The next morning, goaded out of bed about four hours earlier than my hangover would have liked, I had some tea and toast for breakfast, then suited up and jumped on my bike. Today was a manifold experiment: how long would Buckhaven to Edinburgh take along the Fife Coastal Path? Would a heart-rate monitor/cycle computer be useful? And most importantly, would the one-two punch of a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer and a Stuart’s scotch pie be the match of 60 kilometres of winding coastline?

This final question was an ad hoc addition to the day’s challenges, brought about by my complete failure to bring any cycling-friendly snacks with me in the first place. The caramel wafer was provided at my Gran’s house a mile or so along the road — a distance just far enough to warm up, followed by a tea break just long enough to cool down again — and the pie was safely ensconced in my backpack, bought at Stuart’s in Buckhaven before I left and ready for consumption somewhere down the road. A cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit, a pie and some lycra: my loins were girded.

I hit the coastal path just beyond Kinghorn, exchanging fast but worrisome B-roads for gravel paths and startled pedestrians for the next fifteen miles. It was a great day: cloudy but bright; cold but not windy, and I gradually forgot where I was as the miles rolled by. I’ve always been a bit less than enthusiastic about the south coast of Fife (familiarity breeding contempt, maybe) but it was a lovely cycle; the harbours, fishing cottages, old woods and train lines, with the quiet rustle and slap of the dark water of the Forth behind it all, put me in mind of a highland lochside.

I climbed up and over the Forth Road Bridge and freewheeled down into South Queensferry about an hour and three quarters after having left Buckhaven, rested my bike against a wall and collapsed, sweaty and smelly, onto a bench in the shadow of the rail bridge. My pie was calling.

This was no ordinary pie: Stuart’s are the founders of the World Scotch Pie Championships, and have won it countless times; their arch-nemeses W.F. Stark face them across College Street and snatched the crown a couple of years ago. This was a pie whose shell bore the weight of history, expectation and tradition. The fat had frozen into little white pools on the top of the crust, and yet this only made it more appealing. It was a glistening, golden-brown cylinder of meaty joy, and I ate it with gusto. And a coffee from a café over the road.

God, it was excellent. 500-odd calories of bakery genius, a smart-bomb of beef, mutton and lard, and it propelled me home over the last 15 kilometres. My heart-rate monitor told the full story: 60 kilometres, two and three-quarter hours and not one but four pies’ worth of calories expended. I was ravenous for the next two days.

You may recall that I bought an old Peugeot racing bike in Vancouver with the object of converting it to singlespeed. Well, the path to singlespeed enlightenment does not always run smooth, as I found out to my cost. (I will admit that I did not bear that cost alone: you bore it with me, dear reader, in the form of two thousand words of bicycle-related self-flagellation.) To recap: I’d found the last singlespeed French freewheel in the world, hooked it up with two spliced-together BMX chains, and replaced the original drop bars with a pair of hipster-ready bullhorns.

I started to commute by bike, a lovely trip through Vancouver’s leafy suburbs and across the Fraser River to Richmond. The weather was uniformly balmy, and over my couple of months of cycling to work I even acquired what might reasonably be called a suntan.

Unfortunately, the bike did not fare so well. In short order, both of the original 27″ wheels were knocked quite badly out of true; the bearings in the last French freewheel in the world gave up shortly afterwards and the pedal bearings followed. To ride the bike was to be assaulted by the scraping of brake pads against wobbling rims and the grinding of shafted ball bearings.

In repairing her, I caved. I drank the hipster Kool-Aid. I took the blue pill. More specifically, I bought deep-V track wheels, blue-striped tyres to match the frame, an indestructible Shimano freewheel, extremely awesome keirin-style pedals, and matching toe clips*. My bike was indistinguishable from a Commercial Drive hipster chariot, and my journey to the dark side was complete.

It was brilliant. For my last six weeks in Vancouver I descended (even further) into the domain of the bike nerd, taking part in a couple of Critical Masses, a couple of rides with the Vancouver Bicycle Club and one Midnight Mass, a small-hours ride around the traffic free city in the company of various bike messengers, fixie riders and sundry other ‘alternative’ types.

Then, of course, came the end of my stay in Vancouver, and I had to decide what to do the bike. Short of lugging it all the way down the west coast of the ‘States, there wasn’t much I could do other than leave it with someone in the city. Monica’s boyfriend Pete, a stand-up type of fellow with a keen cycling glint in his eye, offered to become the bike’s foster carer and so I left it in his capable hands. He has promised to keep ‘er oiled till I return, and I can’t ask for more than that.

* There’s a weird hero-worship within the singlespeed world for Japanese keirin components, which are stamped with the letters ‘NJS’. This says nothing about quality or suitability for purpose, only that they’re unlikely to spontaneously disintegrate, and yet an NJS-branded part will inevitably cost more and inspire a larger degree of singlespeeder lust. Hilariously, my NJS toe-clips were race approved, even if the rest of the bike emphatically was not.

• Me
• Chris
• Neil
• Devon
• Jesus
• my Dad
• 2010

In amongst all this, Coba Fynn have been recording an album; I built a cyclocross bike and then abjectly failed to enter any cyclocross races; the Project is finally under way again; and just the other day we took the Antiquary pub quiz by the scruff of its neck and gave it a thorough hiding. Good times! (And though that sounds sarcastic, it is not meant to be so.)

I’d met a guy called John at lunch in the office a few times. We’d chatted a bit about the Tour de France as it had been going on through August, and he’d mentioned that nearby Burnaby sported a fully enclosed velodrome. “I’ve been meaning to organise some beginners’ track lessons there, but we’ve always been one person short. Would you be interested?”

You’re damn skippy I was interested.

I turned up at the track after work on Friday, parked the car and pushed through the revolving doors*. The wooden track takes up the centre of the dome, leaving enough space at one side for changing rooms, offices and the like, but the corridor narrows down to barely a shoulder-width as it curves at the end. I followed voices along the curve under the eaves of the track, passing racks and racks of track bikes locked up under the banked corner, to find Pete, Monica and John already being fitted for their rental bikes. We were all kitted out in hilariously overcompensatory cycling clothing, and we were all shitting ourselves.

Claire, our instructor for the evening, picked out a bike for each of us — incredibly light Treks like this — and we wheeled them out through an underpass and into the centre of the track.

This was going to be scary.

The track is 200m long (too short for the Olympics, apparently) and is banked at 47° at each end. It’s the steepest track in North America, and if you don’t cycle at something like 30km/h around the corners then you fall off. It’s as simple as that. There were a few riders up there already, caning round and round to an astonishing cacophony of noises: tyres hummed over the lacquered wood, and the track creaked and groaned as the riders flew over it.

Claire explained the markings on the track to us: the côte d’azur, or ‘on-ramp’ at the bottom; just above it, the metre-wide sprinter’s lane bordered by a pair of red and black lines, and the blue stayer’s line about halfway further up. It seemed impossibly distant. “That’s where you wait during the Madison,” she told us. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you up there — and a bit higher — before the end of the night.”

We had a few laps of the côte d’azur to get used to our brakeless, fixed-gear bikes. The rationale here is that if track bikes did have brakes, all it would take is one twitchy rider in the pack to brake suddenly and there would be a massive pile-up. The consequence is that slowing down is much, much harder; you have to let your legs continue to move with the pedals but apply a bit of pressure as they come up from bottom dead centre. It’s possible to just lock your legs up, but do it with enough determination and the still-rotating pedals will catapult you up and over the handlebars†. I came close a couple of times.

After that we were encouraged up onto the straights, then back to the côte d’azur for the corners and eventually, once we felt we had enough speed, up onto the track for the whole lap. The sensation is exhilarating, and mortifying. With ten or twelve beginners on the track, our speeds were all over the place: some riders were caning round as if to the velodrome born; others were creeping around with tyres squeaking in protest at the lack of speed in the corners. Claire had explained some track racing etiquette — call out “Stick!” as you approach someone to overtake, or let them know whether you’re passing them on the inside or outside, for example — and rounding a corner was terrifying mixture of wall-of-death speed and dodgem manoeuvering. “Stick!” I’d yell. “Jesus — stick!” as a laggard ambled round in front of me, barely fast enough to keep from sliding off the track. All the while, the more gung ho riders shot by with an airy whoosh and occasionally a whoop of glee.

We went on to experiment with pace lines, where a team of four cyclists circle the track in single file, the front rider each lap peeling off to the back of the pack. We yo-yo’d forward and back like a horizontal slinky; no brakes might prevent sudden stops but it doesn’t make it any easier to keep a constant speed. After that, Claire led the entire gaggle up to the top of the track for a flying 200 metres, where you hurtle down to the sprinter’s lane by the infield for a flying lap. These were exercising enough, but finally we moved onto Madison drills.

The Madison is a slightly bizarre race between teams of two riders: one rider rests above the blue stayer’s line, cycling slowly to conserve their energy, while the other races around the sprinter’s lane at the bottom. When the pair swap over, the racing rider transfers some of his momentum to his teammate by linking hands and slinging him forward. We weren’t going to try this (most of us were still astonished by every lap we managed to complete without injury or mishap), but we were going to get part of the way there. First, Claire told us, “You’re going to be riding with your hands in the drops. No using the flat bits on top. Take one hand off the bars on the straights, then put it back on for the corners. When you’re happy with that, try riding an entire lap with just one hand. Then do the same with the other.”

Okay, okay, we nodded.

“And then, you’re going to pair up. One rider is going to stay on the black line” — as in, the 2-inch-wide strip of black tape at the top of the metre-wide sprinter’s lane — “and the other has the whole of the sprinter’s lane to move around in. The second rider will stay slightly behind the first, and rest their right hand on the first rider’s back. For one whole lap.”

I know this doesn’t sound difficult. Reading it now, it sounds like a piece of cake. But on that track, where the illusion of a smooth surface at a distance was replaced by a rippling, creaking, tramlining mass of wooden boards, and where the 47° banking had you almost more horizontal than vertical in the turns, it seemed like an impossibility. The riders in each pair would have to speed up and slow down respectively in the corners to make up for the different radii of their turns; the outside rider had to quite literally toe the line with as little deviation as possible, and the inside rider had the awful task of making it round the track one-handed at 20 miles per hour just to avoid falling over by default.

Pete and I paired up and gingerly headed off. A few laps in I could complete a circuit one-handed, staring fixedly at the boards in front of me and pedalling like it was the only thing keeping me from smashing painfully into the blue paint of the côte d’azur, because that’s exactly what it was. A few laps after that I held to the black line as Pete steadied himself in the sprinter’s lane with his hand on my back, and a few laps after that we swapped over and managed a second paired lap, this time with me wobbling along below and slightly behind him, managing to keep my hand planted on his back for one complete lap. We had all the coordination, grace and assurance of newborn calves on an ice rink, but we did it. We came down to the infield sweating with nerves, and, if I remember rightly, actually high-fived each other without even a hint of irony. Claire congratulated us, and we were happy.

I can now say without a shadow of a doubt that velodromes are awesome.

* The pair of fire doors next to the main entrance have a big sign on them: “Do Not Open Both Doors at Once!” I asked Claire the instructor about this and she told me that the ’drome has an air-supported roof — it’s basically a huge balloon which is kept rigid only by fans maintaining positive pressure inside it. Unfortunately, air-supported domes have certain problems, like collapsing when it snows.

† Fixed gear riders on the street get round this by doing a little hop: they lock up their legs as the back wheel comes off the ground and skid to a halt when it lands.

By the time I got to the starting line a mile or so away at Science World, the rain was belting down, and it continued to do so solidly for the next four hours. I met up with Monica & Pete, grabbed a free coffee and waited for our turn to start. We were off! The three of us stuck together for the first few kilometres, but Monica & Pete were only planning to do the 30-kilometre course (Pete had, of course, already cycled 80 kilometres that day before I’d even crawled out of bed) and so I made an effort to speed up and latch onto some semi-serious looking roadies who I presumed were going for the 60k.

The ride went by surprisingly quickly: I crossed the 30k mark thinking I’d done only half that, and my adopted peloton of roadies were dropping off faster than people wearing replica Team Astana kit had any right to do so. “Eat my single gear ratio,” I crowed to myself, although my triumph was short lived as I dropped my water bottle and had to U-turn to pick it up. I passed most of that same group again a few kilometres later and settled down to keep pace with a middle aged guy who seemed to be going at a reasonable rate. We blethered for a bit, out on our own now, and pushed on through the gritty rain.

We heard the finish before we saw it, with lots of volunteers and spectators clapping, whooping and clanging cowbells as people crossed the line. Now having just watched the final few stages of the Tour de France, I couldn’t help but feel the urge to top things off with a little Cav-esque dash to the finish.

“Mind if I go for it?” I nodded at the line to my companion.

“Be my guest!” he replied, and I got up on the pedals for the last hundred metres or so, grunting and gurning across the line in a pale imitation of a sprint finish. One of the clapping ladies shook her head sadly, clearly disappointed by my perversion of this charity ride into a solo TdF reenactment. “Young people today,” I could hear her think. “What a bunch of tools.”

Monica & Pete turned up a few minutes later, Monica having caught a flat tire soon after I’d left them. We wolfed down burgers at the free barbeque as the rain continued and then went our separate ways. By the time I stepped out of the shower at the flat an hour later, it had stopped raining and the sun came out. My sopping clothes were steaming themselves dry in the sun on the balcony.

Thank you all for sponsoring me! It was a great day despite the pouring rain, and doing it for a good cause made it that much more worthwhile.

On the downtown side, the bridge juts out from a lofty cliff and the ascent from there to the crest of the span is short and fairly innocuous. On the north side, though, you’re confronted with a steep, kilometre-long descent which disgorges you onto the shoulder of a busy freeway. We shot down it at ludicrous speed, the river two hundred feet below on the one side and 60 km/h traffic on the other, wheels thudding over the expansion joints and holding on for dear life. Having screwed my bike together myself, I had absolutely no confidence that it was going to hold together. How would it fail, I wondered? Would the bars come off in my hands? Would a brake cable snap? It was an interesting time: tyres humming, wind roaring in my ears, outraged pedestrians backed into the barriers and every clenchable part of my anatomy at maximum clench.

We whipped down onto the freeway shoulder intact, regrouped, and doubled back under the bridge onto the rolling coastal road to Horseshoe Bay. The sun gradually warmed things up, and I was sweating freely into my ludicrous new shorts by the time we careered down an equally terrifying hill into Horseshoe Bay itself. The 40-minute ferry ride to Langdale over on BC’s Sunshine Coast let us decompress a bit, and we set off again at a more sensible pace once we arrived.

The Sunshine Coast is nice little place, a strip of leafy coastline northwest of Vancouver which easily conforms to my “all picturesque scenery must look like the Scottish Highlands” test of aesthetics. It’s on mainland BC but the intervening terrain is too rugged for roads and so it’s accessible only by boat or floatplane. According to the guys on the ride, the inhabitants are mostly retirees, farmers, holidaymakers and a few demented Vancouver commuters. We stopped briefly in the town of Gibsons to refill our water bottles — it has a public well dispensing the one-time best drinking water in the world — and also so that I could have a brief, cathartic rant about the obvious lack of a bloody apostrophe.

We stopped for lunch at a place called The Gumboot Café. The nearby town, Roberts Creek (named, happily, after a man named Roberts and not the result of some typographical butchery), was once a staunch hippie hangout, and the smell of good old BC weed still filled the air of the patio. We sank a couple of beers and headed home as the sun reached its peak, shaded at times by overhanging trees, but otherwise sweating like bastards at each hill. I crawled into the apartment’s parking garage having done about 80 kilometres over the day, knackered but as smug as hell. Then I emailed Andy Birkett about it, and he told me that he averaged 65 miles per day for three weeks to cycle from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. My smugness evaporated.

Cycling’s an odd sport/hobby/pastime. Although everyone rides together, it’s difficult to chat much because of the need to stay in single file, and the hills inevitably mean that the train gets broken up as the faster and slower riders spread out; then, everyone stops for a break and the pent-up chat just tumbles out. It manages to be competitive and cooperative, personal and social all at the same time. In case my incessant writing about it hasn’t already made it clear, I kind of like it that way.

* This is almost the last Vancouver+cycling related post. I promise.

One afternoon I walked along to the beach at English Bay, taking a book to read but mostly just watching the people go by. To the uniformly tanned, strapping Vancouverites out for a day’s seaside promenade I must have looked like a malnourished heroin addict*: aside from me and a few homeless guys sunbathing fully clothed (I couldn’t help but imagine them soaking up the day’s warmth to carry them through the night like iguanas on a rock), almost everyone out for the day’s seaside promenade was baring their beach-ready bodies and playing frisbee or volleyball or skateboarding in the parking lot. I floundered around sweating a lot and collapsed against a log on the beach. It took me a while to acclimatise.

Eventually, though, I started to get into into the generally outdoors nature of the place. Although the bike wasn’t quite finished (more on that in a future post!), one Saturday I tagged along with a Vancouver Bicycle Club ride down to New Westminster, an apparently leisurely 45-kilometre route following the newly opened Central Valley Greenway along the Skytrain’s Millennium Line. It went surprisingly well: me and another home-brew single speeder kept up fairly well with the hardened touring types, even laying down the law on a hilariously steep hill by deploying the usual single-speed tactic of charging full pelt at the approach to build up momentum and finally panting to the top of the incline barely able to crank the pedals over. When you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

New Westminster happened to be hosting its annual ‘2009 Show & Shine’, a sort of concours-type vintage car show taking place on the main drag. I gawked at the Chevelles, ‘Cudas and Ramblers, and was generally a happy car nerd for an hour or so. We ate lunch down on the boardwalk and headed back in the afternoon as the skies turned grey.

Up to this point, I’d been sceptical of the need for ‘proper’ cycling clothing other than a decent jacket to help brave the Scottish winter. However, the ride back convinced me of the absolute necessity for proper cycling shorts with a chamois sewn into them. The internet is curiously silent on the definition of a ‘chamois’ in this context, so here, then, is my contribution to the sum total of human knowledge:

chamois n.

a piece of extra padding often present in cycling shorts, which causes the wearer to assume both the physical appearance and waddling gait of one wearing a nappy

It is, to put it bluntly, a combined ass-, balls- and perineum-protection device which stops the crotchal zone from becoming a raw, angry mess after a few hours spent in the saddle. I promptly bought a pair of lycra shorts thusly equipped and then another pair of more baggy shorts with which to cover up the shame of wearing the first pair. That, my friends, is how I roll.

* Ironically enough, I spent a year or so of my youth sporting a proto-buzz cut and a bomber jacket in emulation of Ewan McGregor’s portayal of Trainspotting‘s Renton, a fictional heroin addict. Unfortunately, having aimed at ‘faux heroin chic’, I hit ‘effete neo-Nazi’ instead.

This was the point at which the peculiarly French approach to standardisation first reared its ugly head. The Peugeot’s bars and clamp were a nice, round 25mm in diameter; nice, that is, only until it becomes apparent that this does not correspond to any other accepted standard. Italian road bikes use 26mm bars — and, imitating Cinelli and Campagnolo’s successes, so does more or less everybody else — while the mountain bike industry has settled on oversized, 31.8mm bars like the ones on my other bike.

There was, I thought, a ray of hope. Before the Italians entered the handlebar diameter arms race, there existed a more or less universal 25.4mm standard, used by most road bikes up to the 1980s, and which has since been kept alive by both Japanese Keirin racers and messenger-wannabes converting rustbucket Craigslist 10-speeds to fixed gear. Wannabes like me, effectively.

I did a bit of searching and found a few manufacturers offering 25.4mm bullhorns. Could I pry open the Peugeot’s clamp by .4mm without risking life and limb?

“No”, roared the internet in reply.

“Ah, just do it,” one of the mechanics in Mighty Riders told me.

So, purchasing a pair of Soma’s Urban Pursuit bars from him, I took the bike out onto the apartment’s tile-floored balcony and set to work. And work it did. In fact, dangerously incompatible four-tenths of a millimetre or no, the new bars slid into place with nary a squeak or a scratch. After that, everything fell into place: the brake levers fitted perfectly; new cables and housings made all the difference to the previously notchy braking action, and some new bar tape went on without any fuss.

Next up was the drivetrain. Having stripped off the derailleurs, I was faced with getting the existing cogs off the rear wheel, and again French cultural imperialism (metricism?) crashed the party.

No bike shop within metro Vancouver had the appropriate tool. Most of them pointed me towards Our Community Bikes, a charity-run bike repair shop up on Main Street, and so one day after work I gingerly entered the hippie chaos. They had me sorted out within minutes, pointing me towards a bin full of similarly obscure freewheel removers and explaining how to fit the tool into a vice and use it to get the cassette off. Result!

Next, eBay furnished me with a freewheel, a 16-tooth, French-threaded number. I say “a freewheel”, but as far as I could tell, it was in fact “the only freewheel”. To say that this particular variety is like hen’s teeth would be to considerably overstate the case, and the useful lifetime of the bike may now be exactly the same as however long this single component holds together. That’s not to say that there aren’t more kicking around somewhere; I have no doubt there’s a box of them sitting in the back room of some cycling shop in the Pyrenees, a grey-whiskered bike mechanic smoking roll-ups on his porch and awaiting a passing trade which ended when Eddy Merckx dropped Peugeot for the Italians in 1968. But he sits and smokes anyway, while bike nerds the world over have a collective aneurym over the scarcity of period-correct single-speed freewheels.

But I digress.

I took the big chainring off, leaving the 40-tooth inner ring, and applied my shiny new BMX chain. Problem #1: the freewheel might be a BMX-friendly 1/8^th inch wide, but the chainring was an inconsiderately standards-compliant 3/32^nd instead. Hoping to land an inexpensive 1/8^th replacement (after all, with the World’s Last Freewheel already in my possession, my options for changing that were somewhat limited), I did some more research. And of course, French chainrings use a different sizing scheme from everyone else, and no-one makes them any more. I gritted my teeth. This was annoying, but not insurmountable; the worst that could happen is that it might be a bit noisy. I pressed on.

Problem #2: the chain was too short. I just about threw it over the balcony at this point. What the hell else was left to go wrong? I traipsed back up to Mighty Riders, bought another chain of the same type, spliced them together and hooked up the drivetrain.

Praise Jebus. I took it for a test right. It was done!

Except it wasn’t.

(To be continued, although perhaps after a blood-pressure-relieving interval.)

My plan, after buying it, had been simple: ‘chop and flop’ the existing drop handlebars — the extension of my elbow is still that bit too restricted for drop bars — remove the derailleurs, big chain ring and rear cassette, and replace all of them with a single BMX freewheel. Voilà: instant single-speed credibility and injury compatibility for the price of one measly cog. What could possibly go wrong?

Let me count the ways.

First, I made the mistake of having the handlebars chopped along at Reckless Bikes, a shop simultaneously more haughty and less knowledgeable than any of the others I subsequently visited. The guy helping me out had little idea of what I wanted him to do, and little interest in doing it.

“You want me to chop the ends off?”

“Yes. It’s called ‘chop and flop’. You flip them over after you’ve cut them and use them like bullhorns. You’ve never heard of this?”

“‘Bullhorns’?”

This bike shop lackey, working in perhaps the single-speed capital of North America, where every second bike is a polished steel Bianchi Pista with a coloured chain and a single cog on the back, where the fixed gear community and their dazzling array of custom Nitto handlebars can be seen at every grungey watering hole on Commercial Drive, could not grasp my plan. In hindsight, he looked and acted more like a fratboy than a hipster. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders, muttered “It’s your funeral,” or something to that effect, and got to work. I watched him as he stripped off the old, grimy bar tape, unscrewed the brake levers and worked the bars out of the clamp. He fixed them in a vice, blew out a deep breath and looked blankly at the bars.

“Where do you want them cut?”

“Here,” I said, erring on the side of caution and indicating a point so that there would be plenty of bar left.

“Okay. Well, why don’t you take a seat outside and I’ll bring it out when I’m finished?”

To cut a long story short, he cut the bars too short.

He wheeled the bike out with a look on his face which managed to be sheepish and defensive at the same time.

“So, er, what do you think?”

He had emasculated my bike. This moron had lopped about an inch more off each side than I’d wanted, leaving the bars ever so slightly asymmetrical, and still had the temerity to charge me $20 for the honour. With the old brakes reinstalled on the vestiges of the bars there was barely any room left for my hands to grip. I wobbled home, fuming and awestruck at this utterly undoable balls-up.

Back in the apartment, I stared at the bike, which stared back accusingly in turn. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I can reclaim an inch or so of handlebar if I can fit a pair of time-trial brake levers into the stumps remaining and make them at least slightly useable again. A few phone calls turned up a pair of TT levers in a bike shop over on the other side of town, so off I went.

My destination was Super Champion, on Main Street in the downtown eastside ghetto. The walls are arrayed with pristine fixies with coordinating deep-V rims, coloured chains, Brooks leather saddles and shiny drop bars sans bar tape*, all of them the absolute height of fixed gear sophistication. I looked around in the humbling knowledge that my Craigslist special would forever be a redheaded stepchild in the cutthroat world of bicycle couture. Specialising in faux messenger attitude, the staff understood exactly what I wanted to do with my handlebars and would probably have encouraged me to buy a set of $90 Nitto moustache handlebars instead, or maybe even just steered me in the direction of a gleaming $750 Pista to save me the bother of getting my hands dirty, had they not been rendered careless by the reefer whose aroma which filled the shop. A straggly-bearded guy wearing a T-shirt for a defunct Italian bike company and sporting a thousand-yard stare to go with it sold me the brake levers with a minimum of fuss. “You know, if you’re trying to fit them to chopped bars you might have a bit of trouble,” he mused. “Sometimes they aren’t straight enough.”

You know what? He was right. I wobbled home again, tore the new brakes out of the packinging, and tried to slide them into the ends of the handlebars. They would not fit. The tiny amount of curve left at the end meant that the cylindrical barrels of the brakes wouldn’t go more than a couple of millimetres inside the bars. Perversely enough, they would only have worked if the Reckless fratboy had cut even more off them.

(To be continued.)

* The absence of bar tape is ubiquitous among the fixie elite these days. Practicality be damned; fixed gear bikes seem to be on a road where every last ‘unnecessary’ component — brakes, mudguards, and now bar tape — is left off the bike. I strongly suspect they’ll wind up using tillers instead of handlebars.