Dirty Faces Win Races

Peter Sagan was a legend before this race, and he put a nice exclamation point on his legend here.

Winning a six and a half hour (!!) cycling race is not about proving who is the strongest, it is about proving who can win a six and a half hour cycling race. It takes skill, nous, luck, and legs and heart and lungs and will of iron. Sagan has all of these things in spades, and they are on glorious display here.

He rode a strong race, got a bit lucky to get close, and found a way to win. It gets no better.

Hot Jamzs: Trip the Light by Kaz James

Big Cheese sent this along and it's got a good vibe. Long mix so it takes a few minutes to get started. The radio edit, if one exists, would skip that part.

Bespoke Jersey is Best Jersey

Same Colors as a Chewy Peppermint Christmas Candy

Along with the bike you need stuff to wear while riding. That means padded tights, which do not have pockets. And also jerseys, which (conveniently) do have pockets. I am no big fan of wearing tights in public but if you want to ride there is no way around it. I will never be that guy at the local coffee shop tromping around in clipless pedals and tights but as long as I am just out the door, riding, and then home with no intermediate stops then I am okay with it.

Finding cycling gear that isn't lame and ugly is tougher than you might think. Or maybe not, because if you even noticed almost any road cyclist you probably only noticed them because their outfit was ugly af. If you can find something that is decent (more on that shortly), you then have to find something that fits. This is even harder than finding something decent to wear, especially if you regularly lift anything heavier than your 8 Kg road bike. (Why are road cyclists so obsessed with weight? Because if the bike is too heavy they are afraid they might not be able to pick it up. OR: What's the hardest part about learning to ride in a peloton? Asking your dad to lift your bike into the truck. To be fair this is perhaps a bit much because cyclocross riders frequently lift their bikes and run with them and then jump back on again, but you get the idea.)

If you have shoulders then fit is problematic. Partly because I do not have a 'cyclists build', and partly because the hot thing in cycling these days is to be as aero as possible. Marginal gains and all that. So not only do the jerseys tend have narrow shoulders to start with, but, depending on what you buy, they are designed to be very tight.

So you found something that fits (maybe), what do you do about the graphics? While most of the designs you notice are butt, there are happily a few decent offerings from both affordable and premium brands. Or you can get creative and build your own. It is very easy to build custom from scratch and then order it online, as in this post and the one immediately below. There is a lot of overlap in the snob craft beer culture and the snob cycling culture so I enjoy the idea of having a not-cool beer jersey to ride on my supposedly not-cool bike. (My bike is polarizing because it has a suspension in the front, which gives traditionalists the vapors.)

I saw some California-themed jerseys out and about and they were okay, but not as good as one you could design in half an hour if, for example, you already had plenty of practice trolling the internet for Miller Lite logos and pasting them onto a color-themed template.

No plans to do a custom order on the jerseys any time soon, but if you want to then get your order in now because the price drops dramatically as you increase the quantity. You have my number.

YMMV: Likeness by Lawless, feat. Little Ashes

I heard this jam and I thought it was good. It's got that epic feel. You might dig it, or you might not. You do you.

Also heard recently that riding a bike 'brings color and joy to the world'. Riding a motorcycle does the same thing. You should do one or the other or both.

Overdoing It

You Know You Want One

So it turns out that if you have not ridden a bicycle in a serious way for over 25 years and you get a new bicycle and decide to ride it in a serious way then you are almost certainly going to hurt something. It is possible that you will not, such as if you stopped cycling when you were 2, but even then: the body needs some time to adjust after a long time away. 

For example, if you get a totally awesome new road bike that you think is the dope shit and start logging miles because the bike is awesome and rad and riding around on it is awesome and rad then you will very probably get sore knees, which is decidedly not awesome and/or rad. In less temperate climes than the type I enjoy here in lovely Southern California they call this condition 'spring knee', because riders would be drawn outside and begin to ride more as the weather warmed. You can ride 365 days a year where I live so I just call it "sore knees that are bad and hurtful" or "hurtful knees", for short. The struggle is real. 

The hurtful knees are definitely cramping my style, so I have had to scale back my riding and do more (a lot more) to loosen the angry, angry quads in an effort to ameliorate my condition. Pro cyclists get a massage after every stage of every race, and also after almost every workout (must be nice). That's not in the budget, so I have been spending some quality time with a roller and a supernova ball. It's not much better but it's not worse. You care. Soon I will be back on the roads and looking good while going slow. I have a lot more words about looking good on the bike, but that will be another post. Get excited.