FLAMME ROUGE
Emmulating the pros is easy, muses the Doc – until, of course, it starts raining
When I think of the Giro d’Italia over the last few years, I think of many things. I think of third weeks that make your legs hurt just looking at the profiles. I think about an awful lot of Covid-19. And of Geraint Thomas falling off in all sorts of ways that really aren’t his fault.
But mainly I think of rain. And wind and snow, and riders struggling to put on jackets because their hands are too cold to find the arm holes. Last week, on a stage shortened because of the rain and cold, the weather was still bad enough for a fan to ski past the bunch on one of the descents.
But here is a strange thing. Most of us love to feel a kinship with the pros. We train like them, we buy Oakley glasses and Soudal grout. We ride the high mountains to feel the same broken tarmac and the same gradients.
We do not go and ride in driving rain and single digit temperatures. We do not do it equipped with pro rain jackets and ass-saver mudguards. We do not stand in the bathroom afterwards fishing grit out of our ears with a hotel housekeeper’s entire supply of cotton buds.
We love suffering like the pros. We brag about how hard cyclists are. Right up till the first rain cloud heaves into view. Runners, rowers and deep-sea divers all do it in the rain. The only athlete more ombrophobic than us is a cricketer.
Most of us anyway. There are a few hardier souls. For a while I was one of them. One winter when I was a student I decided that to hell with the turbo trainer (always difficult in a college room), I was going to train on the road come what may. I bought some mudguards and a boil-inthe bag rain jacket and carried on.
It was absolutely fine. The riding downsides were small – your bike ends up looking a ploughed field on wheels, but you can fix most of that by banging it against things as you carry it up the stairs of a college accommodation block, and you can fix whatever is left by banging it against the same things going back down
How To… make a How To video
There are many reasons to make a How To video. You might be a manufacturer trying to skimp on printed instructions. You might be a YouTube attention seeker. Or you might be an altruist who genuinely wants to help strangers install their bottle cages the right way up.
To script a How To video, start with a title page. This should display for approximately three times as long as it takes to read it and ideally have a typo. After that, cut to a shot of yourself. Introduce yourself, at length. Don’t forget to include your qualifications to make a video, your enthusiasm for cycling in general, the names of your pets, where you went to school, and what you just had for lunch.
Then tell any remaining viewers what tools they might possibly need. Explain
