Speed Progression

Have you ever noticed that the faster a car goes the cooler it looks. Whether it is a sports car or a muscle car the faster it goes the aesthetically pleasing. Bike racers are not like that. In fact they are pretty much the opposite. The faster you want to go on a bike the bigger a dork you need to look like.

When I started riding around 1990 I had a mountain bike. I wore baggy shorts without pads and t-shirts. Never wore a helmet.

Then I made a bad decision. I wanted to go faster. I bought a road bike. Then as now, if you were riding a road bike in normal clothes it meant that you were DUI guy. People in cars thought that I was a dork because I was riding a bike. People on bikes thought I was a dork because I wore normal clothes.

A few months later I decided that if I want to go really fast I needed some of them tight shorts. Besides that, they had pads in them and I sure could use some relief. I struggled with the no underwear thing for a while but eventually embraced the free-balling nature of cycling. Now I was a cycling dork, tight shorts – but I wasn’t one of those full blown cycling dorks. Hell no. I wore a t-shirt with my tight shorts. None of that faggy jersey stuff for me. I wanted to go fast, but not that fast.

I got a jersey a few weeks later. Turns out tight shorts have no pockets, besides tight jerseys are faster.

Then mom got me a helmet. I was a full-blown Greg LeMond wannabe (this is before Lance Armstrong kids). A least I didn’t have the Z-team kit. At that point I thought that if you had a Z-team kit that you probably actually knew and raced with Greg LeMond.

It took half a year, but I was a cycling dork. I still wanted to go faster. I heard that cycling shoes were faster than regular shoes, so somewhere along the way I picked up some sweet nike cycling shoes (with laces). Cycling shoes were great, but I knew that the true key to speed was clipless pedals. Made that upgrade early in year two, shortly after I bought some tight pants. Oh yes, now I was flying – at the pinnacle of speed.

I started riding with other people and soon learned I needed some new equipment. I began the hopeless process of trying to make my piece of crap bike nicer by adding some accessories and switching out components. The biking equivalent of pimping out a Ford Escort.

Eventually, I joined the ‘making payments on my bike, but not my car crowd’. Then I started racing. I started to shave my legs – not to go faster, just to fit in – and besides chicks dig it ya know. I thought that my dorkiness (speediness) had peaked when I joined a team and started wearing clothes with logos on my butt. The only thing dorkier than that is time trial equipment.

So I can’t afford to have a real time trial bike. I converted an old road bike. That is like putting lambo doors on a chevy cavalier. My first tt bike experiment was named Frankenbike. It didn’t work so well, so I sold it. Now I am on to stage 2 – ‘The Harvester of Sorrow’. I named it after the Metallica song – I thought a tt bike should sound angry and painful, because there isn’t anything fun about a time trial.

Just when I thought I would never go dorkier I folded and bought a tt helmet. It is HUGE. It has to be big to fit over my enormous dome, but this is ridiculous. It looks like I stole it from the alien autopsy show. When I ride down the road people are going to stop and say ‘did you see that enormous sperm just go by?’ I am going to wear it in public for the first time tomorrow. I should be ok as long as no one points and laughs.