Tip 117: Lift a bike

Choosing a bike is not easy, and the pressure in the bike shop is all too real. There's one thing anyone can do to look wise, and that's lift a bike up.

You need to make a face as you lift it.

• If it's light your mouth should turn down as your eyebrows shoot up.  
• If it's heavy your eyebrows crease down and your mouth stays still.  Don't show exertion.

BONUS TIP: Encourage any companions present to lift it. When they do, say "See?"

Tip 115: Wear a helmet inside

You may *know* you look dorky but subconsciously, you've forgotten. Otherwise you wouldn't have walked in wearing that stupid plastic hat.

No matter what claims are made about the charms of helmets - when you step off the bike, hotness rushes out like air from a thumb-tacked tire.

BONUS TIP: If you thought a Mohawk, a skinhead or a hijab were socially divisive, try wearing a helmet into a hipster bar.  Some tattooed douchebag will start up the helmet debate, and there'll be blood all over the ironic decor before you're able to leave.

Tip 114: Budget for a new bike

Half your savings?
Twice the monthly extra data costs on your mobile phone plan?
Fifteen times the cost of those totally sweet, ever so now brogues you just bought?
Every cent you've saved by eating two minute noodles that you actually ate only because you are too lazy to cook properly?
Every cent you'll save by not making it to old age, on account of a life-span shortened by trans-fats found in cheap noodles?

BONUS TIP: If you are bold - go large on your budget.
Take a little bit of debt to buy a bike, you'll have to work to pay it back.
Take a truly massive amount and ride around pleased as punch for a while. Then, when France and Germany suggest you should take a few austerity measures to pay it back, ride around throwing molotov cocktails at public buildings.
Complete the sequence by giving up the currency every one else uses, which will mean you never need to save again...

Tip 73: Ride through a head-wind

If your ride to work feels like slow-motion, it sometimes isn't the sisyphean nature of the day ahead holding you back.
The head-wind you face need not be the prospect of filling spreadsheet cells A1 to Z99 and determining the matrix product of the array, but a literal one caused by the coordinated relocation of large number of gas molecules.

BONUS TIP: Relish the opportunity to ride right through the middle of a big fucking metaphor.  On the way home you will have the wind at your back, but if the road rises up to meet you - on a bike - you've screwed up.

Tip 70: Register your dissatisfaction with the local bike-share scheme

 
Why not take a bike?
Because the law says I need a helmet, and I don't #@%&ing keep one in my top pocket!

BONUS TIP: Urban Riding Tips does not condone destruction, Melbourne. Contact your local MP, or more effectively - just keep not using them.  Something's gotta give.

Tip 57: Browse for a new bike

On eBay, gumtree, craigslist, you can ponder what it would be like to have a whole new cycling identity.
Ride a $45,000 sculpture made exclusively of carbon atoms taken from the ankles of Milanese catwalk models and grafted together by a direct descendant of Michaelangelo himself.
Or spend $29 on a Huffy that has clearly been left in the rain since it was last ridden in 96. "tiers need sum air - othrwise perfct!"

BONUS TIP: A bike been ridden "once" has been ridden >50 times.  Small scratches on the downtube are major structural weaknesses.  A 2009 model is a 2004 model.

Tip 38: Make a show of obeying the law

You're gonna stop at a light? Own it. 

Acceptable flourishes include the super-slow stop, the look-around, the impeccable posture, and the excessively careful acceleration. Don't waste this chance to show the world cyclists are citizens, upright and true.

BONUS TIP: *Tsk*ing at anyone else you see bombing that intersection is acceptable, but yelling has greater effect.  

Tip 37: Keep your old bike

An old steel bike can outrun a planned-obselesence avalanche.  While all others are leaping from 105 to Ultegra and Di2 like rock climbers on a pitch of loose shale, you (and your bank account) are still and solid.

BONUS TIP: Do you see Luke Skywalker upgrading his light sabre between Star Wars and Return of the Jedi? No. (although, that's probably only because it wasn't an Apple product.)

Tip 34: Ride with flat tires

Top track athletes train with tractor tires tied around their waists. Top archers shoot with their eyes closed. Top swimmers do laps with a brick in their speedos. You ride with flat tires.

BONUS TIP:  Refuse offers of pumps. Smile when they say you're crazy - it will make veins stand out in their foreheads.

Tip 31: Ride with your dog

When the The Call of the Wild grabs hold of you like some Nietzschean will to power, and you feel the urge to move to Alaska and mine for gold, start to assemble a team of dogs.

You will need beasts powerful in body and strong of heart, and an alpha hound to lead the pack. Sorting out the alpha dog is a process the hounds will take care of.  

After a month, perhaps two, of sleep interrupted by the cruel sounds of natural selection, you will have found your super-dog, red in tooth and claw.   

Commence to tame that dog by an assertion of dominance - affix to it a collar and drag it along on a trip to the shops. 

Cycling with dog

BONUS TIP: Cries of "Mush! Mush!" will not endear you to local animal lovers. Save that for the barren north.

Tip 29: Stop in front of someone who's stopped in front of someone

Who are these douche-bags? Is that a dutch bike?  Look at that guy's fringe! 
I reckon I can take him when this light turns green.  
I'll just stop here in front of the pedestrian crossing so I can take off first. 
etc. etc. ad infinitum.

BONUS TIP: Fundamentalists may get away with this manoeuvre on the basis that the reverse line-up, or shoal formation, is condoned in Scripture. 

 But many who are first will be last, and the last first. - Matthew 19:27-30

Even if you have the fish sticker on your bike, you will need to possess pretty sharp acceleration to receive forgiveness for this act.

Tip 27: Ride a bike that's too big

The gorgeous woman struts across the restaurant, all eyes on her. She doesn't know she is trailing a long strand of toilet paper from under her little black dress.
It flutters behind, getting caught around other diners' chair-legs as she lives in the moment.

So it is with a rider on a too-large frame. 

You are simply delighted to be riding with the wind in your hair.
Sure, you feel the strain in your triceps as you reach for the brakes. And you are mightily aware that top tube will make you a eunuch if you slide forward off that saddle. 
You don't know you look like a 16 year old who got a birthday present to grow into, and you won't really care until that mortifying moment someone tells you.

BONUS TIP: After you get your bike fitted properly, spend several happy years snarkily pointing out ill-fitting bikes all over town.

Tip 20: Think about removing your pie plate

It serves no function, but does it really serve no function?
Is removing it bowing to some sort of fashion police edict?
Would they put it on if it really did *absolutely* nothing?
Is this the first step to socklessly rocking boat shoes, or casually throwing on a Dolce and Gabbanna tie to ride your track set-up in a variety of shades of lime? Hmm.

BONUS TIP: Take it off, sure, of course. But leave those wheel reflectors on just in case.

Tip 8: Fall off on wet metal

You have drips in your eyes and a big stripe up your back.  A slippery feeling between your toes as your croc loafers prove less waterproof than the animal they're made of.  It's dim, and there's a mirage effect as headlights gleam up from the road.
You're on the brakes the whole time.  You are super careful, slow and steady, alert to cars stopping distances, studiously avoiding puddles of unknowable fathom. 
Until you get within a street of home and you lean into a corner.
Oh! That manhole cover must be new.
When the asphalt rushes up to caress your cheekbone it feels like a rusty razor found way down the back of the bathroom cabinet. Your trousers tear like tissue paper as you slide. It ends when you are lying still, feeling like you are taking a cold gritty bath with your bike.

 
BONUS TIP: If you are spread-eagled on a tram track, ignore the holes in your Lee denim and put a finger to the track.  If the steel is thrumming, you are about to be turned into strawberry jam.  Move!