Real men drink pints

Don't worry, this is actually about gears, not beer, so bear with us. There's a saying back home, real men drink pints. There's also the somewhat sexist corollary, women can only drink half (pints). As such, the TA has even heard of a woman ordering a pint of beer in Scotland and being served said pint as two halves. Honestly.

Interestingly, this doesn't carry through when dealing with the insanely-strengthened Belgian beers so beloved by cyclocrossers. One wonders if this pintism isn't so much volume apartheid as it is alcohol apartheid. If regular beer is ca. 4% alcohol by volume (v/v), then a pint (ca. 500 mL) has about 20 mL of pure ethanol, whereas a 300 mL bottle of Duvel (8.5% ethanol v/v) has 25.5 mL of ethanol. What would happen to "men pints/ladies halves" thinking if Tetleys had the same alcohol content as Duvel we have no idea but we know we wouldn't go down Leeds City centre on a Saturday night! But we digress. Too much Hoegaarden perhaps; only 4.9% but the TA has always been a bit of a lightweight. We must have the dodgy ADH gene.

Anyway. Gears. This beer thing sounds frankly ridiculous doesn't it? But you'd be surprised how many people ask for a lower granny gear on their bikes, but when told to get a compact crank (50 Tooth and 34T chain-rings) instead of a racing double (53T/39T) the reaction is "but compacts are a girls' gear".

Really?

Continued on the TurnAround at trins.ca

Saddle, Horse, Man

Saddle, horse, man is an old cavalry adage that lists the order of priorities in which a trooper would look after his kit. Firstly he would look to his saddle (and all the other tack), then he would see to his horse and only then would he look after himself.

The same can be said for us as bike-riders, or at least that was what the TA was taught in our first bike-club (many, many, moons ago). This is not surprising perhaps, as many of us treat our bikes like horses. The stabling fees may not be as high, but the up-keep certainly can be (Dr Rob Klue DVM?)! We refer to saddling up, go for a trot in the country, bunch gallops and so-on. Maybe this is as far as we should take it; after all it used to be said, a touch cruelly, that the only brains in the cavalry were kept in their horses heads. Sure we're all an intelligent lot, by and large, but we all know some-one (I'm sure) who is regularly out-smarted by his (or her) Di2 controller!

Continued at the TurnAround's new home here (or here http://trins.ca/2011/07/saddle-horse-man/)

A history of aero

Triathlon is a new sport. We're pretty lucky about this. Take our rules, for example. Ratified only in the eighties, they were able to take into account new technology and changing societal attitudes not available to other sports. Take gender-equality; equal prize-money is right there, front-and-centre. Take that Boston Marathon! Or perhaps headphones; banned, outright, from the get-go. None of this prevarication and chin-stroking over the use of iPods in big-city marathons or the use of radios by professional cyclists.

On the other hand, there's a little sibling rivalry and, perhaps, we're always looking for a bit of validation from our parent-sports. Maybe that's why we jumped on aerobars when Greg Lemond won the '89 Tour by the thinnest of margins, and christened them tri-bars, because they'd come from triathlon. Well, they hadn't, they'd come from the Race Across America (RAAM) people, but triathlon got the cultural-meme nod and we're now using tri-bars, not RAAM-bars.

Continued on the TNS blog's new page here (or if links aren't working for you at http://trins.ca/2011/07/a-history-of-aero/)