When I was a kid, I did most of my training on my own. None of my friends were cyclists and so this was just the way it was, particularly as we lived out of town and back in those days there was no such thing as the Sunday bunch – just a group of hard arses who would put in about 150 k for their “long” ride and who made it pretty clear that you were not welcome until you had paid your dues. Dues really just meant that unless you rode off scratch or second scratch you could piss off.
Anyway, one day I was riding along when I saw a bloke riding about 500 meters in front of me. I put my head down and buried myself to catch up. I was so shagged when I got to him that I needed to sit 20 meters behind for 5 minutes to catch my breath. When I could talk I rode up beside and asked if I could ride along with him, which he grunted would be OK.
The guy was one of the hard racers of the club, getting old but still very competitive. He was riding tubulars (singles to us when I was growing up), with a spare tucked into his back pocket. We rode along for a while and he started to chat and ask me a little bit about myself and to give some advice about cycling which I was lapping up.
After a while my eye caught his leg and I realized that he was only wearing one sock. I nonchalantly mentioned the missing sock. He didn’t look at me, but said “Oh yeah – I needed to have a shit a while ago and I used it to wipe my arse”.
While in retrospect I can see that this is a completely predictable explanation, at the time I have to admit that it threw me a bit. All I could come up with was “Oh that’s was a good idea.”
And so my education started.
No comments:
Post a Comment