In Praise of Non-Essentials

BIKE BEAT

As a kid in the 1960s and ’70s, I rode a bike all over the south side of Milwaukee wearing cutoff jeans, T-shirts, and tennis shoes. It never occurred to me that it was necessary to dress any other way to ride a bike. I wasn’t just riding around the block, either. The summer after I turned 15, I put an odometer on the 5-speed Schwinn I inherited from my uncle. By the time school started in the fall, I’d racked up 2000 miles.

I wore the same cycling attire through undergraduate and graduate school, though I swapped the cutoffs for bell-bottom jeans and the tennis shoes for leather boots. And no helmet, of course. I don’t remember feeling uncomfortable on the bike, despite riding in street clothes. Then again, most of the time I was just toodling around town.

It wasn’t until after graduate school, a little over 40 years ago, that I learned a chamois wasn’t just a cloth for waxing a car. I was living in Southern California at the time, and began to take advantage of the nice weather and the quiet roads that ran through the inland orange groves to get out on a bike again. I also started to notice that on longer rides, especially on hot days, even cutoffs got sticky. So did cotton T-shirts.

Like a good academic, I turned to the literature for a solution. As I recall, it was Bicycling magazine that got me sorted out. The expert consensus was clear: cycling is more comfortable—less chafing, more ease of movement, minimal sogginess—if one wears fabrics that wick away sweat. That’s how Lycra entered my life and I learned that a chamois was something to sit on, something that could make a long ride a lot more bearable.

The author’s first pair of cleated cycling shoes, purchased circa 1985. Photo by Michael Schwalbe.

If the experts were right about fabrics, maybe they were right about other kinds of gear. Cycling shoes, for instance, with their stiff soles, were supposed to better transfer energy to the pedals. So I invested in toe clips, straps, and a pair of Avocets that looked like bowling shoes but with ridged soles to grip a pedal cage. Later, I upgraded to a pair of Dettos—the old-school kind with cleats secured by nails.

And, yes, I found that proper cycling shoes made me more efficient. The gains might have been marginal but they were also undeniable. A minor downside was walking like a duck when I got off the bike.

I went a long time without buying cycling-specific sunglasses, in part because it was expensive, back in the day, to get prescription lenses put into sports frames. Years later, when I finally sprang for a pair of wraparound Oakleys, I kicked myself for waiting so long. Hazards on the road surface stood out with far greater clarity, and my dry-eye problem went away. Another win for the non-essentials.

Other bits of kit that I acquired early on included a helmet—which I came to see as essential, based on a different kind of calculation—along with gloves, a rain jacket, tights and other cold-weather clothes, a bar-mounted computer. I could have ridden my bike without any of this stuff. But as I became more serious about cycling, I found myself wanting to go farther and faster, with more ease and comfort, in all kinds of weather. To do this, I had to get fitter, but I also benefited from good equipment.

Bikes themselves constituted the biggest category of non-essentials. Of course, some kind of bike is essential, but an expensive bike isn’t. In 1984, I paid about $300 for my first decent road bike, and I thought that was extravagant. Actually, it was just a start. Over the years, I spent more and more on better and better bikes. The last high-end bike I bought cost about half as much our Honda Fit. It was a non-essential purchase—the bike, not the car—and entirely worth it.

As has been true for years, when I’m out on the road I look the part: skin-tight jersey and shorts, helmet, glasses, posh bike, thin tires, trim body. No doubt many drivers see me and other similarly-clad cyclists as a bit otherworldly—the word “insectoid” has been used to the describe the look created by a cycling helmet and dark, wraparound glasses. This probably doesn’t help stir drivers’ compassion for cyclists. Just the opposite, it seems.

Or perhaps drivers see decked-out cyclists and think the gear serves mainly to fuel an imaginary Tour de France breakaway. Well, no, that’s not it. Okay, rarely.

As in golf, tennis, fly fishing, and other sports, cycling can be more fun with good equipment, and acquired skill can deepen one’s appreciation for good equipment. For cyclists, the resulting ensemble can look odd to outsiders. Forgive us for that, please. Under the Lycra, we’re just ordinary folks. We know that fancy stuff isn’t essential to getting around or having a good time on two wheels. But it sure does sweeten the ride.