{"id":759,"date":"2008-11-08T13:23:58","date_gmt":"2008-11-08T20:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=759"},"modified":"2008-11-09T11:42:53","modified_gmt":"2008-11-09T18:42:53","slug":"pretty-in-spandex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=759","title":{"rendered":"Pretty in Spandex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: there will be no photographs in this entry, for reasons that will soon become apparent.<\/em><\/p>\n

I decided to go for a bicycle ride this morning.\u00a0 Since it was chilly, I pulled on my new Spandex tights.\u00a0 Oh my God!\u00a0 One glance at the bedroom mirror and I fished out a pair of baggy shorts to put on over them.\u00a0 I don’t know why the tights are so much more revealing than my Spandex bike shorts, but they are.<\/p>\n

It’s been a standing joke in our bicycling group<\/a> 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.\u00a0 Oh, and that Darrell and I, the two guys in the group, will start shaving our legs.<\/p>\n

My path to poseur-hood has been a predictable one.\u00a0 First came the fancy road bike, then the bicycle shoes, then the baggy mountain bike shorts (baggy on the outside, Spandex \u2014 what else? \u2014 inside).\u00a0 Two months ago I started wearing all-Spandex shorts; today, full-length Spandex tights.\u00a0 Along the way I picked up three jerseys: two short-sleeved and one long.<\/p>\n

There’s a tragic side to Spandex, apart from the tragedy of what I look like in tights \u2014 it has created a rift within our group.\u00a0 It started when one of the women in our group jokingly asked another woman when she was going to start wearing Spandex.\u00a0 Alas, the second woman \u2014 an attractive woman and a long-time friend \u2014 is sensitive about her appearance.\u00a0 She took it as a crack about her looks and stormed off.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We haven’t seen her since.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Darrell, no poseur he, still rides a hybrid and wears regular shoes and shorts.\u00a0 He’s a Fred<\/a>, through and through, and I mean that in a good way.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And I’ll stand with my brother Freds and take this solemn vow:<\/p>\n

I will never<\/em> shave my legs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 Since it was chilly, I pulled on my new Spandex tights.\u00a0 Oh my God!\u00a0 One glance at the bedroom mirror and I fished out a pair of baggy shorts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,18,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bicycling","category-consumerism","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=759"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":772,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}