Tip 122: Collide with your mate

Friend, lover, team-mate or mother, you think you're on a wavelength but you're not.
You might be in the middle of a conversation about the European Central Bank, or an excellent new cat video when suddenly:

You make a turn it was obvious you both should take; or
They make a turn without warning.

All of a sudden knees are touching, brake levers are scraping along knuckles, someone is squealing like a macaque and if one of you doesn't hit the ground soon, you both will.

BONUS TIP: The remainder of the ride will feel like an 800 mile epic through a landscape of frigid silence, punctuated with sightseeing stops at the sulphuric geysers of fault and blame.

Tip 111: Get your smug on

Pass a guy, who can't be more than 21, wearing a tie, in a BMW, stuck in traffic, and just try to not get your smug on.
You can't help it.  As you blast by his 318i the look of self-satisfaction spreads over your face like a "One Less Car sticker" spreads over the top tube of a second-hand Repco.

BONUS TIP: As they say, silent smugness is wasted smugness. But shouting at SUV drivers is déclassé and lecturing your friends is so undergraduate.
Express your smugness clearly but quietly - carry your helmet with you all day, leave your right pant leg rolled, or wear spit all over your shoulder and a big smile.

Tip 107: Pedal squares

Regular quadrilaterals got a bad name until concerned hipsters mounted a thankless campaign to rehabilitate their image: sporting square-frame spectacles; rocking checked shirts; and promoting suffocating conformity.
Newly endorsed by the cool set, your defective pedalling technique will no longer be a source of derisive glances, but of seething envy.

BONUS TIP: When everyone's buying up John Lennon glasses and tie dye, you will know it is time to research  how to "introduce power tangentially to your pedal action." Until then, just have the phrase on hand so you are ready to appear avant-garde.

Tip 106: Wimp out

Others ride, you drive. You cruise the roads with your elbow in the air, singing the Beach Boys and making those harmonies ring. Your hair is like a sculpture by Damien Hirst, your armpits are as dry as the surface of the moon, and you draw people's eye as you meander here and there in the chinos everyone will be wearing next season.
You feel electric that night and have literally the best bowl of muesli ever next morning. 

BONUS TIP: Each time everyone sits around to reminisce about the time they rode out to Upper Fieldton you will fall silent, stare into your beer stein, espresso cup or bidon. Your jaw will slacken and your posture will droop and as they laugh you will feel the pealing regret of a life half-lived.

Tip 102: Suck at running

Equating, conflating, exaggerating, whatever you want to call it, it's easy to imagine all those pedal strokes make one a cheetah-swift runner. Ballerina like in grace and rhinoceros like in power. The reality is the most ridiculous pain through feet legs back and lungs and giving up heinously close to home.

BONUS TIP: Do not be tempted by triathlon.  Would you set out to make a bloody Mary if you only had tomato juice? Make a BLT with just lettuce? Buy neapolitan ice cream that was all strawberry? Consume a breakfast cereal that just snapped?

Tip 97: Pump up your tyres at the servo.

Too prudish for the licentious actions of the hand pump?
Get your tyre food down at the service station.
Be careful though.
Like the buffet at Sizzler, it's hard to know when to stop and you could easily pop, spraying all the other diners with dubious lasagne and high-fat soft-serve.

BONUS TIP: With the passing of peak oil will come the passing of peak smugness, as cyclists stop cheering the demise of Shell, Exxon-Mobil, et al, and wearily face a future with a lot of hand-pumping.

Tip 93: Ride to work day

It turns out you will enjoy the proliferation of bemused noobs, the silly outfits, even the bike traffic jams.
But you will have to endure your personal passion becoming the kind of fleeting obsession Justin Bieber should have been.

BONUS TIP: So how does it feel when you carved out a tiny cave and now everyone wants to visit it?

Well, there's the honey taste of vindication, mixed with bitter yearning for the space you used to have. Like a suitcase full of soup and another one of gelati, those flavours are hard to hold onto both at once.

Special Bonus Cadel's Mum picture!

Cadel's mum Helen  rides 20km to work and is a total bike hero in this town.

Tip 85: Let your significant other dictate how many bikes you own

Once there are bikes in the bedroom and the loungeroom, and the many important differences between a cyclocross bike and a fully rigid mountain bike are something you can no longer successfully explain, you may realize there is a hidden clause: Til death do us part, except if another effing bike shows up in this house.

BONUS TIP: Steal back your independence by letting loose on cycling jerseys.

Tip 83: Spit on yourself

The biology of saliva, phlegm and snot is clear to cyclists: Cycling makes them happen. (Tips et al, Nature, Vol 12, pp.1264-1289, 2011)
The physics are a whole nother matter. Generations of cyclists remain mystified by why - when you spit out into all that fast moving air - it is so rarely whisked away, and so often splattered all over you.

BONUS TIP: The sociology of phlegm splatter could be a whole journal.
When you stop to buy coffee and don't know you have spit all over you, it's ok. Post-ride, when you realise you have been riding for team snot-rocket, emotion surges through you.

Tip 82 : stop and help

If you see someone up to their armpits in chain grease and confusion, be a good samaritan.

Did you know the Samaritan were a detested underclass? Social outcasts out of the era, expected to be no good ( just like the modern hipster).

BONUS TIP: That's why it's so amazing the Good Samaritan stopped to help that guy carry his cross that day. The good samaritan put the cross in his pannier, and dinked Jesus all along the road to Damascus. Jesus forgave the awful pedalling technique, and they snacked on loaves and fishes, at their last supper together.  Later they parted ways forever. although the Good Samaritan was sure he saw him again on the road three days later.

Tip 75: Put your lights in your pockets

Forget the effect on your slinky silhouette, you can't leave those Knogs on the bike. 
You're going to have to put them in your pockets or they'll be gone before you're down the block.  Jam them in there with your phone and wallet, and if it looks like your pants have the mumps, so be it

BONUS TIP:  If they accidentally turn on later when you're on the dance-floor, it will look like there's a whole other disco going on in your pants. Can that be a bad thing?

Tip 65: Start a bike blog

The stream of party invites, the blow and ingratiating SMS's from network executives are obviously transient.
But if you invest the money you make wisely (I commend to you a balanced portfolio keeping at least a mill in Chris King headsets) you can drop the annoying writing-of-posts part after mere months and buy a yacht with a teak velodrome foredeck.

BONUS TIP: If Wildcat Rock Machine can get a book deal, well, the publishing industry must be giving them away. Or Something.

Tip 60: Tear your trousers in your chain

Here's how it goes - you're wearing Daffy Duck socks, so you forego the rolling up of suit pant that normally exposes such a beautifully defined calf. Instead you throw caution to the wind. An unpropitious gust immediately blows that fine fabric back between the teeth of the cog and the grip of the chain. Putain de merde!

BONUS TIP: The size of the tear that results is a fair power meter. If the rent proceeds to the thigh, you may well be Cadel Evans. Thanks for reading, Cadel.

Tip 48: Try mountain biking

Trees are the cars of mountain biking, but if one collides with you, it's harder to get your buddies to back you up that it wasn't your fault.

BONUS TIP: squirrels are the pedestrians of mountain biking - constantly emerging from nowhere and risking their skinny mammalian necks. Big jumps are the police cars of the forest - audacious riding will be punished and meekness rewarded. Swallow your pride, rookie. Dismount and walk past, if you have to.

Tip 39: Put up your seat

Proof weight goes straight to your behind?  The mass there is stretching the space-time continuum so that the longest one centimetre in the world is that one centimetre too far you put your seat up.

Your taint is screaming for mercy, your pedal stroke is as efficient as a burger-flipper on Oxycontin, and if that truck pulls left you will turn to strawberry jam, because you damn sure can't reach them brakes.

BONUS TIP: At that altitude, air is thin, and you may have a vision of the vast Allen key forest.  Climb down.

TIP 26: Worry about noises

Fzzzzzzzzzzzz. Hmmm.

Flt flt flt flt. What the?

Click click click Shit click click click Shit click click click Shit click click click Shit click click click Shit

Grrzzhhhhdnk. Sounds like I'm asking for extra overtime this week.

Clunk grrr pop.  Well, I have never heard *that* before. Gonna need to spend some time on Sheldon Brown tonight...

BONUS TIP: Earplugs?

Tip 24: Comment on BikeSnob

You've perused the back catalogue and you read religiously.
You know a collabo from a colourway and were recently delighted to learn how hipsters are just mulch.  You venerate the man and his helper monkey, Vito.
It's time to step up and comment. If you're Pacific-Occidental, like this blog, the only way to compete for a podium position is to be up and on the internet at some weird time.  Even then, without a sharp trigger finger, you could easily be squeezed off the top ten.
No. For you, a well considered comment in the top 50 is the goal. Rake through the pile of leaves in your brain, looking for a thought not yet withered and autumnal. Add snark, and set to!

Bonus Tip: The true goal is to make it into a post.  Try taking a video of a hipster beating on a cop whose car is blocking a bike lane.

Tip 22: Hang your helmet on your handlebars

The first people to dangle stack-hats from their Oury-brand grips were a small group of History Professors.
They had read how Hernan Cortes, on arriving in Mexico, had his men burn the boats they  arrived in.  Removing the safety net meant his soldiers would brook no retreat. 
These wise professors saw a parallel in cycling.
Perhaps it could be made safer in a counter-intuitive way.  Your head, they reasoned, is the soliders and your helmet the boats, with their false promise of security.
(Of course, your handlebars are the flames and the road an angry phalanx of Aztec warriors).
Around the holly-oaked lanes of Oxford, untold dozens of injuries to some of the most valuable heads in academe were avoided through this time tested logic.

BONUS TIP:  One unpropitious spring day a history professor revealed the helmet strategy (and its historical antecedent) to some Business school faculty over scones at College. 
The Business School professors started spruiking the historical lesson in their flimsy best-sellers on the strategy of business and copied the helmet routine to boot.
The only time Oxbridge neurology wards got any work was when a business professor and a history professor both rounded a corner in the gloaming, and collided.
The boat burning strategy can't work if both sides do it.

Tip 19: Slip off your pedal and hit your shin

If cycling is a spreadsheet of good and bad, then lurching down as you slip off your pedal and feel the sharp part of it tear the thin cover of flesh and nerves on your shinbone is a big entry in the bad column that will cause the total to just look like #####. 

 BONUS TIP: Adjust column width.

Tip 17: Get Gloves

Scene: You, hands in pockets, waiting at lights on a Very Frosty morning.

Fully Kitted Middle-Aged Man who rolls up behind you: Cold hands eh?

You: Hm?

FKMAM: I see you have cold hands!

Y: Oh. Yeah. It is a bit cold!

FKMAM: I don't know how you do it without gloves!

Y: I've been meaning to get some. Mumble.

FKMAM: I ride so much, I've got three pairs, thin, medium and these ones.  I look out the window each morning and decide which ones to wear.

Y: Really?

FKMAM: It's also good if you fall off cause otherwise you'll take all the skin off your palms.

Y: Oh yes.

FKMAM: You should get some.

Y: Sure.

FKMAM: Promise me you really will.  It sounds like you're just saying you will.

Y: *watching desperately for light to change*  OK, OK!

BONUS TIP:  You are going try to burn off FKMAM when the light goes green. Do not fall. Your pride can't take it.