Controversial Things I Think

I had a nice ride with Seibold this morning, then worked at home to avoid the downtown crush of security and traffic. With no commute to work there was a little bit of time left over to think about controversial shit I think about cycling and other stuff. Well, it's not controversial to me and maybe some of you agree with me. But it's what I believe and I'm sure it pisses somebody off, somewhere.

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Cyclists will never be treated decently on the roads until our advocacy and our self-image isn't based on feelings of victimhood and persecution. As somebody pointed out on the MABRA list the other day, drivers are just as shitty to other drivers as they are to cyclists. You want to change that, you need to change driving culture. To do *that*, along with advocating for bike lanes and cycling awareness campaigns, you have to change the culture at large from one with a callous disregard for human life, into a culture that respects human life. From there you need to work to make cycling something people want to do, so maybe the horse is going for a trot behind the cart here. It still is true, however, that few people want to join a victim subculture. If we don't get out of the victimhood mindset, we aren't going to persuade nearly as many people as we need to, to make it safer out there for cyclists. And pedestrians. And cars. I'm for better treatment of cyclists - strongly, there's some self-interest here - and I am also realistic that we probably don't have a snowball's chance in hell of doing it because the culture tends toward the lowest common denominator, and things like respect or selflessness are long division in our culture.

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We waste an inordinate amount of time and money on our bikes. Instead of dropping $3k on your next road machine with the stated goal of improving performance, if you're serious about improving performance, use that money to pay for some coaching, hit a good training camp or two, see a nutritionist to get a program, and pay for the latest drivetrain improvements (because shifting really does matter). For the most part it's about the engine and the psyche. A shiny new bike makes us feel faster but it probably only represents marginal performance improvement - says the guy who has been bullwhipped by Jay Murphy on his 27 pound 1980's vintage steel fixed gear. If you are going to drop the bling on the new bike, admit to yourself and us that you are doing it because you have an irrational love of shiny bikes. There's nothing wrong with that - just don't try to hide The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name In Front Of My Wife using the rationalization that it'll help you move up from 46th to 33d at Bunny Hop.

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- We cyclists tend to be whiny bitches. Road cyclists worst than mountain bikers. If there's something to whine about, we will. Everybody papers over their whining pretty quick with "but it's cool, lovin' the ride today," but we started with whining before we caught ourselves. I think the stony faced old guys who still hammer pretty well but don't talk much probably realized this about themselves somewhere along the way and that's why they don't talk much. A lot of mountain bikers, of course, overcompensate with cheerfulness. The forest is on fire, Bambi just ran past with his cute little fluffy tail aflame, and you can't see through the smoke, and it's, "Sweet ride, brah!" As my teamie Bernard points out, cribbing from Mercyx, "Class is the absence of whining." It's a trait many of us could probably stand to work on. Class is also the absence of self-pity, too, just in case you were wondering. I don't claim to have a lot of it...

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This revelation hit me on the road today - gruppos from the Big Three are well sorted out. If you need a gruppo that will not fail, go with Campy, Shimano (105 or higher) or SRAM. You can't go wrong, and even if there is a failure, it will be a logical sort of failure attributable to something stupid you did or fair wear and tear, and it will almost certainly occur only under ultra severe use, or toward the end of a product's natural lifespan. Every other piece of kit on the road has fatal flaws that hard riding - or even moderate riding - will reveal. It doesn't mean that the Race Face cranks with chainrings I've found easy to break are bad bits of gear, or that the Zero G brakes many find impossible to properly adjust don't work, or that the Zipp wheels like the one Cancellara crushed on Sunday are fragile. No, those parts actually do work - just that they have holes in their game and when you work them outside their design parameters, they fall apart. No so much with the Big Three. Their parts tend to be over-engineered; their design teams apparently don't just ask "how will this be used?" but also "how will this be misused?" There's a reason the Big Three are big. It's because they git 'er done just about all the time.

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The best way to improve your knowledge of how the world works is Popular Mechanics. It is the antidote to having been raised in a culture where you were never expected to do anything with your hands. If you're curious about how things work, it's where to go. And they have a good website. You won't get expert knowledge about anything from PM, but they will introduce you to the basics and give you enough background information on any topic they cover, so that you have enough information to research further. Basically, it's the Bicycling Magazine of Everything - including bicycles.

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Unless you're using very mild mixers, it's a total waste of time to put top shelf liquor in a mixed drink. It used to kill me when I saw guys order VSOP and Coke. Why not just put some Grain in a glass of coke, and drizzle in a little maraschino cherry juice? It'll give you just about the same flavor and you're not drinking from a $40 bottle... This rule about using modest mixing liquors doesn't hold if you're mixing the liquor with water - scotch rocks, gin and tonic, a mint julep, or a mojito. You gotta use decent stuff then because the true taste of the liquor will flower once you add water - but understand too that a lot of mid-market liquor has a great taste that works in well drinks. See e.g. Old Grandad in bourbon drinks; Beefeater in G&T's and Martinis. And, BTW, if it's wetter than a 4:1 mix, then it's not really a martini, nor does it make more than a cosmetic difference whether it's stirred or shaken.

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I just finished reading Joe Parkin's second book, Come and Gone. Like the excellent Dog in a Hat, it's a great read if you dig bike racing war stories and enjoy a magazine format with a bunch of loosely related stories stuck next to each other. It's a so-so read if you're looking for a coherent book with a unified narrative in it. The most profound thing he says in the book is tucked into the end of a chapter about three quarters of the way through, where he discovers that for most racers and for himself, racing isn't about winning, it's about the process of racing. The whole book is about this! The reason Parkin doesn't destroy himself in training, and why he usually doesn't win races, is that he isn't there for the win. He's there to have fun racing! As the great Andrew WK put it, "We do what we like and we like what we do." This discovery should have been the punchline to the book, not the coda to a chapter midway through.

The narrative thread appears to evade Parkin as if it were a greased pig, and he a rodeo competitor. This doesn't make it a bad book - far from it. It's just that the stories could have been better organized around some common themes that crop up in most of the book's chapters. Most writers suffer from this lack of focus. This is why editors make decent money - to trim the unnecessary branches off of the story tree. So for our sake, please get an editor Joe!

The best book about roadracing, for my money, is still Tim Krabbe, The Rider. Krabbe is one of the Netherlands' great writers to begin with, and the autobiographical book about a single race captures what goes on in a racer's mind during the race better than anything I've ever read. Joe's books should be in your library too though; they offer a glimpse into what it meant to race and to come up the hard way in the generation of Roll, Phinney, Kiefel, Tomac and Juarez. That makes Parkin's books a priceless bit of bike culture anthropology.

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My conception of NFL Commish Roger Goodell asking Big Ben Roethlisberger what he is going to do to avoid sexually assaulting young women during future nights out on the town. (With apologies to Blazing Saddles.)

Roethlisberger: I got it! I got it!

Roger Goodell: You do?

Roethlisberger: We'll work up a Number 7 on 'em.

Roger Goodell: [frowns] "Number 7"? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one.

Roethlisberger: Well, that's where we go a-ridin' into town, a-whompin' and a-whumpin' every livin' thing that moves within an inch of its life. Except the women folks, of course.

Roger Goodell: You spare the women?

Roethlisberger: Naw, we rape the shit out of them at the Number Seven Dance later on.

Roger Goodell: Marvelous!

Million Dollar Arm. Ten Cent Head.

Take it away, Burt...