The Curious Case of Cyclists

I’m back from my two week blog sabbatical and today I want to try to formulate my opinion on those spandex-loving, pedal pushers that we call cyclists. You know what they say about opinions; they’re like A-holes, everyone has one but mine’s the only one that doesn’t stink. Coincidentally cyclists are sometimes like A-holes too. Sometimes. When I started running I was one of those annoying people who waved at everyone else on the path; runners, cyclists, rollerbladers, dog walkers, squirrels and speed-walkers. If you were out there exercising then we were kindred spirits and I figured the decent human thing to do was to acknowledge each other. Can you guess which of the aforementioned groups proved to be least likely to return my smiling head nod? If you answered ‘squirrels’ you’re absolutely right, but cyclists were only slightly behind them, scientifically proving that cyclists are only slightly smarter than squirrels.

Now I’m pretty sure that I have some cyclists that read Half-Fast (at least I did until I wrote that first paragraph) and I know I have some triathletes who visit, my wife for one, so please hear me out before you go getting all offended or leaving me nasty comments or putting my pillow and some blankets on the couch. This past week I had the misfortune of being accused by a cyclist of being a ‘douchebag’ and showing signs of ‘douchetardation’ in my very own comments section, which is annoying because I thought ‘douchetardation’ was pretty funny. Anyway, I’m probably projecting my displeasure at that one cyclist onto all cyclists which is a lot of fun for me, but completely unfair to cyclists in general. I hear that painting people with a broad brush and creating stereotypes is not a nice thing to do and can apparently be quite insulting, not to mention that it could lead to me being wrong about something which would be a travesty. Just as there are a few runners who are idiots (I can think of at least three), I’m sure that there are only a few cyclists who are idiots and the rest are probably nice people. For example, I bet all of you reading this are of the nice variety (read: please don’t be mean in the comments, I’m a crier).

Still, there’s a part of me (the part of me that sucks at cycling) that wonders if there really are nice cyclists out there. Take the Fat Cyclist for instance, on the one hand he is a cyclist and a law-breaker. On the other hand he has a blog that’s well worth reading, a writing style that I find quite similar to my own (i.e. plenty of baseless braggadocio and sarcasm except immeasurably better all-around) and he has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity which would indicate that he’s a nice person. It’s so confusing. Could it be that cyclists are people too? Can it be that they deserve equal rights, even equal access to the roads? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they do because I’m a forward thinker like that. Cyclists, you’re OK in my book. I can imagine what a sense of relief you’re feeling knowing that you have my approval, but there’s no need to thank me.

So go ahead fellow runners, add a cyclist to your reader. You’ll feel good about having some diversity in your reader and you’ll realize that there’s more to life than running.