Many families employ the hand me down concept. With several children, the smallest inherits stuff from the older ones when they outgrow it. In our family, consisting of Susan and me, the hand me down concept is alive and well. The flow of goodies in this case is in my direction, since Susan generally buys good stuff new, and I generally scrounge around for the old and cheap. It was before the turn of the century when I last bought a brand new pair of bike shorts, for example.
Over the years Susan has bestowed on me a number of her castoffs, including some fine Pearl Izumi shorts. Leaving aside the debate over whether bike shorts are truly unisex, they managed to carry the additional payload fairly comfortably, and were way better than my others. She is not a fan of Lycra, so whenever anything of this ilk came her way, it usually ended up with me.
But this time I was the happy recipient of a hand me down bike. Mrs. D had a very nice Miyata that she could no longer ride, and I was heir apparent. Granted it was several sizes too small for me, but my penultimate Cannondale was also rather small. Someone I knew had traded up back in the days when Cannondale offered trade-ins on a new frame, and the bike shop didn’t want the old one, so for $75 I got his old frame. With a suitably long seatpost and stem, it became my main road bike for many years. So, too with the Miyata. It required an even longer seatpost, but it came with STI and a good set of wheels, so it became a contender for my main bike. I found one seatpost in the parts collection that looked long enough, and it happened to be a shock absorbing seatpost I had bought for Susan and never installed.
Now, I’ve always considered shock absorbing seatposts to be a tool of the devil. Why would one want to mount a device that would absorb energy that could be turned into forward motion? When someone suggested a soft ride bike for me many years ago, I responded that I was a hard ride kind of guy. No squishy seats for moi. But since it was the only seatpost that fit, unless I, god forbid, bought another one, I decided to try it out. So, I put it on, jacked it up nearly to the sky, and off I went. I hate to admit it, but it was amazing. My usual routes through Carlisle are fraught with colossal potholes. On the rare stretches where there weren’t gaping holes, there were world class bumps every 30 yards or so. My usual ride through there is a carefully orchestrated ballet involving coordinating dodging these natural features and cars. The seatpost really took the edge off, so I could plow over the smaller cavities with grace and ease and concentrate exclusively on dodging cars. By the time I got through with the ride, I was having thoughts of retrofitting all my other bikes with this magical device. I admit, I had become a weenie. In my case, my Achilles heel was in my butt.
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