In the spirit of spring cleaning, I decided it was time to go though my boxes of bike gear. I had a pretty good collection before, but then we bought a bunch of steel shelves, and I went wild. I had boxes divided into groups: shorts, jerseys, tights, and some of the funkier things like headgear and arm/leg warmers. Surprisingly I have a box for arm/leg warmers although I never wear the things. Actually, I discovered that my old socks served as excellent arm warmers merely by expanding the holes already in the toes. So no more store bought arm warmers for me.
I further refined the classification with separate boxes for commuting gear versus weekend wear. Weekend shorts, weekend jerseys, another box of commuting gear. Then there's of another box of second string bike shorts. These are ones I haven't visited in quite some time. So I decided as a goal I would go through my inventory and actually wear all the things in said boxes. It became sort of like an archeological dig, especially when I got down near the bottom.
The shorts box was interesting. An interesting phenomenon occurs with the elastic waistbands. After many years, these seem to oxidize and disintegrate. If you've ever had a rubber band (elastic for you New Englanders) that is really old, you can see the problem. It loses its elasticity, which is sort of its raison d'etre. So there were a number of otherwise perfectly good shorts that whose fatal flaw was that except when I was actually sitting on the saddle, they had little motivation to stay up.
Then there's a pair of shorts that look like your basic baggy civilian shorts (not to be confused with your basic baggy camouflage mountain biker shorts). The only clue that they are intended to be bike shorts is that they have a liner and are made by BellWeather (another now defunct brand). These too seem to have spontaneously expanded so they could now fit the hind quarters of a small horse, and don't have much chance of staying up on my bony butt.
Then there was a pair of cotton shorts. Aside from the novelty of cotton these shorts had been retreaded a number of times and the liner was actually more like a quilt than a liner. The other problem with them was that unlike clingy lycra, there seems to be no mechanism for making them stay up (you sense a trend here?). Not a problem when in the saddle, but walking around in these things they had a decided tendency to go south. So, in the interest of protecting the public from seeing parts where formerly "the moon don't shine," I decided with great reluctance to send them to the trash. The clincher was in addition to their somewhat funky nature, when I looked at them closely, I could see daylight coming through. I took that as a Sign from God.
Near the bottom, I unearthed a couple of pair of wool shorts. These are kind of an oddity, since generally when it's cold enough for wool, it's tights weather. But they were in pretty good shape, except for a few moth holes.
Then there was my blue period, two pair of blue cycling shorts, one a powder blue number that always seemed to attract attention from the more homophobic segment of the population. I'm not shy but they seemed to be stretched out to a great extent and no longer supported the bits that needed to be supported.
I found two jerseys that were actually tank tops, but they had to be bike jerseys because they had pockets in the back.
There were two ancient CRW jerseys (the purple ones), which I'd pretty much given up on in favor of ones which had a full length zipper, better on hot days.
Then there was a CRW tee shirt that I turned into cycling gear by sewing on three pockets in the manner of my mentor Eric F.
I found a couple of cotton, yes, cotton, jerseys. These were not Donohue creations, they were actually sold, for money, by a company named "Cool Gear." I guess the gear wasn't quite cool enough since they have gone the way of the leisure suit. These are somewhat of an oddity. Your basic jersey these days is Lycra and you see a bunch of retro-cool wool jersey wearers, but cotton has no place in the pecking order. I like them since they tend to attract odor a lot less than synthetics (in the old days polypro was a prime offender). This is good when I have to hang them up in my cube within noseshot of my poor unsuspecting coworkers.Maybe next time through I'll actually get rid of some of this stuff.
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