The Bicycle Thread - March 2024

Welcome to The Bicycle Thread. A monthly PING List for bicycle enthusiasts to share experiences, information and ideas. 🚴‍♂️👍

Fifteen years ago, I bought a secondhand sky-blue 1979 Trek, a road bike only slightly younger than me. It was a step into an unfamiliar world of elegant vehicles – until then, my rides had all been cheap, rusty or semi-broken.
Pedaling home from the bike shop, stretched over the low-slung handlebars, I noted some things.
“My hands hurt,” I told my companion, a former bike mechanic. “The seat hurts. And my neck hurts.”
“Changing hand positions should help,” he said. “The rest, you have to get used to.”
I kept riding. But the posture the sleek bike required – weight on the hands, crotch against an unforgiving racing seat, back in a range of diagonal angles, neck craning – was rekindling some old injuries.
“Could a person put different handlebars on a bike? To sit up?” I asked.
“You’d have to change out a few other parts,” the ex-mechanic said, “but you could do it.”

I changed my straight handlebar for a sitting upright handle bar that is excellent for me. It would be preferable to buy a bike that is designed for sitting up. But this bike was perfect in every other way so I bought it and it worked out great for me.

“Bikes truly shine when they carry us from home into the natural world,” writes cyclist Peter Flax in a new book, ‘Live to Ride,’ which celebrates just how far and wide those two wheels can transport us.

For the past year I have been immensely enjoying riding late at night. But now I want to change my schedule to ride in the morning as that opens great rides to the lake/beach, trails through woods, beautiful tourist sites are great for a lunch break, etc.

Because of the late night rides I only went to the beach twice last summer. That is criminal!
But also there were many rain squalls blowing through.
There was a lot of sun, rain, sun, rain, all in one day.
It was like that the whole summer long, so I picked the right year to ride late. 👍

Steppenwolf - Born To Be Wild (Easy Rider) (1969)

Are those Carnac shoes he’s wearing? Greg LeMond used to hype those.

I ran into Robin in France back when Pharmstrong was cheating his way to the top of the TdF. He had walked away from his “handlers” and the rank and file Frenchies never gave him a second look, so I greeted him and talked cycling and the race for a couple of minutes, then left him alone.

He was built like a short, hairy bowling ball, hard to imagine him on a bike.

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