‘Just Ride,’ by Grant Petersen
By DAVE
EGGERS
Published: July 27, 2012 New York Times Book Review
Many a weekend bicycle rider has had the same
unsettling experience: You ask a friend to ride with you along some scenic,
low-impact route. You show up wearing shorts, Sambas and a T-shirt, and he
shows up dressed for an Olympic time trial. On his torso is a very tight shirt
slashed with a half-dozen garish colors and logos irrelevant to him. His
helmet, decorated with flames or stripes or both, is equipped with a rearview
mirror. A rubber straw dangles around his neck like a fur stole, through which
he can drink fluids from a container on his back. And then there are the
spandex leg-enclosures. These have patches of yellow on either flank, giving
the impression that your friend is wearing chaps. Yellow-and-black spandex
chaps.
A Radically Practical
Guide to Riding Your Bike
By Grant Petersen
Illustrated.
212 pp. Workman Publishing. Paper, $13.95.
All
this for a 10-mile ride on a bike path.
If you can identify
with the more casually dressed biker described above, or if you want to go
biking but have been scared away by the sport’s cult of gear and equipment,
then your bible has been written. Grant Petersen’s “Just Ride” is a wonderfully
sane, down to earth and frequently funny guide to riding, maintaining, fixing
and enjoying your bicycle. That so much common sense will be considered
revelatory, even revolutionary, is a testament to how loony the bike world has
become.
 |
| Grant Petersen-Author and Bicycle Friend |
The accepted
orthodoxies are upended, one after another. Petersen is skeptical of special
biking shoes. He is pro-kickstand, pro-mud-flap. He thinks a wide, comfortable
saddle is O.K. He doesn’t see why anyone needs more than eight gears. He thinks
fragile carbon-fiber bikes and super-narrow tires are impractical for just
about everyone (“Getting paid to ride them is the only good reason I can think
of to ride that kind of bike”). He has nuanced thoughts on helmets (he wears
his at night but not during the day) and reminds us that biking is “lousy
all-around exercise” and shouldn’t be considered a stand-alone regimen. But
most satisfying is his takedown of the tight-shirt, spandex-shorts phenomenon.
“In its need for special clothing,” he writes, “bicycle riding is less like
scuba diving and more like a pickup basketball game.” A regular cotton T-shirt
and a pair of shorts will ventilate better, he says, and if you’re not trying
to shave seconds off a world record, the microscopic aerodynamic advantages of
tight synthetic clothing just don’t apply to you.
Coming from just
anyone, this kind of thinking wouldn’t carry much weight. But Petersen raced
for six years, then worked at Bridgestone ,
Japan Walnut Creek , Calif.
But with this book,
he’s trying to bring biking back to a state of moderation and rationality. If
you like the gear, he’s fine with that, and if you don’t agree with all his
advice, no problem. But he makes the case that at its core, biking should be a
simple, democratic, sometimes ludicrously enjoyable means of getting around.
“No matter how much your bike costs,” he says, “unless you use it to make a
living, it is a toy, and it should be fun.” Amen.
