m gonna get a job,” and then the real interrogation begins: “What can you do with an English degree?” they ask. At least they realize now that it’s too late to persuade me to change my major … that had gotten old over the first couple years. So, recently I was talking to a friend I hadn’t seen in ages, and she asked the same thing. “I’ve got a job lined up,” I told her, “in a factory, deburring plastic parts on an assembly line. You see, when plastics are molded, there are flashings left over from the holes the liquid material was poured through, into the mold. It’s actually pretty tricky work, because if you slip with the file you can ruin the whole piece.” I was pleased to have pulled off the entire description with a straight face. “Wow!” she said enthusiastically. “That’s great!” Sheesh. She took it hook, line, and sinker. So you can see how little respect we English majors get.

September 27, 1996

My pasta is infested. I’d bought like twenty pounds of De Cecco from the restaurant supply store down the street for super cheap, not worrying about what looked like maybe minor water damage to some of the boxes. I store most of the pasta under my bed because our kitchen is so tiny. Well, a week or so ago I saw little flecks of something when I poured the pasta in the boiling water, but wrote it off as minute cardboard debris. I made up a big batch of corn goo pasta and as E— and I began to eat, we both noticed that there were little specks in our dinner. I isolated one and determined that it was reddish in color and seemed to have a protuberance at one end. I ran and grabbed my albeit cheesy microscope and had a closer look. As I had begun to fear, it seemed to be an insect: six legs and a snout at one end. I fished out another speck and examined it; same thing. My next question was, what kind of insect could it be? I racked my brain to try to think of what kind of insects have a history of invading foodstuffs. Then it came to me: a word commonly used to describe the meals endured by peasants in Russian novels: “weevily,” as in “his grey, weevily porridge.” So I looked up “weevil” in my CD-ROM dictionary and found this definition: “Any of numerous beetles, of the superfamily Curculionoidea, especially the snout beetle, that characteristically have a downward-curving snout and are destructive to nuts, roots, stems, fruits, and pasta.” (Yeah, I added that last bit.) A picture was even provided:

E— couldn’t bear to eat the pasta, but I was hungry and just kind of ate around the weevils. I regaled my boss at work with this anecdote and he told a story of some relative who was a POW in Japan and was fed weevily rice. At first the POW refused to eat it; then he just ate around the weevils; then, eventually, realizing he wasn’t getting enough protein, would not only eat the weevils but would push them back down into his rice when they tried to escape up the side of the bowl. Reassured by this story, I’m continuing to eat the weevily pasta, since I have so much of it. Last night I made perciatelli, which is tubular like macaroni but straight and long like spaghetti. It’s particularly weevily because the weevils crawl inside of it. But it’s fine … I can’t even taste them.

September 9, 2009

A few days ago [in preparation for the Everest Challenge bike race], I shaved my legs for the first time in three years. I think it does make the legs feel a bit cooler. Plus, my leg hair was literally blowing in the wind during the Mount Diablo descent two weekends ago, which I’d found distracting. I think shaving may offer a placebo effect as well. Couldn’t hurt (unless you nick yourself). Anyhow, congrats on biting the bullet and joining me for the race. You will not suffer alone, unless you drop me.

I don’t mind driving you home on Sunday night after the race. My un-doping regimen [only using caffeine before bike rides] means that one NoDoz can wake me from the dead, and/or keep me going on a late night drive after two days of cycling overkill. And I even have a valid driver license, because I braved the DMV today to get a temporary license extension since my real license is, for some reason, moving at the speed of a glacier through the bureaucracy.

September 22, 2009

I don’t have a time trial bike you can borrow, but if you’re really, actually doing a triathlon you’ll need an appropriately dorky jersey as well, ideally one made by (well, branded by) a former pro triathlete. And you’re in luck: I still have a Scott Tinley jersey you can borrow—see attached photos.

Notwithstanding the mesh side panels, I had to make the jersey even more Tri by cutting off the sleeves so I could wear it “properly” with arm warmers (per T—’s astute observation about this dubious sartorial choice triathletes make). The hole in the chest is from when I got shot during a triathlon by an angry biker on the sidelines. Either that or I crashed on the Golden Gate Bridge and slid on my heart rate monitor transmitter; I can’t remember which. I don’t have the matching shorts anymore, which T— (in his capacity as UCSB bike club president) forbade us to wear during races; I gave those to my wife’s would-be ex-stepmother-in-law, who wore them with pride and aplomb for years. Though not in triathlons.

October 2, 2009

[To my bike team members and some other friends.] It’s been a long bike racing season. If you’ll be too tired to cook on Saturday, October 17, but not too tired to eat and drink and hang out with other bike people, celebrate your fatigue with your spouse/other and/or kids by coming to the Albert house. If you’re too tired to move, have someone drag you here. If you’re too tired to eat or drink, we’ll put you in a barber’s chair and pour beer and salsa right down your throat.

What? Salsa? Not homemade pasta? That’s right. Because we’re too tired to cook this year, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mario’s La Fiesta, we’re bringing in Mexican food—lots of it. Beer and the raw materials for mixed drinks will also be provided. If you have m4d sk1llz at the blender, a spot in the kitchen is reserved for you. Bring your favorite beer if you like.

I realize now that I’ve used a vague acronym in the past: RSVP. While this can mean “Regional Senior Vice President,” it also stands for “Répondez S’il Vous Plaît.” And while this phrase literally translates to “respond if it pleases you,” it can also mean “respond, damn it.” It is in that sense I now say, “RSVP” so we’ll know how much food to order.

October 20, 2009

There’s a guy out front (visible through my office window) parking a horrible fake-wood-paneled Buick Roadmaster station wagon. He’s taking a very long time. He’s an old weird guy with plaid shorts and a jacket. Kind of a cross between L—’s husband and my dad. Now he’s done parking and is cleaning the interior meticulously. He has an unimpressive dog. He wants $6K for the car. People are mighty strange.

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Why Cyclists Shave Their Legs

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

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

Before we begin

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

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

What is a cyclist?

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

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

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

The survey

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

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

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

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

Flaws in the survey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do cyclists shave their legs?

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

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

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

Why do so many cyclists shave their legs?

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

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

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

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

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

Explanation and discussion

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

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

Because of our massages

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

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

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

Crash injury treatment

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

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

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

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

Fitting in

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

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

Showing the world you’re a cyclist

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aesthetics/vanity

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

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

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

Should cyclists shave their legs?

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

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

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

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