An Amusement & Diversion for The Genteel Cyclist. Daily.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

A Supposedly Fun Thing : Chequamegon report, tribute to DFW, and a lower GI tract issue, Part 4

As previously mentioned: If the length and rambling nature of this enrages you, well, you know you're getting your money worth, you're getting good value here, not something to be taken lightly in these desperate times, if you can't shop on price, at least shop on value, and make your dollar -- or the cognitive equivalent, your attention -- stretch as far as it can. Also, stock up on staples like rice, flour, bottled water, and solid gold. Conversely, you can continue in your restless quest for instant gratification, for self-realization through high-volume, low-density data, goods, services, ignoring all the warning signs, rushing headlong into better, faster, lighter, pithier, by going ahead and reading the extremely shorter version here.

There are very few times in the flat Midwest when you need your granny gear of course and in fact the Fat Tire 40 rarely requires even a middle ring, and it's tempting to think therefore that it’s a great race for a singlespeed, and maybe it is but not for a person with knees like mine, which work just fine but have to be sort of babied/pampered in specific ways such as not trying to spin at 120 rpms, egg beater fast, or conversely grinding at less than 10 rpm desperately clawing my way up a ramp like a spider in a wet sink. Those two scenarios -- precisely the two scenarios played out beautifully in the FTF -- are hell on the knees, my collateral ligaments or ACL, maybe a medial meniscus, whatever, it’s like a steak knife stuck into the side of the knee, which is weird because otherwise no problem riding (with typically, but not always, a geared bike) in the 50-100 mile range, or XC skate skiing in the 30-50K range, but jogging 1 mile would put me out of commission for a day or two waiting for that painful inflammation to die down a bit, gimping around grumpy but refusing to see a specialist, have it scoped at least. It’s worth noting that my father has bad knees and also refuses to see a specialist, which is funny since he himself is a specialist (retired), though an OB-GYN, and therefore not the sort of specialist he’d go see anyway, but the difference between us is that his bad knees keep him from doing several things that he used to love to do – alpine skiing, jogging, tennis – whereas my knees prevent me from doing things I don’t actually want to do anyway. Like jogging and skiing classical, and even now that I think about it backpacking, which like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer feels really great in the moments immediately after a cessation of the activity. Thus riding the FTF on a singlespeed, a very stylish and manly thing to do for sure, but maybe something to do with more of a touring mentality rather than a racing mentality. So but why? The singlespeed in theory is a kind of subversion of the industrial bicycle complex, you know more/bigger/faster/lighter especially expressed in more gears – I can’t even keep track, but I assume there are now mountain bikes with 30 gears, as there are (theoretically) with a road bike equipped with a triple chainring – but the metaphysical idea is to get back to the simplicity and joy of riding, the silence of the lambs, getting away from being wrapped up in the equipment and financing it on an annualized basis, the extraneous moving parts, and sure the excess weight of gears and gear ratios that are simply overkill, and less about improving the quality of the ride and more about improving the revenues of Chinese and Japanese manufacturers, and the supply chain leading from them to us. But then of course the singlespeed idea itself has been widely commoditized and fetishized, and now it’s entirely possible to commission the creation of a singlespeed worth many thousands of dollars, which is part of why Keith Bontrager, once a remarkable anti-consumerist champion of improvised junker singlespeeds has come in for some low-flying subcultural derision being what most assume to be a massive corporate sell-out as if anyone cares about that sort of simple moral calculus anymore, so you have basically a polymorphous anti-consumerist consumer subculture, and one that BTW I think is on the verge of jumping the cultural shark, as it were, and the early adaptors and contrarians and frankly punkrockers that “invented” singlespeeding will move on to whatever is next, probably Dutch commuter bikes with fenders and kickstands and platform pedals and even old-fashioned Sturmey-Archer internally geared hubs (and the bitching modern Shimano versions thereof) are already displacing fixed gear setups on urban bikes, or more probably the whole utility bike Big Dummy/XtraBike scenario and Christiana trikes and whatnot. Cyclists like every other living and breathing member of an essentially Godless conspicuous consumer culture want to belong to a tribe, not too big please, because we want to feel special vis-à-vis others showing the outer trappings of a similar passion, hence the hostility between roadies and mountain bikers, between geared mountain bikers and singlespeeders, between cigarette smoking hipsters on fixed gear bicycles and lycra-clad leg shavers on the idiotic quest to actually ride to the suburban Velodrome through a hell of pickup trucks and crap-tastic trunk highway shoulders, between Hairyleg Baggyshorts and Nuthugger Leghorn. This subcultural hair-splitting is maybe the natural result of too much information in an environment of self-identifying that is basically competitive; the availability of information devalues it unless or until you find rarified, counterintuive information to take on board, to install as personal preferences, even (what appear to outsiders as idiotically) self-annihilating fads like brakeless fixed gear urban riding, the cycling world’s equivalent of being Goth. So but my point was that there is something internally contradictory about racing a singlespeed bicycle, something logically inconsistent about it, if the idea is to strip the experience of riding off-road down to its bare essentials, not to negate speed but to negate competition from the deal, like how you just don’t want to see plaid zipper pants and Misfits tee-shirts on the runway during Fashion Week. But maybe I’m not fully understanding the component of masochism in consumer trends, the incidental stylishness and credibility of crashing without a helmet and “walking it off” and posting snapshots of garish face-plant injuries on Flickr, or the whole fetishistic snuff film phenom on YouTube, the kids knocking their own teeth out and the guy behind the camera says “Oh” and “dude” a lot and then laughing nervously, then almost crapping his pants in mirth, when the kid who just crashed his BMX directly into a concrete abutment can’t form fricatives and is thus reduced to mumbling the word Huck. Hucking shit. And that’s nothing compared to the sort of merit attached to the crashes and injuries of fixie riders and messenger “culture,” and it becomes another signifier of membership in a tribe that any normal person in his right mind would not or could not want to join, thus self-excluding and self-selecting, and racing a singlespeed in a marathon bike race seems to me a sort of weak, watered down version of that same sort of subcultural anti-meritocracy, but dang it is fun to ride silently through the woods feeling unencumbered by complexity, redundancy, &cet. So but here we are at highway OO upwind of Seeley, Wisconsin, and this is not actually the halfway point as it is literally in the Birkebeiner ski race, but it really begins the period of attrition, and smart to take in the crowd and grab a banana and a cup of water, I never take the generic “energy” drink these kind people are hawking because, again, that’s gastro-intestinal Russian Roulette in my experience, and I’ve finished races with Enervit or some other space fuel doubled over with backed up flatulence that took 9 days to fully work itself out. It has started to rain, full on. A cold rain. I’m still not feeling too good, but I’m looking forward to the long sections of gravel road that give offroaders an annual taste of roadie mentality, planning and executing the perfect bridge-up, negotiating for pull throughs, looking back into eyes of ignorant MTBers who don’t understand the basic concept of drafting and spontaneously self-generating teamwork to improve the prospects of a temporary alliance.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there a part 5? (and a part 6,7 and 8?). While amusing, this is getting as long as the race itself. Were not even to firetower yet....

charlie

TOMMY GUN said...

I sure hope that Nuthugger Leghorn and the Hairylegs will be playing at the finish line. This anti-meritocratic monologue is killing me with suspense!

Anonymous said...

Sheer brilliance!

Next installment... Please!!!!