House of Eratosthenes

A few years ago an acquaintance of mine purchased one of these for an ungodly amount of money as his new daily driver. Three wheels, slung low to the pavement, with an enormous plexiglass bubble windshield rising in front of the handle bars, you rode it laying flat on your back with the pedals out front. I was skeptical of its utility as a commuting rig in Seattle with its notoriously shitty drivers, but running low on smokes I convinced him to let me take it for a spin down to the 7-11 for a fresh pack and a test drive. The first thing I noticed in attempting to mount the vehicle was that you didn’t mount it so much as you flung yourself into it, and once in it I was consumed with the thought of how I was going to get out of it without the mildly embarrassing spectacle of flopping myself out onto the blacktop belly first and then struggling to my feet. No matter. I fell into the seat without too much effort and took off. Hoping inspiration for a more graceful exit would come to me on the ride.

The second thing I noticed while piloting this thing was that due to its low aerodynamic profile, I was rendered invisible to the aforementioned shitty drivers of the cars I was sharing the road with. There was a long fiber-glass rod with an orange flag on top attached to the frame that was supposed to warn these drivers of my position in relation to the underside of their vehicles but this is just not the sort of thing that Seattle drivers, who are known for their ability to cross four lanes of rush hour traffic fifty feet from their exit simply by blindly turning the wheel and hoping for the best, are capable of deducing as every vehicle I approached would lock its brakes up while the driver leaned on the horn and shout obscenities down at me. By the time I had returned to the house I had consumed about half of my new pack of Camels in the attempt to soothe nerves jangled by numerous near wrecks.

Disappointingly, the hoped for graceful dismount had not materialized on the trip and as I rolled out onto my hands and knees, I told my acquaintance that this thing was the most useless device for transportation that I had ever encountered. He became visibly upset and began a long diatribe on the superiority of the recumbent bicycle over its more traditional counterpart. As I wearily listened to his verbal powerpoint presentation on aerodynamics, improved power train gear ratios, and increased cardiovascular efficiency while in a reclining position, it suddenly dawned on me why these things are so popular in liberal enclaves. They are the perfect metaphor for the progressive mind set. They are generally ridden by people obsessed with reinventing that which already works perfectly fine. They are easy to get into and exceedingly difficult to remove yourself from without looking like an idiot. They are more expensive, more engineered, and theoretically more efficient, at least on paper, than a traditional bicycle and therefore the rider is, as they will inform you ad nauseum, inherently superior to those on “lesser” machines. While the rider pedals nonchalantly through traffic confident in his theoretical brilliance, he pisses off everyone else on the road who would rather he just ride upright where they can see him so as to avoid an accident.

I shamelessly swiped this image from a site called 2 Blowhards, at which was posted another interesting observation to share.

My experience has been that, in almost every case, the rider of a recumbent bicycle is a wiry guy with a beard. I’m not kidding. I almost think that the factory making those bikes has a laboratory where they clone those riders.

Yes, I have noticed this as well. I see a lot of these out on the bike trails…and now that I think on it, 2-blowhards is right. I can’t think of a single exception. I have not seen a recumbent-bike-rider that looks like Charlie Sheen…or Adam West…or Kathy Ireland.

No, they all look like…like…where have I seen this before?

Ah —

Yes. That is the look. And that is the personality, too. It is a way of life. “People obsessed with reinventing that which already works perfectly fine.”

Some people need to be looked at. I don’t know the psychology of it, but my Drill Sergeant wold suggest that perhaps their mommies didn’t love them enough. It’s why they grow the scruffy beards (hey, look at me!), it’s why they build bikes that you have to lay down on (hey, look at me!). Any time you see someone walk into a room who has something going on that just smacks of some kind of visual effrontery, you are looking at a someone who really, really wants to talk to you about himself.

In high school I hung out with a group of skateboarding punk rocker types (at least we were convinced of it). One of the crew always dressed like a completely average joe, never used his appearance to demand that someone take note of him, which is what the rest of us were doing with our dyed mohawks and ridiculous clothes. He was still every bit as “punk” as the rest of us – actually more so, in the true spirit of punk rock – and now he is helping design aircraft engines for Rolls Royce. Methinks he had it right, from the get-go.

These recumbent cyclists and their ilk all have a uniform. Just like the bicycle messengers who wouldn’t be caught dead on a bike that just came off the shop floor without ripping out the gears and putting uncomfortable handlebars on it. I don’t usually go here, but it is a very liberal thing, this need for a uniform. It’s another grand distraction from honest representation, and a triumph of pretense over earnestness.
- Andy | 10/24/2010 @ 09:12
Morgan, I’m a bit surprised by your take on the recumbent bike. I want to focus only on that for the moment; I will ignore the comments about wiry bearded men and the need for lefties to wear uniforms.

Okay, you blogged about a week or two ago about taking a really long bike ride up into Newcastle from your home in Folsom, correct? You even posted your route on a Google Earth for us all to follow. (I want you to know, by the way, that it’s because of that post that I decided to wheel my bike down to a local bike shop and get it a tune-up. I am now regularly riding the thing…for the first time in two years.)

Anyway, that looked like a REALLY long ride that you took, first off…so it would stand to reason that you’d want the most comfortable bicycle possible. I would also think that you would share my concern about making sure that the saddle isn’t putting undue pressure on your prostate or other parts of male-only apparatus down there. (Yeah, my bike has one of those saddles with the groove down the middle that’s supposed to redistribute your weight; does that pass muster? I honestly don’t know.)

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the greater Sacramento are where we live, Morgan…is NOT Seattle. As I read the article you included, I couldn’t help wondering if the real complain wasn’t the recumbent bike at all, but rather the brash and inconsiderate car drivers he was sharing the road with. I’m not here to claim that Sacramento drivers win any courtesy awards, but simply to point out that our area has MANY miles of light-traffic roads. I am willing to bet that on that ride you too, you saw fewer than twenty vehicles per hours. As well, there is the 25-mile bike path along the American River upon which motorized travel is prohibited entirely.

I would think that given all this, you wouldn’t laugh at recumbent bikes. Were it not for the princely sum required to acquire one, I’d probably buy one myself; I’ve been itching to give one a try actually. But now that I’m hearing you saying that riding around on this is going to make me look like a pretentious left-winger? Hmmmm.
- cylarz | 10/24/2010 @ 18:25
[…] Complications Recumbent Bicycles Red Friday Totty…………. […]
- Killing and Reviving the American Dream with Marisa Miller | 10/24/2010 @ 18:37
All the same, after seeing the example photo above, I have this strange urge to go try one out 😉

I have a buddy who always thought he wanted one. Still doesn’t have one. And I will say, he is as far from the stereotype as I am. Maybe farther.

It just doesn’t look like a good idea to me. I might fall asleep on the road. zzzzzzzzz
- philmon | 10/24/2010 @ 20:57
… [Trackback]

[…] There you will find 22686 more Infos: peekinthewell.net/blog/recumbent-bicycles/ […]
- My Homepage | 11/30/2013 @ 02:13

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Recumbent BicyclesSunday, October 24th, 2010

Recumbent Bicycles
Sunday, October 24th, 2010