This Space for Rent

Cycle chic fail

My regular pair of +4s were in the wash because they had picked up a bit of an aroma after my speedy ride around the Verboot Sausage route yesterday, and my emergency pair of +4s were also in the wash because I wore them when I went out for bagels this morning and got rained on for my trouble.

And I needed to go to Trader Joe’s to pick up dishwasher soap, snacks for the bears and some at work food for me. “Your riding clothes are in your closet!” chirp the cyclocouture websites, so I took a look.

Blue jeans. Eh, they’ll have to do; I’m not going to wear my suit to go shopping.

So I put my jeans on, dragged the xtracycle out of the back room, and headed off on one of my more-or-less direct routes (that takes the easy, if somewhat longer, climb up the eastmoreland bluffside) to Trader Joe’s and back.

Oh my god I thought I was going to die.

I tend to favor form-fitting clothes, but the jeans ended up sticking to my legs and being way more formfitting that I could even imagine tolerating. And denim doesn’t, as a general rule, breathe worth crap, so by the time I got home I was dripping with sweat and the jeans had to be peeled off and tossed into the wash.

So I must have been going really fast, eh, and not adhering to the cyclochic ideal of riding really slowly. Uh, no. My normal average speed for taking the xtracycle up to Trader Joes and back is something on the average of 13-14mph. Today it was 11mph.

So I ended up riding extra slowly and sweating as much as I would have if I’d been riding under a deadline. The drowned rat look? SO HOT!

I’ll stick with my +4s, thanks.

Comments


A kilt would have been very handy. Just sayin'.

rone Mon Sep 27 05:40:07 2010

Yes, but kilts are Scottish, and I don’t think that counts in cyclochic land. Cyclocross, yes, but not cyclo-chic.

I don’t tend to wear kilts anyways; the American style utilikilt is fairly klunky, and a nice formal Scotch kilt really needs a white shirt and coat (which would then fall into the category of “wearing a suit to go shopping”) to look really good.

I’d probably have to get a mixte frame if I was going to wear a kilt, otherwise it would become a big old windcatcher (and I’m not really sure if a mixte would really help; I’d probably have to pin the skirts together to keep them from bagging up during pedaling, and by then it would start to fall into the cyclocouture-forbidden category of “cycling specific wear”)

David Parsons Mon Sep 27 11:50:03 2010

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