Owning It

Artisanal blog curation is essentially a service industry, and as such it is occasionally recumbent upon me to address customer feedback.  For example, recently I wrote a column for Outside about how self-driving cars freak me out, and in amongst the usual litany of comments on their Facebook page about how cyclists deserve to die I found this thoughtful critique of my work:

Christian Cutshaw The running columnist and the bike snob are both annoying, whiny, talent-less hipsters, who shouldn't be writing for Outside. Their articles are less about actual content, and more about having an enormous public audience to whom they can vent their frustrations, which are often excessive, pedantic, and hostile.

Does it make me a total hipster that I regard with bemusement and contempt anyone so out of it that they think I'm a hipster?  Seriously, what a rube.  For that matter, I feel bad for pretty much anybody who's still using the term "hipster" in 2018, since everybody knows the hipster sensibility went mainstream years ago and I think we're pretty solidly in the post-normcore era now.  (Though I can't say for sure, I'm pretty out of it, despite my trendy lifestyle and the fact I live in a neighborhood were "hip" means you wear a knit yarmulke.)

Then again, just hours after reading the above comment, I found myself riding a singlespeed bicycle:

To Brooklyn:

Where I ate lunch in the Whole Foods on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg.

Oh my god, I really am a hipster if it was ten years ago.

Here's another indignant comment I found right here on this very blog:

Anonymous said...

...now you're defending that corny artisanal boutique wood framed monstrosity. You know darned well that most any 'normal' frame would perform just as well with those components. I challenge you to race that bike & then switch frames and see which one is 'better' !!! Maybe do a time trial somewhere... and use a surly pacer or something similar as the replacement

APRIL 2, 2018 AT 9:43 PM

You know, eleven years into this blog I shouldn't have to hold your hand anymore, and certainly it's a given that any well-built frame that puts your components and body parts in the right places relative to each other is going to perform about as well as any other.  Furthermore, at no point did I claim that the "corny artisanal boutique wood framed monstrosity" performed any better than any other frame might have.  In fact, I said it performed worse, since its only water bottle mount is on the downtube and I've got to reach between my legs for it like I'm cleaning my scranus.

Indeed, now that I've been racing again I found myself wondering what bike I'd buy if I weren't a middle-aged Fred and semi-professional bike blogger with more bikes than I can ride in a week, and to that end I've found myself browsing the websites of the mainstream bike brands to stay in touch with the commoners who don't receive $10,000 bikes in the mail.  (Losers!)  Were I starting the whole bike racing thing from scratch today, I'd probably go with something like this:

Or this:

Or this:

All of which are relatively inexpensive by new bike standards and would leave you wanting for absolutely nothing if your focus is go-fast riding.  Indeed, for all my ridicule of expensive bikes over the years, it seems to me that if you ignore the ultra-high end bikes you get a lot more Fred sled for your money now than you did back when I started racing.

Of course, the fact is I don't need to buy a new bicycle, praise be to Lob.  I've also paid my dues over the years, both in riding bikes and in blogging, and as such I've got no compunctions about relishing the fact that when I get an occasional break from parenting I get to ride around on a "corny artisanal boutique wood framed monstrosity" that costs more than all three of those bikes combined while offering essentially the same level of performance.  It's not about going faster; it's about reaching a point in life where you enjoy the satisfaction that a team of Portland beardos had to toil away for hours for the sake of your leisure time.  (I have no idea if the people who work at Renovo actually have beards, but between the Portland and the bikes and the wood it would be incredible if they didn't.)  And sure, if the bike rode like crap I'd certainly say so, but the fact is it rides great despite its quirks, chief among those being the bottle cage.  Sorry to disappoint you.

Hey, I told you this was a service industry--it's just that the customer I'm serving is myself.

(And don't worry, once the Renovo insists on getting their bike back you'll find me astride a more humble velocipede.)

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