Whiter Shade

Sometimes, when I'm out riding and should be thinking hard about serious work or domestic-related matters, I find my mind wandering to the more esoteric reaches of bike culture semiotics.

Today was a case in point. What, I wondered, lies behind the increasing and mysterious popularity of white Assos kit? 

Not as trivial a subject as you might think. Our choice of clothing, how we present ourselves to others, is never insignificant.

Before the Industrial Revolution, pale skin was a clear indicator of wealth or breeding. Relatively simple to decode, white hands and face said:

"I do not have to toil all day in fields under a boiling sun, or stoke fires in someone else's house."    Fine clothes in delicate fabrics reinforced the message, but a milk-like complexion was the real giveaway.

Things changed of course, first with the arrival of factories and offices which took many of the working classes inside to labour; and later when the rich discovered summers on the Cote D'Azur and private yachts.  A perfect tan announced that its owner was a person of leisure, an international jet-setter.

Package tours and St Tropez spray booths have disrupted that particular piece of symbolism, but the underlying principles still apply.

When I started cycling, shorts were black.  The occasional coloured side-panel was tolerated but anything more guaranteed you the role of club laughing stock.  I once turned up to a Sunday run wearing red Giordana tights (our jerseys were red and white) and the cruel Rudolf Nureyev jibes and Santa jokes continued for months. 

The drawbacks of white -- or very pale -- cycling clothes are well known: they make you look fat and emphasise your privates.  

Plus, on the simplest level -- you need somewhere to wipe your hands.  When your chain comes off or you need to change a tyre,  a pair of black shorts are very effective hand cleaners.

So the not-so hidden message of white Assos (and its marginally cheaper cousin white Castelli)?  

"My bike is very expensive and very new.  In the unlikely event of anything going wrong, I shall simply call a man to fix it.  I have no intention of riding in the rain or getting a puncture.  And anyway,  I can afford to buy lots more new shorts at £90 a pop if these ones get dirty."

So now you know.  Glad to be of service. 

Dry Season

I'm staying off the beer, in a half-hearted attempt to get my ailing body into some sort of shape.  Still allowing myself the odd glass of wine with food.  

There's no sense losing all proportion over this; and anyway, I've been heartened by reading "Sex Lies and Handlebar Tape",  Paul Howard's intriguing biography of five-times Tour winner Jacques Anquetil.

Anquetil's colourful private life is now well-known, but is probably worth repeating.  In as short a summary as I can manage:

• He had an affair with his Doctor's wife, setting up home with her and her two young children.
• When she proved unable to bear him a child of his own, he had one with her daughter -- who was by now a teenager. 
• He then lived with the two women and his new child in an unorthodox (no wonder the French have a word for it) menage a trois.
• When this arrangement failed, he attempted to make his two former lovers jealous by having an affair with his stepson's wife, a relationship that continued until his death.

Chapeau, Maitre Jacques.  Sunday lunch at the Anquetil house must have been a bit tense.

More interesting in some ways was his attitude to food and drink. 

Anquetil had a reputation as a bit of a gourmand, horrifying traditionalists with his taste for seafood and creamy sauce. Howard suggests that some of it was pretence, done to wind up the press and opponents, but Cycling magazine looked aghast at his diet when he came to Herne Hill:

"Before his races ... Jacques ate hors d'oeuvres (sausages, meat, salad), sweetbreads in cream sauce with creamed spinach, and fresh fruit, and he drank spa water and coffee."

Sweetbreads in cream sauce?  I was lucky to get some bread-and-butter pudding when I raced at Herne Hill.

And he was partial to a drop.  After an all-night drive to one team training camp he sat down to a breakfast of langoustines with mayonnaise and a carafe of white wine.  His famous quote about training is reproduced here in full.  Asked by a young fan how best to prepare for a big race, he recommended:

"A pheasant with chestnuts, a bottle of champagne and a woman"

In particular, I like the fact that he was very specific about the food -- less so about the rest.

The book if full of interesting, almost incidental, asides that reveal the lost colour of pro-racing.

Among my favourites so far: Apo Lazarides,  on a lone breakaway up the Col D'Izoard, stopped and waited for the peloton to catch up because he was frightened of being attacked by bears; Raphael Geminiani, angry at being left out of the French team for the Tour,  turned up at a stage start with a donkey named after the selector Marcel Bidot.

Truly, it is the races that have got smaller.

  

 

Back to the Old School

32 hole, Veloce hubs, DT stainless spokes, silver Open Pro rims. And, according to the rim tape, "personally approved by Monty Young".  It's a long time since Monty was a permanent presence at Condors in the Grays Inn Road -- sitting at his ancient jig and creating perfect wheels.  But his spirit is still there somewhere in the carbon and titanium high-money operation that his shop has become.

Monty made wheels for my father in 1949, and a set of track wheels for me that I raced for a season then rode into the ground over five years fixed-gear commuting on London roads.  

Never had to use a spoke key once.

Best of all, these new ones were on special offer and less than the cost of a second-hand pair I'd been eyeing up on e-Bay

They'll be on the bike tonight and on the road tomorrow.

 

 

Pain and Humiliation

At least once a week, I drive to a nondescript house in suburban South London, take off my clothes and pay an attractive young woman to inflict pain and humiliation on me.

In case you think this is some Max Mosely-style middle-aged sordidness, I should point out that these are visits to my osteopath -- a whippet-thin, sub-3.30 marathon runner with astonishingly strong hands and an ability to find the part which hurts the most and concentrate all her efforts on it, which suggests the CIA may have missed a trick by not recruiting her for Guantanamo duty.

I'm being treated for what I claim is a ski-ing injury to my shoulder, and what she says is the inevitable result of 20 years of poor posture, insufficient stretching and general laziness.  Did I mention the humiliation?

I've written before about how  pro-cyclists exist on the fine line dividing superfit athletes and physical wrecks.  Even rank amateurs like me suffer for our sport -- overdeveloped calves and thighs, poor core strength and useless upper bodies.

There's an old bloke I sometimes see out on the road -- well into his seventies -- who has an impressive on-bike position over the drop bars of his modern carbon machine.  Unfortunately, he maintains almost exactly the same position -- hunched forward, flat back and crouched legs-- when he gets off and walks into the cafe.  Clearly his spine gave up on standing straight a few years ago.  I have seen my future.

My own personal Ole Kaare Foli has so far not banned me from riding my bike. But she has insisted that I take regular breaks while riding to perform swivelling shoulder movements and dangle my right-arm loosely at my side like a chimp.

So if you see someone riding a red Casati round Richmond Park looking like Tarzan's Cheetah, give me a break. I need all the support I can get.

Wheel worries

You remember that scene in Belleville Rendezvous when Grandma balances a racing wheel at the dinner table with the aid of a tuning fork and a scale model of the Eiffel Tower? 

What do you mean, no? Go out and hire/buy it at once and refresh your memory.

Anyway, I've spent the last couple of days just like Mme Souza -- trying to get an annoying twitch out of my front Aksium.  Modern factory wheels aren't quite as easy to tweak as traditional hoops, and it's been a thankless task.

And I'm starting to think that a set of old school 36-holers might be the ticket for Roubaix.  I know that Aksiums - hardly the most glamourous wheelset but solid -- are supposed to be robust, but there's something unnerving to me about so few spokes. 

Ridiculous, I know -- I'd be better off losing a few pounds off my own bulky frame and therefore putting less stress on the bike, but I feel an e-Bay bargain hunt coming on.

Bombproof 10 speed Campags on Open Pros anyone?

I've been bad...

I've been rubbish, actually.  At keeping up my training and this blog.  When Brian Washingmachinepost kindly enquired how things were going, I realised that my e-mail reply wasn't much more than a list of excuses and moans.

I've moved house.  Which has brought with it untold chaos, deep in cardboard boxes and paint-tins.  Just finding the basics of life (clean cycling kit for instance) can take hours.  Through a mixture of advanced planning and straightforward awkwardness -- my bike tools were kept out of the hands of the removals men and travelled with me in the car.  However, our Hungarian decorator has taken to prising open paint-tins with my Campag cone-spanners.   

Another bizarre result of moving is that -- for the first time in 20 years -- I've stopped reading The Comic.  It used to be delivered  every Thursday along with the paper,  but no newsagents in our new part of South London actually deliver to your door. Too dangerous, probably.  So far, I'm not missing it.

I'm trying to launch not one, but two new businesses:

www.parkinsonmedia.co.uk

www.thinkagainmedia.co.uk

...which is proving to be fascinating and exciting but massively time-consuming.

I've just been on holiday.  The annual family ski-trip to one of my favourite parts of the world -- Northern Sweden.  I'm not sure it's possible to become bored with powder snow, stunning mountain scenery and beautiful blonde women --- but if it could happen anywhere, Sweden would be the place.  While Boonen was sprinting for victory at the Roubaix velodrome, I was dodging moose on the E6 back to the airport.

And I've picked up an injury -- an inflamed shoulder.  According to my osteopath, a classic cyclist's problem -- decades of hunching over dropped bars have left my upper body so tight that a minor ski-ing knock has refused to heal -- there's almost no room in the joint for the muscles to recover.  Nothing that a few sessions of expensive and painful bone-crunching won't fix.

And finally -- I forgot just how much I relied on commuting to keep my fitness up -- fifteen miles most days on fixed at least kept things ticking over.  Now I'm working from home, it seems a real drag to have to get my kit on and get out on the road.

But that's enough whingeing.  This afternoon, I put my To Do list to one side, stepped over the cardboard boxes and went for a ride.

And it felt very good.  Watch out, Tom -- I'm back.

The bags are coming

You know there's a major campaign right now against plastic bags? Well they're fighting back. Twice in one day I was attacked by a plastic bag while out cycling. Not the same plastic bag, obviously -- that would be too Doctor Who for words.

Different location, different times, different bikes. But same menace.

The first came as I rode my wife's commuting bike past a builder's skip and a five-yard tendril of bubble-wrap came looping out and tried to strangle me. I batted it off and it attempted to wrap itself round the front wheel instead. My wife's machine -- a bit like a Dutch-bike in design -- shrugged it off but it was a nasty moment.

Then, heading back from a run to Richmond Park, I spotted a huge, blue plastic bag in the middle of the road. It didn't move until I was about six feet from it, then it suddenly leaped across the road and enveloped me and my bike. In the space it took me to stop, it had become entangled in the rear wheel, the cassette, the right hand quick-release, the back brakes, the chainring and the left-hand pedal.

Much to the amusement of a nearby bus queue, it took me ten minutes to remove the blue monstrosity -- at one point I had to take off the back wheel and hang the rest of the bike on the fence while I pulled and struggled.

Two attacks in one day. Coincidence? I think not.