Note: there will be no photographs in this entry, for reasons that will soon become apparent.
I decided to go for a bicycle ride this morning. Since it was chilly, I pulled on my new Spandex tights. Oh my God! One glance at the bedroom mirror and I fished out a pair of baggy shorts to put on over them. I don’t know why the tights are so much more revealing than my Spandex bike shorts, but they are.
It’s been a standing joke in our bicycling group that in time we’ll turn into Spandex-wearing yuppies, the sort of poseurs who wear identical jerseys and ride in groups, sneering at mere recreational bicyclists. Oh, and that Darrell and I, the two guys in the group, will start shaving our legs.
My path to poseur-hood has been a predictable one. First came the fancy road bike, then the bicycle shoes, then the baggy mountain bike shorts (baggy on the outside, Spandex — what else? — inside). Two months ago I started wearing all-Spandex shorts; today, full-length Spandex tights. Along the way I picked up three jerseys: two short-sleeved and one long.
There’s a tragic side to Spandex, apart from the tragedy of what I look like in tights — it has created a rift within our group. It started when one of the women in our group jokingly asked another woman when she was going to start wearing Spandex. Alas, the second woman — an attractive woman and a long-time friend — is sensitive about her appearance. She took it as a crack about her looks and stormed off. Weeks later, when we finally cajoled her into going out to dinner with us, my wife Donna, fishing around for small talk, told her I had started wearing Spandex. We haven’t seen her since. I wish I could tell her that I’m probably even more sensitive about my appearance than she is (and that there’s nothing wrong with her appearance in the first place), but that would no doubt do more harm than good, so I’ll just stay out of it and hope that, in time, she comes back.
Darrell, no poseur he, still rides a hybrid and wears regular shoes and shorts. He’s a Fred, through and through, and I mean that in a good way. I’m far down the yuppie trendoid road (and getting worse by the day) but I’m a Fred at heart and always will be. And I’ll stand with my brother Freds and take this solemn vow:
I will never shave my legs.