These days, people ask me, whether in person or by e-mail, questions about some aspect of bicycles or cycling. What's even more ironic is that women--not only young ones--ask me what they should do about or with their boyfriends or husbands. As if I know! But that's a topic for my other blog.
Anyway...I think of the times when I was looking for advice about bicycling (and guys! and girls!) when I was young (which, believe it or not, I was once). There weren't nearly as many experienced adult cyclists in those days as there are now. Likewise, there weren't many people who were knowledgeable about bicycles. Of course, I didn't know that when I first became serious about cycling, but it didn't take me long to find out.
If you rode for a couple of years, you could find yourself walking into a neighborhood bike shop and asking for something they'd never heard of. Hal Ruzal, a longtime mechanic at Bicycle Habitat, told me about an experience he had during his ride across the USA in 1980. He was riding with two friends and they'd had a rash of flats. As they were all riding high-quality bikes (Hal was on a Mercian, which he still rides!), their wheels were all 700 C diameter, rather than the 27" that was found on most ten-speed bikes of the time. And their inner tubes all had Presta valves.
For those of you who may be relatively new to cycling, Presta valves are thinner than the kind of valves found on cars and motorcycles and on older and heavy bicycles, which are called "Schraeder" valves. Not only are Presta valves thinner; they also have a stem that must be unscrewed in order to inflate it. It actually makes a high-pressure tire easier to inflate, and because there's no spring, as there is in a Schraeder valve, there's less to go wrong.
Anyway, Hal described a dilemma he and his buddies faced: "There wasn't one single Presta valve tube or 700 C tire in the entire state of Kansas!" A few years earlier, when I was first starting to take long rides and do my own repairs, one didn't have to go to Kansas to find bike shops with such limited selections: There were plenty in New Jersey, where I was living at the time. To be fair, there were a few really good shops, and their personnel and I quickly came to know each other. But most local shops still hadn't progressed beyond kids' bikes or, more tellingly, the notion that bikes were only for kids.
The sad thing is that most of the books in cycling that were available at the time weren't much more useful. There was no Internet in those days, and although its predecessors existed, they were very limited and you practically had to have a national security clearance to use one. So people like me were limited to those few-and-far-between experienced cyclists, good shops and books that were available.
Even the "good" cycling books were full of things that are, at best, outdated (and probably were when they were published) and, worse, laughable or just plain wrong. One book recommended "yak butter" for breaking in leather saddles. Does "yak butter" actually exist? Maybe they have it in Dean and De Luca. I suspect that whoever wrote that (I've forgotten which book it was in, much less who wrote it.) was partaking of some Sonoma County gold, and I ain't talkin' about wine, as the early mountain bikers would say. Or maybe they were simply pulling their readers' legs.
What's really strange, though, is the realization that I know more than the writers of even some of the better bike-related books I read at the time. I'm thinking now of the first edition of The Complete Book of Bicycling from the late Eugene A. Sloane. (Scroll down to the bottom paragraph for a very politically incorrect statement!) He was roughly the same age as I am now when the first edition of his book was published in 1970. I read the book about three years later and, even by that time, some of the information had become dated. For example, he said that the best derailluers were the Campagnolo Nuovo Record, followed by the Simplex Prestige and the Huret Allvit. Granted, there weren't as many derailleurs available, at least in the US, as there would be by the time the second edition of the book was published. But I know that there were others, some of which shifted better than the Allvit.
Also, he says that high-quality bikes were almost always made of Reynolds 531 tubing. Now, I've always liked it, but even in those days, it wasn't the only high-quality tubing. He mentions Columbus tubing (which he refers to as "Columbia") only in passing. I've ridden bikes with Columbus tubing (including a Colnago on which I raced) and, while it is stiffer, I always felt that Reynolds tubings (of which all of my Mercians are made) gave a livelier ride, which made them better all-around. Still, I think that any book that called itself "complete," even in the embryonic days of the bike boom, should have said more about Columbus, not to mention Vitus and one or two other brands of tubing.
Also, he recommends Brooks saddles, but the only model he mentions is the Professional. I know that the B17 and other models were available, and probably many more cyclists ride B17s than any other model of Brooks.
In fairness, Sloane was trying to sum up, for would-be cycling enthusiasts, what was known and available at that time. And I realize that a large portion of any book that contains technical information as well as advice about equipment that's available--and conditions that prevail--is bound to date itself after 40 years. But I also see how limited Sloane's perspective was.
Again, to be fair, I must say this: If the resources available to me were limited, I can only imagine how much more so they were for Sloane. And he had even less of a cycling infrastructure, so to speak, than I had. I would imagine that in his day, in order to learn much about cycling or obtain good equipment, it was all but necessary to live in England, France or some other country where cycling was more ingrained in the daily fabric of life.
Now I can say that more people are knowledgeable about, or at least aware of, various aspects of bicycles and bicycling than were at the time I became serious about cycling more than three decades ago. People like Sloane are responsible, at least in part, for that. But it's weird to know that I know more, at least about some things, than the people from whom I learned. Yet I still feel as if I don't know about anything.
Then again, sometimes I feel the same way about writing, literature--and guys--and girls! Yet I'm still asked for advice about all of those aspects of life. And bicycles and bicycling.
