Meanwhile I own the world’s heaviest bike ever, and love it. I love the way my chest hair flows in the spring wind as I peddle in my baggy sweats. Nothing more freeing.
Ooohhhh, chest ticklies!!
Truly the most MintyFresh comment of all time lol.
I had to double take while reading haha.
Work it
Those bikes don’t look very aero.
If he was really serious about it he wouldn’t have shaved - he would have waxed.
deglove
Don’t be silly, your skin is smoother than your muscles
Hmm true… must go deeper
I don’t think there’s a rule against it.
quad gods with god quads
I’m slightly convinced that for everyone under pro levels this is all just placebo. But I still shave my legs and if I had the money I would buy all the cool stuff.
Pros just cheat. See Icarus and all that.
True, but not eating 2 family sized pizzas a week would probably help my performance more than shaving my legs.
Or, eat the pizzas, then do some combo of Ozempic + PEDs…winning!
Ozempic works by making you not want to eat the pizzas. It’ll never be a performance enhancing drug for sports because the top levels already have nutrition habits indistinguishable from eating disorders.
Most amateurs have signifcantly more time they can cut by training better and harder than spending thousands or tens of thousands on better components.
Its a very small list of amateurs who train to the same level as a pro who has a good chance of winning any of the big competitions.
Stick that under 30s pro on a cheap bike geared the same as a midlife crisis amater 45 year old gear head on an ultra expensive bike and guess who wins?
If you want to buy wins enter an amateur car racing event, those are mostly reflective of money spent given a base level of talent and training (which costs far more money per hour than training for cycling).
Yeah, I’m doing nothing but running right now, adjusting my workout, training often. That’s it. When I see a long plateau, then I’ll consider looking to other things, but right now I know there’s room in my purse running training for improvement, so there’s no point in messing around with other shit.
I’m doing nothing but running right now,
that was me when i was younger. now reading that makes my knees hurt.
I’m assuming you’re older than me, but I’m on my way to 39. New shoes have really done a lot for some of the aches and pains associated with running, though if the damage is done I think it’s moot.
the damage is done and i’m a recumbent cyclist now. i highly recommend recumbent cycling it is so fun. slapped a motor on and now i basically have one of these but in real life
Recumbent cycling absolutely appeals to me.
mine isn’t this one, but she’s pretty close. she’s at the shop right now (don’t get me started on my inability to keep my front right tire unpopped) but i’ll post an image on the dull men’s club when i get her back. i usually have my seat more reclined than that, a big orange flag, headlight, taillight, a crate, and mirrors. and a speaker because i can’t exist without music
there are a lot of used recumbents in great shape on craigslist. the tadpoles (2 wheels in front) are a lot more sturdy then the deltas (2 wheels in back) probably because your center of mass is lower, probably other reasons i am not qualified to comment on
It will make you go faster. It only makes any difference at all if you are competing for something, whatever level you are.
But if you like cool bike stuff, great, go get it.
For me it is also any advantage I can get to keep up with my boyfriend. No competition, just hoping he feels slightly out of breath when I am panting for air. Unfortunately he is the weaker one in a group of bike friends too, so he also tries to optimize as much as possible.
It absolutely is, but as with any hobby spending money on new things is part of what keeps it fresh. The issue is that cyclists get really insecure about this. I am a commuter who does a solid 200 miles per week and can drop most of our local bike club on my steel commuter bike while wearing a tshirt and baggy shorts. I honestly don’t judge though, whatever makes you happy, but I do occasionally run into people who are like “you can’t join the group ride without proper equipment” because I don’t wear a skin suit or use the clipclop shoes. Whatever bro, let’s see if your $800 padded onesie can beat my 8 year old gap Khakis.
I absolutely do judge, because it doesn’t make them happy. At no point during their run on the approval-seeking treadmill of ‘gotta shave off another 0.3 seconds from my time, no wait, 0.4 seconds, no wait…’ do they actually have the briefest of moments where they can feel like they are just okay to be who they are. It’s painful for them to chase the carrot on a stick, vicariously painful for others to watch, and readily turns them into toxic people when they can’t get their fix.
"Me, I’ve got a secret motor in the bottom bracket powered by batteries in the shaft
Are we still talking about bikes?
Bikes?
MAMILs are the worst…
Bring back steel bikes 🙌
I wish the cardboard ones became a thing. would love to lock up my bike with a luggage lock and some thin wire
Can you redirect me to a showdown of successful cardboard bikes?
if they were successful they would have been a thing instead of not being one. they were supposed to be like 20 bucks and technically as light as the super high end bikes. At that price I figure you could just not lock it up but I figure a token lock like what connects projectors in a classroom would be prudent. This is the one I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_bicycle#Izhar_Gafni’s_prototype
They’ve never gone away, I ride mine almost every day.
I know this would be one rebuttal. Yes, you can still ride your steel bicycle, but the manufacturers left are few and premium-priced.
What you need an 6000 euro race bike as an overweight man in your thirties how else am I going to look cool.
All jokes aside owning a good bike to commute or travel on the weekends is really nice. And for the people feeling self concious about wearing bib shorts, you can where something over them.
I went into a Subway once in my bike shorts. A bunch of little kids hiked their shorts up wedgie-style and danced around me like the dwarfs in the Spinal Tap Stonehenge scene. Everybody in the store laughed, including me.
Sounds like a jolly good time.
Meanwhile, during a shopping stop in a two-day back-country ride:
“Let’s wait for Pus finishing their ice cream.”
Me, with a baseball cap, sunglasses, jeans and a hoodie, headphones on the head, cigarette in the mouth and ice cream in one hand, handlebar in the other:
“What? No need to wait, I’ll follow yall.”
This was me when I smoked.
I’m not sure of its the eight years since my last cigarette giving me superpowers or if I’m just eight years older and my body cries at each minor inconvenience but I think I was healthier when I was downing a pack a day of menthols.
Fuck I miss smoking.
Good news!
Þere will come a time when, statistically, if you started smoking again you would be almost guaranteed to die of someþing oþer þan lung cancer. In oþer words, you can start smoking again when you’re 60!
I’m counting þe days…
Lmao well at least I have that to look forward to
I’ve quit three years after that adventure, but it turned out that regular bike rides contributed much more to my health than smoking took away. So I rather miss cycling now.
You smoke cigarettes and go on 2 day long bicycle rides for fun? That’s like being a vegan who will eat meat but only if the animal died in some truly awful way.
I tell you hwhat. The meat industry is awful but roadkill… that there’s good eatin.
Some people just really enjoy bicycling. Now don’t get me wrong, I agree this is insane, a cig kills my ability to bike much. But I totally get not caring about your health and just happening to have a hobby you love be exercise
I peed before riding and only carried one water bottle.
I zipped up my jersey.
I drove the other direction, which is with the wind and downhill
I asked the principal engineer about the rider used in aerodynamic testing. He grinned and replied – “but they sure are pretty, right?”
More like Fast and Furless
New kink unlocked.
I knew a guy with one of those bike, and he had special towels in the garage because the tires couldn’t touch the ground
Same dude swapped frames every year cause the manufacturer rolled out upgrades like Apple does iphones. One beam at a time, they went from round carbon fiber to triangular. He dare not be spotted on last year’s model!
$2,600
Former phreaker detected
Totally worth it.
That other guy’s gonna be miles behind by the end of the race.
