Just passing

32 quite hilly miles today, at a good fast pace.  My shoulder feels as though someone's  sticking a knife in-between the bony bits, but it's a big improvement on a month ago.

My riding companion and I took to discussing the general miserableness of some of the bikies you see out on the road -- with their head-down, grimacing unwillingness to acknowledge anyone else. 

Maynard Hershon has some theories on it, and Michael Hutchinson wrote recently in the Comic on a related theme -- what's the etiquette for passing a slower rider?  To talk or not to talk, to acknowledge or not?

To be honest, that's probably a bigger question for Hutch than me -- these days I sometimes struggle to pass old ladies on their Raleigh Shoppers (some of them have a vicious final sprint).

But there is one area of etiquette that does trouble me -- passing female riders.  Again, most women steam past me while I'm out on the road, but even I catch up and pass the occasional slower female cyclist.   

There seem to be three options, none of which is ideal:

• Put on a burst of speed and shoot past, reinforcing their belief that male cyclists are arrogant show-offs who have to display their testosterone-fuelled physical superiority at every opportunity
• Pass more slowly, offering pleasantries about the weather, the gradient of the road etc.,   probably raising the fear that this is a socially-inept attempt at a chat-up, and that if she responds she'll be stuck with you for at least the next ten miles
• Dither about, not passing her --  which suggests that you are simply a  pervert and are taking the opportunity to study her lycra-clad bottom

More complicated than you thought, isn't it?

I've taken to passing at a medium speed and offering a carefully-modulated, non-committal greeting, without making eye-contact.  

Most respond in kind -- some with a faint note of surprise in their voice,  although I'm not sure whether it's because they've been spoken to, or simply that this red-faced, wheezing fatty is somehow going slightly faster than them.

I'll continue my experiment and report back.  All other views welcome.

The Old Block

Nothing new about bike bling of course.  

Take this picture of a right 'flash harry' from the 1930's.  Apologies for the quality, but you might just be able to make out that it's a Bates BAR, with a chrome-plated frame and a new-fangled derailleur gear where a fixed hub would normally have been.

Wrist-length black leather gloves (were Rapha around even then?)  a white alpaca cycling jacket, white socks and black racing shoes are the icing on the two-wheeled cake.  

The dashing rider is my father.  Judging from the Anderson shelter in another photograph, they date from around 1940, when he would have been 18-years-old.   

A Bates BAR cost about 38 pounds in those days, when manual workers in Britain earned a little over 3 pounds a week.  My father was an apprentice in a bakery, so a bike like that was a significant investment.  

He put it to good use though -- here, he's on the way back from a massed-start race at Donnington Park to the family home in South London.  I'll repeat that -- he rode from South London to Donnington Park, took part in a race and rode home again.

And who could resist the cigar-shaped tubing, the wonky diadrant forks, the (5 pounds extra) chrome plating?

A passion for cycling and a love of style over financial common sense.  He passed a couple of things on to his son. 

 

When the man comes around

The incomparable NewYorkBikeSnob is fond of identifying signs and portents of what he believes is the forthcoming apocalypse -- according to him, at least one of the four horsemen will be riding a Bianchi track bike on the road.

I think I may have seen further evidence this morning of the imminent arrival of that fateful day.

I was trying to sneak in a quick training ride between rain showers when a pop and an unmistakable squidgy feeling announced a blown front tyre.  No disaster -- I had tools, a pump and a spare tube and, anyway, I'd just passed a branch of Evans, so I could get another spare tube for the onward journey. 

So I found myself in the bike shop, deserted except for one assistant, and another customer in front of me -- an expensively-dressed twenty-something whose Specialized race bike was propped up against the counter beside him. 

I'm not sure what model it was (to be honest, all Specialized and Trek's look the same to me) but there was a lot of carbon and it clearly wasn't entry-level.  He appeared to be buying a Specialized branded water bottle.

The conversation went -- verbatim -- like this:

Assistant:  "Is that everything, sir?"

Customer:  "Yes, thanks. Oh, do you do servicing here -- because I think my bike needs one?"

A: "Yes, of course"

C: "How much do you charge?"

A: "It's 55 pounds plus parts for a standard service"

C (clearly outraged): "What? You charge 55 quid for putting a bit of oil on the chain?"

A: "Er, no -- if you want us to oil your chain, we'll do that free, but the service means we adjust everything."

C (still outraged, staring at his bike): "But....it's a bike! What is there to adjust?"

A: "Er...gears, brakes, hubs, wheels - that sort of thing"

The customer stared at the assistant, then at me, tugged down the legs of his Assos shorts and departed without another word -- clearly convinced he was the victim of some massive leg-pull.

And during this conversation, I swear I heard the sound of ghostly horse-hooves heading through the Wandsworth one-way system.

As I was saying....

...before I was so rudely interrupted.  

Well, what a cock-up that was.  Regular readers of this blog, who I estimate number about three, will have noticed a distinct lack of posts.  And a distinct lack of news about my efforts in L'Enfer Du Nord. 

To cut a long and deeply depressing story short, I had to pull out with about a week to go when it became clear that the shoulder injury I picked up in the Alps in March was not going to heal any time soon, in fact it was getting worse.  

A week's, probably ill-advised, surfing in Devon was the final straw. 

There followed a long period of gloom, and not much on-bike time -- since even relatively short rides would result in numbness and an inability to perform relatively simple tasks, like eating or brushing my teeth.  

I didn't feel much like writing.

But, it's slowly getting better. To the extent that I've entered a longish (155k) sportive in September as a kick-start to my training for 2010

As to the blog - keep checking back.  I was spurred into posting by two things - first, Richard Lee's rather nice Cycling Art blog, which features a link to here -- shamefully showing no new contributions for two months.

And second, this fabulous picture from Stage 3 of the Tour.  Bernard "Le Blaireau" reminding a misguided protester why he was justly regarded as the hardest man in the peloton, and why nobody ever tried to take liberties on his watch.

Chapeau, Bernard -- a blow for old blokes everywhere.

Bella Figura pt.2

Bella Figura

With the Giro due to start in just a few days, this seems as good a time as any to say that I love Italy -- and the Italians.

Some of this affection was passed on by my Father -- a fellow cyclist and lifelong admirer of Italian food, wine and music.  He took me -- as a small boy -- to Naples, a city which -- twenty years earlier -- he and his RAF colleagues had enthusiastically attempted to flatten, then fallen in love with.

Ever since, I've shared his love of the country memorably characterised by Dave Stohler's Dad in Breaking Away as one where "the men shave their legs, but the women don't shave theirs."

I admire Italian design and their passion for the really important things in life -- like cycling.

Across thirty years of velo-obsessiveness, most of my bikes have been Italian, running on Italian hardware.  

But one thing which has begun to grate a little recently is the Italian insistence on their innate superiority in dress sense.   Certainly there was a time when Italians -- especially Italian men --were better dressed than their fellow Europeans, but I think that may have passed.

Filippo Pozzato is at it again in this month's Cycle Sport -- a man possessed  by the worst peloton hairdo since Laurent Brochard, and wearing a leather jacket he appears to have borrowed from a Neapolitan pimp -- lectures other riders on their clothing deficiencies.  Most of these alleged deficiencies -- he claims -- are because the riders in question are not Italian, and therefore not blessed with innate style.

His argument is weakened slightly by appearing in the same issue as Dave Millar - a man with a real sense of style, and no need to resort to iffy perms and giant designer logos.

And weakened further by these pictures -- admittedly of two of my favourite cyclists of all time. Separated by forty years, but united by a shared inability to look in the mirror before going out.

Not everything Italian is automatically stylish. Enjoy the Giro.

  

Maynard Hershon

I've been on this Interweb malarkey for a good few years now;  long enough that I was once a number not a name in the original Compuserve "community".  In fact,  it was while taking part in a very lo-tech Fantasy Tour De France on a Compuserve forum in the early nineties that I first realised there were people in this world even sadder than me.

But it wasn't until this week that I realised that the great Maynard Hershon had a blog.  Maynard's books "Half-Wheel Hell" and "Tales from the Bike Shop" are now out of print, although I suspect an E-Bay or Amazon search could turn up a copy,  but much of his excellent writing has been revised and reprinted in digital form.

I first came across Maynard in the mid-Eighties, when he wrote a column for the US cycle racing magazine Winning.  

This was long before Procycling and Cycle Sport, so UK bikies were stuck with the dull and parochial Comic and not much else.  During the Giro, Paolo Garbini would let us sniff his Gazetta at his shop in Great Pulteney Street, and I would buy L'Equipe during the Tour to look at the pictures and brush up my schoolboy French.

So Winning came as a breath of fresh air.   True, you had to wade through pages of unnecessary guff about obscure mid-Western crits, and its Grand Tour coverage was inevitably tilted towards LeMond or the 7-Eleven squad - but at least it had good colour pictures and intelligent writing.

And Maynard Hershon -- and his folksy, quirky monthly column.  Tales of old-school mechanics, mid-week races and life viewed through the uniquely twisted prism of a cycling obsessive.  Imagine Prairie Home Companion set in a dusty bike shop, with Garrison Keillor in a faded, celeste Bianchi jersey.  

Sometimes the stories were just too folksy, too Waltons for UK taste -- but most of the time he set a standard for thoughtful writing the rest of us can only aspire to.  Maynard was by all accounts a useful racer in his time as well, and an official motorbike rider at several US events, including a spell piloting one of the yellow Service Des Courses Mavic motos.

Bizarrely, a short-lived UK edition of Winning was published -- with a few time trial results stuck in among the stories of the Coors Classic and, unforgivably, Maynard's column was clumsily rewritten in a hopeless attempt to make it sound British ("Last weekend, I came across a dead coyote by the side of the old fire-road in the hills above Milton Keynes").

Not long after, Winning itself folded and was absorbed into VeloNews, to which Maynard still occasionally contributes.

Anyway, stop reading this and go and read his blog instead.