Rants ahoy!

Got some rants that have been building up…

Don’t wear team kit.

The pros wear advertising because they’re paid to. Unless you’re being paid to wear it, wearing team kit is tacky and arrogant. There’s nothing I enjoy more than dropping someone riding a team issue bike in full pro kit. Cycling isn’t about hero worship; it’s about being a hero, and you can only become a hero through what you do, not what you wear.

Don’t wear jerseys for rides you didn’t do.

Same thing. You have no business wearing a RAAM jersey if you didn’t race across the country, and no business wearing a RAGBRAI jersey if you bought it secondhand from someone who actually did the ride. And this rule also applies to wearing jerseys for a ride you did only in prior or subsequent years. I wouldn’t dare wear a 1998 PMC jersey when I only rode my first one in 2001.

Stop whining and ride.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told “I’d like to go on a bike ride with you sometime, but you’d be bored because I can’t keep up with you.” This is what is commonly known as horseshit. If you were given a chance to go jogging with Joan Benoit, would you tell her “I can’t run with you because I can’t do a whole marathon”? Do you really think athletes only have two speeds: off and 100 percent? Get over it. The only thing you’re doing is proving your own self-consciousness and insecurity.

2007: Closing another volume

The 2006-07 cycling year has come to a close, and most of the news is bad.

Looking back, my knees bothered me all year, even keeping me off the bike for three weeks in June and July. Although I had a great ride during this year's PMC, I was off the bike for another three weeks in August, getting my rear wheel replaced (under warranty) after it tried to self-destruct during the ride.

The prior year, I accumulated a record 4,600 miles in the saddle, thanks in part to riding the Boston Brevet Series 200k and the 16-mile commute out to Woburn. At the end of the year, I gave myself a big offseason rest, and took a job with a mere 2-mile commute. Then I started training late, and I couldn’t ride any brevets this year.

All that adds up to a lot less mileage this year. In fact, this year I rode just 2,300 miles. That’s exactly half what I rode in 2005-06, and only 200 miles short of being my lowest mileage total since I started cycling seriously back in 2000.

Not that the news is all bad. I had a fabulous early-season ride through Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas on a rented Cannondale Synapse, and the weather for the PMC ride was—yet again, and despite my pessimism— absolutely perfect. I also got a bunch of interesting new equipment this year: two new LED headlights, Slipstreamz noise reducers, a new pocket digital camera for use on the bike, insulated water bottles, Specialized Armadillo tires, and of course the brandy new Ultegra rear wheel.

But the biggest news of the year has to be my fundraising. The previous year I set a new record, raising $6,360; this year I blew that record out of the water, raising an absolutely unbelievable $10,190 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. So I’ve raised as much in the past two years as I did in the previous five years combined, and that brings my total fundraising over seven years to $32,615. I’m very proud to be able to have that kind of impact on the fight against cancer, and I owe more thanks than I can possibly express to all of this year’s record six dozen sponsors.

So what are next year’s goals? I dunno. I think the the first order of business is to figure out what’s up with my knees. After that, repeat the PMC, and maybe I’ll think about the 200k and 300k brevets. I might even do the Buddhist Bicycle Pilgrimage, if circumstances allow. But really, with the knees giving me trouble, I have no idea even what I’m capable of, so no firm predictions this year, other than I’ll be back for my eighth Pan-Mass Challenge, which I’m very much looking forward to!

Protocol in a Port-of-Call

Bicycling has certain protocols. One of them is that you don’t wear team kit unless you are being paid to weat it, or can at least hammer faster than anyone else in the vicinity. Anything less would be incredbily gauche. Picture a 275-pound flab-gator tooling around, sweating profusely at 13 mph on the flat, piloting a replica of Lance’s bike, wearing Lance’s team jersey. Tack-ay. But sadly far too common.

That goes eightfold for the yellow jersey: the symbol of leadership in the Tour de France. Any cyclist who can wear the yellow jersey for real, that is the best day of his entire life, without exception. People devote their entire professional lives to earning that right. Whole squads of people devote their lives just to have the opportunity to indirectly help someone else earn that right. In the past century, only 261 people have earned the right to wear a yellow jersey.

So you can imagine how massive a faux pas it is for a weekend hacker to put on a replica yellow jersey. It’s like showing off your (replica) Nobel Prize for Literature when you’re not even professionally published. It’s like proudly displaying your “Olympic Gold” at work, when in reality the closest you’ve come to the Olympics was spending one Saturday laughing when Olympic curling was on television a few years back.

Wearing a replica maillot jaune is the single biggest act of hubris a cyclist can conceive of.

So you can see where this is going. Recently some blithering idiot showed up for our group ride in a replica Tour de France leader’s jersey. A woman. Wearing sneakers, rather than cycling shoes. Who felt the ideal accessory for the maillot jaune was a big ole fanny pack. On a cheap department store flat-bar bike. With reflectors and a kick-stand, for Christ’s sake!!!

Now sure, you can mark all that down to ignorance, but that’s some absolutely amazingly superlative kind of ignorance, unabashedly paraded out in public in a way that just demanded to be noticed. That’s much worse than nine-months-pregnant-in-your-wedding-dress level stuff.

Folks, don’t do stuff like that. Please! You’ll get spat out the back of the ride like a wad of stale chaw, and be left behind, alone on the open road but for the echoing laughter your offensive hubris earned.