Yesterday I rode a brisk 47 miles, not the 60 mile Saturday morning training rides of 1995 Tucson, but something. Today the only time my legs forgot their pain was when I was on the bike again. That’s one of the best things about bicycling.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this blog. It’s feeling increasingly useless. I’m going to remove the link to it from my homepage because I’m getting a lot of emails from recruiters. Recruiters are hilariously coy and always require the wrong information. A friend asked the best question, “Are you ready?” I replied, “Work is good.” He echoed, “Work is good!” and sort of half threw his hands in the air. This is the best we do. If we were farmers we would be planting. If we were hunters we would be hunting. Not because we wanted to but because we had to.
What we do is make software. And software is best made by humans who understand each other (and by extension understand the people who use their software). Unless they’re miraculously made up of such humans, organizations make shitty software. Just an observation.
Penn is sitting next to me doing his homework and just declared: “Don’t give me an idea! Give me a snack!” It was completely random. Before that he said, “Don’t think of bad things. Think of pancakes!”
Back to bikes. I must confess. I spent the afternoon looking at porn. Bike porn.
The image to the left is from this post, which is full of pictures from pre-1990 era cycling. The era that I studied while riding and then racing in junior high and high school. I have a collection of cycling hats from that era; I’m not really sure how I got into hat collecting…they’re cheaper and take up less space than jerseys or bikes. I am pretty sure at one point I had a GiS cap. I might have worn it until it was too worn to wear or keep. But when I saw that GiS logo on that rider’s kit, I could smell my introduction to cycling. It is weird how the olfactory sense is the one most connected to memory, isn’t it? I could literally smell some combination of things I haven’t smelled in two decades, and in that brief memory was all the magic that was bike racing.
What probably happened was that moment released some happy chemicals in my brain and so I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to recreate that experience. In vain, of course…
But I did find this GiS jersey on Flickr. There’s also this Ariostea jersey! And it turns out that Flickr account is some kind of magical gold mine for awesome retro (or otherwise) gear…
What you have to understand about a Tom Kellogg bicycle is it was a bike that–at least while I was in the Leigh Valley in mid-90’s–made an immediate statement about the quality of the rider who pedaled it. I was in Tucson in the same time frame and there it was a Gilmour that communicated the same thing.
Hilariously, I’ve had the same bike for so long now that it gets retro points. It is in fact so old I have to do some research to figure out its lineage.
Another funny thing is that I get the most cred, these days, for being able to do a track stand, which I learned over time while navigating the many traffic lights of Tucson, not at the track where I raced for a few years. As with most things in life, the hardest part of learning how to track stand is starting to learn how to track stand. After some initial mastery of it, it becomes ridiculously simple.
Back to jerseys for a moment. This one really makes me all fuzzy with nostalgia:
Maybe now that I’m an adult I’ll start collecting frames instead of caps. Spectrums and Gilmours and LeMonds and Sachs and my old Klein. Oh and a Fast Boy, of course. I’ll get one of these to actually ride:
(Here’s why.) I have more to show and tell about bicycling and bicycle racing but this post is long enough already. Here are some more images just for fun:
The former above is for after the latter. Yikes! And I leave you with this link to a picture of Eddy Merckx signing a poster in a butcher shop, which I love for some reason.