First Person

Bend Bulletin: Confessions of a Leg-shaving Cyclist

Published: Sept. 14, 2017

I had never cut myself so badly while shaving before. My razor snagged on a piece of skin and, none the wiser, I kept pulling until I noticed the ruby-red blood streaming past my toes toward the shower drain.

Glancing past my knee, I saw that I’d unzipped the outside of my ankle.

From my razor, I pulled a linguine-shaped ribbon of skin and winced as much in embarrassment as I did in pain.

I’m 34, and I have been shaving my face since ninth grade when my dad told me I should “clean up that dirt” on my upper lip. My acquired handiness with the shaving blade, I learned, didn’t translate to my lower extremities.

Since I joined a cycling team and began road racing this spring, I’ve shaved my legs once or twice a week. I shave pretty high up — otherwise my leg hair resembles a weird, very hiked-up skirt. I admit I like how my legs feel, allowing that I have a tissue in hand to blot the inevitable nicks I introduce to my shins. Aside from a repulsed grocery store employee who gave me a once-over, I’ve shifted seamlessly into my new identity: road racer, and unapologetically so.

You’ve probably heard most of the justifications regarding leg-shaving. But here are the three primary and completely practical reasons for doing so, which the cycling world stamps on the back of our membership cards for easy reference:

1. Road-rash. Wounds are easier to clean, dress and keep from getting infected if you’re not picking out bits of hair with tweezers.

2. Ease of massage. This is more of a pro-cyclist thing, where getting body work after every race or demanding workout is de rigueur. And perhaps paid for by a sponsor.

3. Aerodynamic advantage. Say no more.

Frankly, I always thought the third justification was flimsy. It turns out, it has recently been proven that leg shaving provides a demonstrable aerodynamic edge.

In a 2014 wind tunnel study, Specialized Bicycle Components found that cyclists saved 50 to 80 seconds during a simulated 25-mile distance by shaving their legs. That’s a substantial advantage in road races where the difference between first and 14th place can be less than a minute.

For some cyclists, however, the ultimate motivation is to keep with tradition, which is a weeny way of saying “following the crowd.”

“Let’s be honest. What good reason would weekend warriors like us have to shave our legs? Because it’s PRO, that’s why. It’s all about your dedication and commitment to the sport. Shaved legs are the trademark of a serious cyclist,” according to an article on CyclingTips.com.

And a serious cyclist I had become. Or did I have to shave to officially become serious?

Dress for the job

Previously, during any of Bend’s handful of group rides, I mostly fit in: I had the road bike, the spandex get-up and the sweet wrap-around shades. About half of the riders, even the fast ones, kept their leg hair — aerodynamics be damned. But joining a racing team changed everything. Once spring racing warmed to summer and we removed our leg-warmers, I realized something when the field rolled to the starting line: I was practically the only person with leg hair. Despite the fur, I felt naked and eyed with suspicion. Hadn’t I gotten the memo? Did I know how to ride in a straight line? What kind of liability would I be in a fast-moving pace line? Cyclists even have names for the kind of clueless racer I was suspected of being: a Fred.

Local triathlete Hans Bielat is decidedly not a Fred. He assured himself of this by lathering up his legs when he began road racing at age 15.

“The main reason for shaving your legs is fitting in,” Bielat said. “I was showing up on these group rides with these really, really fast guys, and I didn’t want to be the so-called Fred. I wanted to hang with these guys. I wanted to beat ’em. So I had to join them.”

Bielat, now 42, has shaved his legs for 27 years.

“My wife sometimes questions why I do it. When we first started dating, (that) my legs were smoother than hers made her a little self-conscious,” Bielat said with a laugh. “She would ask: ‘Is it tradition?’ Yes. ‘Is it aerodynamics?’ Yes. If I crash will it make it easier to clean the wounds? Definitely yes.”

Aerodynamics is not something Bielat takes lightly. Not only does Bielat pilot Boeing 737s for Southwest Airlines, he’s the co-owner of TorHans, a company that makes aerodynamic accessories for triathlon and time trial race bikes. Since Bielat shaved his legs — and arms — before finishing 11th at the Ironman Canada triathlon a month ago, he hasn’t touched a razor.

“I have the hairiest legs I’ve had in years,” he said, adding that despite not having any immediate races, a fresh shave is on the horizon. “It’s coming soon. After I have a new, fresh set of legs, they feel better for some reason. I don’t know why.”

Wes Kapsa, a mid-pack triathlete, met me for a road ride on Skyliners Road. His tri bike, fit with aero handlebars, was incongruent with his wind-grabbing, hairy legs. Kapsa doesn’t shave his legs because he thinks even the advantage demonstrated by the Specialized study is negligible.

“There are other ways I can shave time off my races,” Kapsa, 41, said. “For example, during (recent) Ironman Canada, I stopped to run into the woods to pee three times. That’s probably six minutes right there,” he said. “This year, I’m planning on doing what most other triathletes do, which is pee while riding the bike. It means I’ll have an interesting conversation with my 4-year-old, who just recently stopped peeing himself.”

Having raced since 2002, Kapsa teems with leg-shaving opinions, many of which he articulates in rule form:

Rule No. 178: At 5 feet, 8 inches, 148 pounds (his specs), unless you are an elite Category 2 racer or higher, you cannot shave your legs.

Rule No. 245: If you do shave your legs, you cannot do it in the men’s locker room. “I equate locker-room leg-shaving to be worse than nail-clipping and maybe second to masturbation.”

Rule No. 118: You must have more than three bikes to shave your legs.

Kapsa enumerates these tongue-in-cheek rules for comic effect — they’re really just boundaries he sets for himself to make sure he doesn’t get too carried away with his training.

Reluctant obedience

Brandon Gallagher, a teammate of mine on Murder of Crows, might be the least enthusiastic leg-shaver I’ve ridden with. He was glad his legs were freshly shorn, however, when he went down hard during a Category 3 race at the Worthy Brewing Criterium Series earlier this summer. After striking a pedal on an uneven turn, Gallagher, 41, slid on his side along the rough pavement, ripping his spandex kit and earning mean, blackened burns on his hip, calf and arm. After receiving a free lap and ultimately rejoining the race to earn fifth place, Gallagher said scrubbing his wounds and reapplying bandages was made easier by his hairlessness. Caring for the injury on his arm was a little more complicated by hair, he said.

Still, the driving force behind Gallagher’s ritual, by which he only abides during the summer months when legs aren’t covered by leg warmers, is looking the part of a serious bike racer — for safety’s sake.

“If you’re racing with people, and you’re inches away from their wheels and their shoulders, you kind of have a certain level of trust in their capabilities. If I see someone in there who doesn’t have shaved legs, I personally stay away from them. They have something weird going on.”

There are mixed opinions about his shaving at home: “My leg shaving might bother my wife, but my two kids don’t care.” But Gallagher delighted in discovering that hairlessness makes applying sunscreen a much smoother proposition.

“It’s so much nicer, actually,” he said. “It makes me think I should shave my chest, too.”

To shave year-round?

A week after my shaving mishap, I’d let my legs sprout fields of little black weeds. The cut on my ankle now resembled a pencil-width strip of bacon that sometimes cracks and congeals with the fibers of my socks. This morning with hot water flowing in my shower, I propped my foot on a ledge. I nervously began running a pink “lady’s razor” up my shins in columns. As usual, specks of blood punctuated the streaks of shaving cream, yet when I was finished, the stinging was minimal.

As cooler weather arrives, along with seasons of cyclocross and eventually nordic skiing, I wonder whether I’ll maintain this new shaving habit. After rubbing lotion into my legs to sooth some minor irritation, I realize I like how my legs look: toned, strong, if severely farmer’s tanned by cycling shorts and socks.

When I impatiently awaited puberty in early high school, I yearned for hairy legs. Now that my fixation on hair has shifted to the receding hairline on my head, having hairless legs, if slightly boyish, is almost a point of pride. I’m a member of a clique that races bikes. We’re nearing middle-age, and our mortality is no longer an abstraction. Yet we still go fast. Sometimes we win, other times we crash. Even wearing civilian clothes about town, road racers spot each other, sometimes first by glimpsing the other’s smooth, defined legs. A nod of acknowledgment might follow. Most non-racers think we’re silly and perhaps a bit vain — perhaps they’re right. And so long as I don’t sever an artery, I think I’m fine with that.

Bend Bulletin: Honoring a Pet: The Path from Mourning to Adoption

Published: Jan. 6, 2018

“Uh, Miss?” The New York Police Department officer said after conferring with his colleagues. “What we think happened was: Your cat had a party.”

That’s the clincher of my favorite anecdote about Fuzz, my green-eyed gray tabby. Years ago, my ex-girlfriend Athena — the cat’s “mom” — returned late to her apartment in Brooklyn, where I previously lived, and heard a crash. She screamed and called 911. After the police scanned her first-floor apartment, they turned up nothing but Fuzz — the indoor and very bushy-tailed cat.

The cops suggested that strays had entered through the open window but scrammed, knocking stuff over, when Athena unlocked the door.

We loved telling this story. We’d do an impression of the earnest cop’s Long Island accent by pronouncing party like “pawd-ee.” Later, when I accepted a job at The Bulletin, Fuzz accompanied me to Bend.

Athena and I stayed close. When I told her Fuzz, who was a whopping 19 years old, was sick, she urged me to take him to the Animal Emergency Center. She flew in the next day.

During Fuzz’s last two years in Bend, the high desert air and sunshine cleared his pollution-induced asthma. Yet, while he passed his days watching birds flit about my feeder, a tumor grew in his chest, a scan would show, gradually displacing his lungs. In a week, Fuzz had gone from his chirpy — if sometimes bossy — self to serially vomiting his wet food and lying, as if suctioned, to the couch, facing a corner.

At the Animal Emergency Center, Athena stroked Fuzz, who struggled to breathe in a Plexiglas oxygen chamber.

“You have to think about his quality of life,” a veterinarian told us. “He’s suffering.”

The doctor softly yet firmly encouraged euthanasia. We decided to have it done in my living room, so we could spend a little more time with Fuzz. Soon, another veterinarian arrived to perform the procedure. Fuzz, who was given medicine for his pain, was nearly inanimate except when gasping for air. With a deceptively slim needle, the doctor ended our cat’s life with a massive injection of painkillers.

“I love you, Fuzz,” Athena said, placing a hand on his striped fur while she fought back sobs. Once Fuzz’s heart stopped beating, his green eyes, as bright as they ever were, stared emptily at the wall. The vet directed Athena to bundle him into her wicker basket. Athena trembled as we held each other. “I’ll miss him forever,” she said. “He was so special; our little gray guy.”

Goodbye

In the week after his death, Fuzz was cremated and his ashes mailed to Athena in Brooklyn, where she had cared for him since she adopted him, one of a stray litter from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in 1998.

As I moved about my apartment in the coming days, I was haunted by reminders of Fuzz.

Although I tucked his food bowl and litter box out of sight, my lap remained cold while I read beside the fireplace. I sat in the spot where he died so I wouldn’t have to look at it. I still find traces of his gray hair on his favorite nap spots. Strands cling to my sweaters and I morbidly regretted throwing away a clump of hair from his last brushing.

To keep from dwelling, I spent weekends in The Dalles with my new girlfriend, doting on her cat-sized dog, occasionally calling it a kitty.

“You should adopt another cat!” cat-loving friends told me, but I wasn’t ready. “Next year,” I said. “Maybe in spring.”

Hello

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I visited the Humane Society of Central Oregon during a lunch break. What I needed was kitten therapy. My editor and fellow cat lover, Jody Lawrence-Turner, told me to watch out or I’d come back with a cat. I guffawed.

On my second visit, I stopped in my tracks. A sign detailed the “Adopt a Buddy” program, which waives a second pet’s adoption fee. They were actually encouraging me to adopt not one but two cats. The HSCO began the program 15 years ago when it was inundated with kittens. The HSCO encourages the adoption of pairs, particularly among kittens and adult animals that have bonded. Together, they adapt more quickly to new homes, said Lynne Ouchida, the HSCO’s community outreach manager.

A married couple recently picked up a bonded dog and cat that came from the same home. “(Co-adoption) shows compassion not only for the animals but for the bond two animals share together,” Ouchida said. “It provides comfort and keeps them happy.”

In a glass-walled visiting room in the HSCO’s feline wing, two cats, who arrived on Nov. 14, reclined in a cat tower: Gotham, a wee 1-year-old black cat, and Crookshanks, a full-bodied 2-year-old orange tabby. They came from the same Madras home when their owners encountered landlord issues. When I entered the room, Crookshanks hopped down and rubbed against my leg. His Scottish name, along with his hooked tail and clipped ear, suggested a pirate. I placed him on my lap. He was meaty without being overweight. His purr was soft but easy. When Gotham trotted over, his yellow-green eyes looked like two blinking marbles; his features otherwise melted into a contrast-less bundle of inky fur. He met my hand with a revving purr and a happy, near vertical tail. As I rubbed both cats, they commingled, their tails sometimes entwined. Both let me hold them in my arms and even rub their bellies — two important boxes to check off.

As I signed the paperwork to put a 24-hour hold on the pair, I felt a strange mix of joy, guilt and anxiety. If all goes well, these cats may survive into my early 50s. They will befriend any children I have. And would they take to the Australian cattle dog I hope to adopt down the road? More pressingly, in adopting not one but two cats within a month of losing another, am I becoming a “crazy cat person”?

To many people, this “pet replacement” might seem irrational or impulsive. After all, in rejoining the club of 30 million Americans who acquire a new companion animal each year, was I actually ready to move past my loss and be the doting cat dad these two felines would need?

Honoring a friend

Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and the author of “The Last Walk,” a book that chronicles the decline of her family’s 14-year-old dog, said the appropriate time for grieving before adopting another animal depends on the individual.

“I know someone who lost a dog seven years ago and still isn’t ready because the loss was so painful,” she said. “This is just anecdotal, but for people for whom the end of life was ambiguous or traumatic — maybe they were uncertain about the timing of the euthanasia, especially if the animal was young and it was unexpected — it may be more difficult to get over the grieving experience. It can be more complicated, and it may take longer for someone to feel ready to open their heart again.”

For others, Pierce said, the presence of an animal can be very comforting during the mourning stage.

“If you’re grieving, it makes sense that having a new animal would make that wound heal and offer comfort,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong or callous about adopting a pet animal very soon after the loss of another.”

She adds a caveat: Pet owners suffering acute trauma, depression and difficulty functioning should seek the help of a mental health professional instead of an animal.

In “The Last Walk,” Pierce writes about the two-year ordeal she and her family endured as one of their two dogs — an elderly yet active vizsla named Odysseus — began losing function of his hind legs.

“His end-of-life scenario was hard because he was clearly suffering. It was really hard to make a judgment to euthanize him and when that time would be. For us, it took us some time to recover,” she said, adding that she and her family had administered exhausting care-giving. “We were not getting enough sleep, and we always had to clean the rug. We weren’t ready emotionally, or physically, for quite a while.”

After two years, Pierce and her family felt good adding a second dog.

Myself, I feel confident I made the right decision. Crookshanks and Gotham have adjusted quickly to the apartment and to me. They greet me at the door and — I kid you not — cuddle with each other, sometimes on my lap. When I think about Fuzz, I don’t feel pained like I used to — I’m too busy retrieving Gotham or Crookshanks out of a head-high cabinet.

Something a veterinarian friend told Pierce really stuck.

“She said, ‘There are so many animals who need loving homes. The best way to honor the animal that has passed away is to open your home to another in need,’” Pierce said. “I like that. … In my mind, it doesn’t in any way devalue the relationship that was had with the first animal … To make room in your home and heart for two cats is a way of honoring Fuzz.”

Bend Bulletin: Bikepacking the West Side of The Cascades

Published: June 7, 2017

I may be problematically susceptible to suggestion. Friends recently invited me to ride along on their three-night/four-day bikepacking trip. We would climb almost 16,000 feet in a 155-mile loop on gravel and paved country roads on the west side of the Cascades, a two-hour drive from Bend. It would involve summiting snow-capped Bohemia Mountain and sourcing drinking water from creeks and rivers, where we’d also bathe and wash our clothes.

I was in.

Bikepacking involves saddling a mountain bike (or, in our case, knobby-tired, road touring bikes and one meant for cyclocross) with all manners of bags, racks and baskets. The point of hauling everything on your bike and not on your back means you feel the breeze and not a heavy, sweat-soaked rucksack.

The plan was simple. Beginning and ending in Oakridge, a former timber town that is slowly experiencing a rejuvenation as a base camp for mountain bike adventures, our trip was inspired by ride leader and Bend Velo bicycle mechanic Tory Sox’s previous cross-country mountain biking trips through the nearby ridges and valleys. He was acquainted with 5,000-foot elevation gains and losses in single-day outings, so why not string them together into a bikepacking trip and invite his wife, photographer Katie Sox, Will Gurney, a Eugene bicycle mechanic, and myself. Tory is also a frame builder, and he and Katie rode steel touring frames he fashioned with these kinds of bikepacking trips in mind.

Camping via two wheels most likely dates to the bicycle’s popularization in the late 19th century, but bikepacking as we know it today is an offshoot of bicycle touring, which involves thin-tired road bicycles that became widespread in the 1970s.

Bikepacking got its chunky tires spinning in the mid-1990s, according to Grant Petersen, the founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works, based in Walnut Creek, California, and a champion of bicycle touring and camping.

“We started doing overnight campouts, something we called Sub-24-Hour Overnights, which is abbreviated as ‘Sub-Two-Four-Oh,’” Petersen said. “If you’ve got a job, a family, responsibilities, you’ve got to be somewhere tomorrow morning, but you have a background that includes a lot of hiking, backpacking, mountaineering, and you’ve got the know-how and still got the gear, an easy way to do that is to load up a bike and head out into the local hills along the fire trails.”

While our trip might as well be called a Sub-96-O, our ride kept in the spirit of Petersen’s concept, which will undoubtedly inspire in us shorter and more-local bikepacking trips in the future (see side bar for Petersen’s Sub-24-O checklist).

“You do that once and then you want to do it again,” Petersen said. “And then you want to explore other areas. It’s self-perpetuating, like anything that is fun.”

Packing, mechanical tweaks

As for food, we brought canned fish, packaged toast, nuts, hard cheese, cured sausage, dehydrated fruit and freeze-dried dinners, to which we added creek water we boiled with compact gas stoves. Energy bars and gels rounded out our provisions — utilitarian quick fixes for when the climbing got rough. Our drinking water, which we pounded, also came courtesy of the various creeks and rivers we rode and camped alongside. Toilet business, both one and two, was handled behind bushes. Toilet paper, sunscreen, bicycle tubes and mosquito repellent were communal goods, passed around as liberally as trail mix. At one moment, Katie dribbled a mocha-flavored gel onto Tory’s energy bar.

“That’s about as crunchy as we get,” Katie said with a laugh.

With sunny, warm and dry weather in the forecast, we packed minimally, which is to say there was little redundancy among our clothing, save for socks (a fresh pair for each day) and chamois-padded cycling shorts (two per person; wash in creeks as desired). Since the weather was ideal, I didn’t need the two-person tent I’d packed into my seat bag, particularly because the hammock I’d also shoved in there was a suitable way to sleep each night. This extraneous stuff weighed my seat bag down to the extent that the it pinned my caliper brake cable to the frame, causing my brake pads to press my rear rim. For the entire first day, which consisted of 45 miles and nearly 3,000 feet of elevation gain, I rode with additional resistance on a bike that already weighed around 45 pounds. Tory, dumbstruck, remedied this situation by securing a rock on my seat stays’ braze-ons — or little mounting nubs — with two zip ties. This served as a brace to the brake cable, and again my wheel freely spun.

“I’m not worried about your paint job,” Tory Sox said.

Daily gravel grind

Like traditional camping trips, our days began and ended with sunlight. After breakfasts of instant oatmeal and espresso, we filled our water bottles — we each carried three 16-ounce bottles — and set off, our bikes lighter from the provisions we devoured the night before. Each of our four days featured a climbing section, which typically spanned 5 miles, gained 2,000 to 3,500 feet, and took three hours or more to ascend.

“When I’m climbing, I get into my mountain-bike-climbing mindset,” Katie Sox said during the first day’s climb. “I don’t look more than five feet ahead of me, and I think about something pleasant, something that doesn’t have to do with climbing this hill.”

The Western Cascades

Our bikepacking trip took us along secluded BLM and Forest Service roads of varying levels of maintenance through the Western Cascades, outcrops found mostly on the west side of the Cascades. Formed 40 million years ago, the ridges and valleys resemble indiscernible limbs entwined beneath blankets of Douglas fir, western hemlock and cedar. The Western Cascades, much older than the high Cascades (which are only about 2 million years old) are a mix of rock that includes basalt and granite. The native Kalapuya tribe inhabited the area for millennia. The arrival of white settlers was hastened by the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act, according to an Oregon State University paper titled “The Bohemia Mining District: A Historical Reconstruction.” The Bohemia Mining District, which we explored on our second day, is named for James “Bohemia” Johnson, a suspected murderer and an immigrant. Johnson discovered gold-infused quartz in City Creek, which flows at the base of the mountain that would bear his nickname.

On our second day, we stashed our extraneous bags in foliage near the City Creek before climbing Sharps Creek Road, an unmaintained thread of gravel that winds up Bohemia Mountain, which, at nearly 6,000 feet, leads to the tallest peak in the Western Cascades. Signs near the top warned visitors of lethal gas, deep water pits, broken ladders and decrepit mine shafts. While they were unintentionally attractive invitations to explore, we were too set on our climb to get sidetracked. Snow banks soon blocked the road to the still-snow-covered summit. We hiked through 10-foot-deep corn snow and at one point reclined in it like sunbathers at the beach. It was an invigorating way to chill our taxed bodies.

Our descents down these mountains and ridges presented distinct challenges. Many feature grades that range from 10 to, at its most extreme, 20 degrees. They tested our endurance on the way up and our bike handling skills on the way down as we carefully picked our lines past rocks and ruts. Miscalculated routes resulted in several pinch flats. Despite a few slips and skids, no one wiped out. Some descents, such as on Rock Creek Road and Bear Bones Road, which were paved with chip seal and blacktop, respectively, offered sure-wheeled respite from the previous days’ nerve-pinching downhills. More than once we let out ear-piercing howls that rang through the sprawling Umpqua and Willamette National Forests.

Clear waters’ murky past

Despite the delicious translucence of the area’s river and creek waters — which range from aqua marine to light emerald — high levels of mercury and naturally occurring arsenic can still be prevalent throughout the area. (A minerals administrator for the Umpqua National Forest did not respond to several phone calls I made regarding water quality.) During the Bohemia Mining District’s heyday, mercury, which was used as a key agent in separating gold from ore, leached into the water table. However, the creek and river waters, as fresh as they tasted, seemed impossibly pure. No one got sick. Throughout the bikepacking trip, without cell phone reception, we forgot about social media accounts and news feeds. We kept a close eye on our provisions, the constant yet manageable aching in our legs, and our skins’ redness, both the result of too much sun and not enough bug repellent. The sound of nearby rushing water was our campsites’ soundtrack since we didn’t bother with a stereo. Falling asleep to a choir of frogs and waking to birdsong activated a dormant sense of connectedness to the natural world. On the fourth and final day when we rolled into Oakridge, we felt tired and elated. While the poutine we washed down with cask beer at a local gastropub was welcome, we nonetheless began throwing around ideas for future bikepacking trips where we’d again forget our daily obligations and conveniences.

“I just want to keep riding my bike,” Katie Sox said.