Once again I spend a couple of hours chasing down weird issues in disc brakes.
The customer came in with his Giant Revolt gravel bike. He said that the brakes needed bleeding, especially the rear, because the lever was pulling right to the bar.
I squeezed it. It was pulling right down. But at the end it didn’t have the telltale squishy feeling of air in the system. It came to a sort of firm stop, as hydraulics go. I told him I thought that it probably just needed new pads.
When I pulled the old pads out, they were only about one-third gone. Because the bike uses Giant’s cable actuated master cylinder, to work with normal brifters, I thought maybe I could snug up the cable part of the system.
No such luck.
I had to root around on the internet for a real service manual. There are little screws all over this unit, so I wanted at least a sketch map to confirm where to attach the syringes full of mineral oil.
As always the configuration of the rear brake line makes it impossible to get a clean, rising line from caliper to master cylinder. I had already taken the bars out of the stem to get access to the cable anchor screws. That made it easy to turn them 90 degrees to the ground to orient the bleed port upwards. But the brake line itself serpentines down and under and around in ways that make the rising line approximate. I hoped it was good enough. Sometimes it is.
After doing the bleed two complete times, the lever feel was still no better. Screw it. I threw a set of pads in, and bingo.
Well, bingo-ish, anyway. Because I never got to feel this bike in the flower of its youth, I have no way to know how it felt at its showroom best. I can tell you this much: almost every set of hydraulic brakes I have operated has felt squishy, even when the rider was perfectly happy with it. A mountain biker passing through this spring laughed when he felt a set of brakes that a noob complained were too soft. “They all feel like that!” he said. “Get used to it.”
The only hydraulic disc brakes that haven’t felt squishy have been overfilled and rock-like. They’ve needed to be bled down to get the pads to retract at all.
I’m really starting to hate them.
I’m also starting to hate Outside Magazine. Always the rag of egotistical vacationers, their increasing attempts to represent cycling expertise are oriented toward the hobbyist with disposable income and no resistance to technofascist propaganda. Because of all my searching for info on disc brakes, Google fed me this article on “Why you should throw your rim brakes in the trash.” Hobbyist McMoneybags says that when he’s riding down a mountain pass in the rain, rim brakes don’t work at all on his carbon rims. Dude! I’ve found your problem! Use disc brakes on your tech-weenie wanker hoops. Preach to your well funded hobbyist buddies about what they really must have. But save your pronouncements about what should be the future of a once simple, durable, and highly user serviceable technology.
Showing posts with label experienced misinformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experienced misinformation. Show all posts
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Friday, March 23, 2018
The misunderstanders write the history books
Dredging around on the interwebs for a certain specific mutant mountain bike from the 1990s, I found a site depicting bikes of that period, viewed through the perception of young modernists. Discussing the flat, narrow handlebars we ran back then, these analysts said that we did it to reduce weight. This is entirely inaccurate.
The mountain bikes of the early ‘90s had short top tubes and long stems. We cut the bars down for better clearance on narrow trails, and to reduce unnecessary steering leverage. No one today understands bar ends, either. I don’t miss bar ends, because I bought a late ‘90s frame with a longer top tube, and put wider bars with more sweep on it, but I also don’t ride off-road in the 1990s cruising style anymore. Back then our rides were little journeys, not a series of linked stunts. We actually chose to challenge ourselves with long climbs, and liked riding cross-country.
The inheritors of mountain biking, the children of parks, ramps, moto-style courses and highly evolved suspension, have come up with their own narrative about a world they never knew. It doesn’t matter. Mountain bikers can pick and choose which antecedents to honor. It’s a young person’s game, so it will always exist in the present and recent past. The machines of history will be judged by the standards of modern riders who have not had to fumble through the period of discovery and refinement.
The older I get, the younger I realize the ages are that I once thought of as old. But if your sport is highly likely to tax your body’s ability to heal quickly, it is a young person’s game.
Back when cycling was just cycling, riders pedaled as best they could over whatever surfaces they had. The first bike ride across the United States predated the first official transcontinental road by about 30 years. And that was on a bike with skinny tires and no suspension. Really differentiated speciation didn't afflict us until the late 20th Century.
Granted, bicycling innovators experimented relentlessly, and forms of suspension can be seen from the beginning. At the start, roads themselves were often little more than trails in some places, or a set of ruts that would be dusty or muddy depending on the season.
The first mountain bikes continued that time line of branching but still related lines. The basic objective was the same: get from point A to point B over a given type of terrain. Riders in different regions, with different backgrounds, took the basic form and mutated it to suit their local conditions and tastes. Are your trees close together? Cut your bars down.
Commuting in the city, I had 38cm drop bars on my fixed gear so that I could slip through skinny gaps. On my open-road bike I had 44cm drop bars. When I started commuting over longer distances of open road, and didn't need to thread the needle in a tight cityscape with close traffic and parked cars, I put wider bars on all my bikes. It's called adaptation. Riders who adopted the mountain bike as an urban platform also modified their bars based on those considerations. Riders who visited our rugged, forested part of New England from the wide-open spaces of the golden West often had bikes adapted to plush singletrack through open range and meadows. But even they exhibited slightly narrower bars than the current norm, because of the top-tube-to-stem ratio I already cited.
Different brands adopted the longer cockpit gradually, taking a couple or three years to shift every company's offerings to the format now viewed as normal. Stems shortened. Bars widened. Riders wanted to sit up a little higher for better weight distribution and a better view down the trail. With suspension, you don't want to risk being way out over the front end of the bike. With full suspension, you can and should stay more neutral on the bike anyway. And of course suspension has bred its own nuances of kinetics to propel the bike. Once you embrace the expense and complexity of a fully modern mountain bike, you might as well take advantage of everything it has to offer in return for its need for maintenance.
The website also dismissed threaded headsets as a misguided carryover from road biking. The article states that the pounding of mountain biking would make the locknut and top cone loosen up. If the headset had been properly adjusted and secured, it would not loosen. The major problem is that the explosion of bike business led to an explosion of shops, and a need to hire lots of "mechanics" while still trying to pay them dirt. Legions of inexperienced people came in who had no idea how a locknut works, and no patience. And why should they, when they just took the job to get the employee discount on schwag, and their employer was trying to nickel and dime them?
I ran threaded headsets without a problem until the turn of the century, when you could hardly find good quality product in quill stems and threaded headsets. The threadless headset is very convenient to work on, but it makes adjustment of bar height an awkward yank a lot of the time. Young riders on their stunt machines don't mind being locked in at an aggressive angle. Riders looking for a little more relaxation end up with a stack of spacers or a stem with a dorky rise that makes the bike steer funny.
Their picture shows someone adjusting the threaded headset without a stem in place, which will result in a headset that binds once the stem is installed and tightened. That kind of makes my point that the vast majority of people getting into the game in the 1990s knew the latest thing, but they didn't know everything. And now the current archaeologists look back from what they know and guess about what they see.
The mountain bikes of the early ‘90s had short top tubes and long stems. We cut the bars down for better clearance on narrow trails, and to reduce unnecessary steering leverage. No one today understands bar ends, either. I don’t miss bar ends, because I bought a late ‘90s frame with a longer top tube, and put wider bars with more sweep on it, but I also don’t ride off-road in the 1990s cruising style anymore. Back then our rides were little journeys, not a series of linked stunts. We actually chose to challenge ourselves with long climbs, and liked riding cross-country.
The inheritors of mountain biking, the children of parks, ramps, moto-style courses and highly evolved suspension, have come up with their own narrative about a world they never knew. It doesn’t matter. Mountain bikers can pick and choose which antecedents to honor. It’s a young person’s game, so it will always exist in the present and recent past. The machines of history will be judged by the standards of modern riders who have not had to fumble through the period of discovery and refinement.
The older I get, the younger I realize the ages are that I once thought of as old. But if your sport is highly likely to tax your body’s ability to heal quickly, it is a young person’s game.
Back when cycling was just cycling, riders pedaled as best they could over whatever surfaces they had. The first bike ride across the United States predated the first official transcontinental road by about 30 years. And that was on a bike with skinny tires and no suspension. Really differentiated speciation didn't afflict us until the late 20th Century.
Granted, bicycling innovators experimented relentlessly, and forms of suspension can be seen from the beginning. At the start, roads themselves were often little more than trails in some places, or a set of ruts that would be dusty or muddy depending on the season.
The first mountain bikes continued that time line of branching but still related lines. The basic objective was the same: get from point A to point B over a given type of terrain. Riders in different regions, with different backgrounds, took the basic form and mutated it to suit their local conditions and tastes. Are your trees close together? Cut your bars down.
Commuting in the city, I had 38cm drop bars on my fixed gear so that I could slip through skinny gaps. On my open-road bike I had 44cm drop bars. When I started commuting over longer distances of open road, and didn't need to thread the needle in a tight cityscape with close traffic and parked cars, I put wider bars on all my bikes. It's called adaptation. Riders who adopted the mountain bike as an urban platform also modified their bars based on those considerations. Riders who visited our rugged, forested part of New England from the wide-open spaces of the golden West often had bikes adapted to plush singletrack through open range and meadows. But even they exhibited slightly narrower bars than the current norm, because of the top-tube-to-stem ratio I already cited.
Different brands adopted the longer cockpit gradually, taking a couple or three years to shift every company's offerings to the format now viewed as normal. Stems shortened. Bars widened. Riders wanted to sit up a little higher for better weight distribution and a better view down the trail. With suspension, you don't want to risk being way out over the front end of the bike. With full suspension, you can and should stay more neutral on the bike anyway. And of course suspension has bred its own nuances of kinetics to propel the bike. Once you embrace the expense and complexity of a fully modern mountain bike, you might as well take advantage of everything it has to offer in return for its need for maintenance.
The website also dismissed threaded headsets as a misguided carryover from road biking. The article states that the pounding of mountain biking would make the locknut and top cone loosen up. If the headset had been properly adjusted and secured, it would not loosen. The major problem is that the explosion of bike business led to an explosion of shops, and a need to hire lots of "mechanics" while still trying to pay them dirt. Legions of inexperienced people came in who had no idea how a locknut works, and no patience. And why should they, when they just took the job to get the employee discount on schwag, and their employer was trying to nickel and dime them?
I ran threaded headsets without a problem until the turn of the century, when you could hardly find good quality product in quill stems and threaded headsets. The threadless headset is very convenient to work on, but it makes adjustment of bar height an awkward yank a lot of the time. Young riders on their stunt machines don't mind being locked in at an aggressive angle. Riders looking for a little more relaxation end up with a stack of spacers or a stem with a dorky rise that makes the bike steer funny.
Their picture shows someone adjusting the threaded headset without a stem in place, which will result in a headset that binds once the stem is installed and tightened. That kind of makes my point that the vast majority of people getting into the game in the 1990s knew the latest thing, but they didn't know everything. And now the current archaeologists look back from what they know and guess about what they see.
Sunday, August 07, 2016
Customer Appreciation
Humans are wired to remember the negative more than the positive. This characteristic probably began as a survival-enhancing trait, because our ancestors who catalogued and avoided negative experiences had a better chance of reproducing and bringing their next generation to breeding age.
As the eons have passed, the survival value of a negative focus has diminished, particularly as our technological society puts out crash pads around every sharp object and nurtures helplessness, but it remains vestigially. Any of us can notice things and connect dots to make small or large patterns that alarm, anger, or depress us.
I riff on customer behavior a lot, because I have absorbed so much of it over the decades. We in the theme park/specialty retail business should wear dosimeters to indicate how many assholes have irradiated us in the course of our careers. Given the bias toward retaining negative impressions, the collection of crap rays builds up and hangs around with more force than the accumulation of happy nice rays. I'm not excusing, just explaining.
Some people have higher susceptibility than others. You'll meet career sweeties in service positions. You'll meet people who have enough self control to contain an appropriate but ill advised response to a customer's radiation. You'll meet snarling burnouts who should change jobs, and would if they could. You'll meet people who are learning that they don't have what it takes to put up with the demands of an unfiltered public surging in with their needs, wants, and attitudes.
The seasonal fluctuation in our particular businesses, bike and ski, create high work loads and deep lulls. Each of these brings a specific kind of stress. And the devotees of one season consider the peak of our other season to be down time, so they come in to chisel and waste time when we are most busy with the other half of the clientele.
Specialty retail has its own challenges. We get chiseled during cross country ski season, because cross country skiers are basically cheapskates. I am one of you. Cross country skiing appealed to me because I could use skis for their ancestral purpose, to go from place to place, and because I could ski for free, limited only by available snow and my own skills. So I share the desire to pay less and ski more, compared to lift served skiing. Bicyclists cover a much broader spectrum, because bicycling can be done over a vastly greater range of conditions. But, because machinery is involved along with physical exertion, bicyclists not only encompass pathological bargain hunters, but mechanical and athletic arrogance in the spectrum of behavior. There's a little of that in cross-country skiing, but among skiers the chiseling dominates.
What does all this mean to customers and shop staff? Last week, with a staff chronically one person short for the workload on any given day, we had bored skiers, tired of summer, coming in for the off season deals, deals, deals. This draws a qualified staff member to sell stuff at suicide margins while in-season repair work continues to pile up. We should make them hold a gold-plated chisel as their emblem. At the same time, we got the out-of-town smart shoppers who will loudly tell their friends not to buy anything from us because they know some place down home that is going out of business and is basically throwing stuff out. That guy should wear a headdress made out of a dead vulture, to proclaim his devotion to feeding on the death of others.
I see from the condition of things people finally bring in for repair that they don't care whether it was properly set up the first place. The things they manage to survive make me wonder why I ever cared so darn much about doing a good job myself. Gone are the 1990s, when thousands of people took to the trails and actually tested products and our workmanship.
Weirdly, the current trend to know nothing and shop entirely by price manages to coexist with a culture of helplessness in which customers depend more than ever on products not only meeting but exceeding their specifications. Take that guy who rode the Mount Washington Century on a 23-22-21-20 spoke front wheel and did not end up in some hospital with his spine pinned together and his whole face in a cast.
When the shop fills up with loud, confident, and wrong experts explaining our products to their friends, while I scrub away at some greasy, rusty, neglected and abused piece of disrespected equipment, it can be hard to summon a feeling of noble justification for my occupation. We in the back shop turn to dark comedy. Occasionally we indulge one or two of those appropriate inappropriate responses.
All this is what we have to survive to be there for the truly interested, interesting, and appreciative riders. It's no one's fault that the pleasant lift from them can be eradicated in the next ten minutes by some behavioral fart. It's just people being people. And we are people laughing at people being people. We'd miss the jerks if they went away. It's fun to come up with ways to bitch about them. With negativity bred into us, our choice is to take it too seriously or to mock it.
As the eons have passed, the survival value of a negative focus has diminished, particularly as our technological society puts out crash pads around every sharp object and nurtures helplessness, but it remains vestigially. Any of us can notice things and connect dots to make small or large patterns that alarm, anger, or depress us.
I riff on customer behavior a lot, because I have absorbed so much of it over the decades. We in the theme park/specialty retail business should wear dosimeters to indicate how many assholes have irradiated us in the course of our careers. Given the bias toward retaining negative impressions, the collection of crap rays builds up and hangs around with more force than the accumulation of happy nice rays. I'm not excusing, just explaining.
Some people have higher susceptibility than others. You'll meet career sweeties in service positions. You'll meet people who have enough self control to contain an appropriate but ill advised response to a customer's radiation. You'll meet snarling burnouts who should change jobs, and would if they could. You'll meet people who are learning that they don't have what it takes to put up with the demands of an unfiltered public surging in with their needs, wants, and attitudes.
The seasonal fluctuation in our particular businesses, bike and ski, create high work loads and deep lulls. Each of these brings a specific kind of stress. And the devotees of one season consider the peak of our other season to be down time, so they come in to chisel and waste time when we are most busy with the other half of the clientele.
Specialty retail has its own challenges. We get chiseled during cross country ski season, because cross country skiers are basically cheapskates. I am one of you. Cross country skiing appealed to me because I could use skis for their ancestral purpose, to go from place to place, and because I could ski for free, limited only by available snow and my own skills. So I share the desire to pay less and ski more, compared to lift served skiing. Bicyclists cover a much broader spectrum, because bicycling can be done over a vastly greater range of conditions. But, because machinery is involved along with physical exertion, bicyclists not only encompass pathological bargain hunters, but mechanical and athletic arrogance in the spectrum of behavior. There's a little of that in cross-country skiing, but among skiers the chiseling dominates.
What does all this mean to customers and shop staff? Last week, with a staff chronically one person short for the workload on any given day, we had bored skiers, tired of summer, coming in for the off season deals, deals, deals. This draws a qualified staff member to sell stuff at suicide margins while in-season repair work continues to pile up. We should make them hold a gold-plated chisel as their emblem. At the same time, we got the out-of-town smart shoppers who will loudly tell their friends not to buy anything from us because they know some place down home that is going out of business and is basically throwing stuff out. That guy should wear a headdress made out of a dead vulture, to proclaim his devotion to feeding on the death of others.
I see from the condition of things people finally bring in for repair that they don't care whether it was properly set up the first place. The things they manage to survive make me wonder why I ever cared so darn much about doing a good job myself. Gone are the 1990s, when thousands of people took to the trails and actually tested products and our workmanship.
Weirdly, the current trend to know nothing and shop entirely by price manages to coexist with a culture of helplessness in which customers depend more than ever on products not only meeting but exceeding their specifications. Take that guy who rode the Mount Washington Century on a 23-22-21-20 spoke front wheel and did not end up in some hospital with his spine pinned together and his whole face in a cast.
When the shop fills up with loud, confident, and wrong experts explaining our products to their friends, while I scrub away at some greasy, rusty, neglected and abused piece of disrespected equipment, it can be hard to summon a feeling of noble justification for my occupation. We in the back shop turn to dark comedy. Occasionally we indulge one or two of those appropriate inappropriate responses.
All this is what we have to survive to be there for the truly interested, interesting, and appreciative riders. It's no one's fault that the pleasant lift from them can be eradicated in the next ten minutes by some behavioral fart. It's just people being people. And we are people laughing at people being people. We'd miss the jerks if they went away. It's fun to come up with ways to bitch about them. With negativity bred into us, our choice is to take it too seriously or to mock it.
Monday, July 18, 2016
Internet knowledge
The customer who dropped this off at the shop today said he read on the Internet that if your shifter isn't working, put grease in it. I didn't get to hear this first hand, but our fearless leader texted me the pic.
The Internet can be a great resource, but it is also a fantastic vehicle for experienced misinformation and profound misunderstanding.
People frequently ask us to grease their chain. "Grease" is their shorthand term for any kind of lubricant. These are often the same people who say their tire needs to be trued, or that their bike needs a new rim. They don't usually apply their terminology literally before turning things over to us. One exception would be Grandpa Grease, which is our own term for white lith in a spray can. At least half the time, when a grandfather comes in with a bike he's fixing up for for a grandkid, the chain has been blasted with spray grease.
Sunday was a great day for walk-in experts. One guy was explaining to his buddy that you only ever want to ride in a gear that gives you a perfectly straight chain line. He had learned this from his own guru, who apparently rides almost more than humanly possible, and knows everything. At least they were interacting in person.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Experienced Misinformation
I've been watching an idiot riding in shorts through the last weeks of wintry temperatures. He's also mashing big gears, further straining his naked knees. I'm sure his friends know him as a big rider. It got me thinking about the effect of experienced misinformation in any activity.
Years in the bike and cross-country ski business have given me a valuable perspective on inside information compared to the wide variety of uninformed or partially informed speculation.
The first bike shop I worked in had the mechanics in the basement. I left that comfortable lair to try to sell some better bikes up on the sales floor so I wouldn't have to work on so much crap. I always intended to return to the mechanics' cave as soon as I had started the Ride Better Bikes Movement, but instead I moved on from the bike biz for a few years. In my current situation the workshop is accessible from the main shop floor. I get to hear every Loud, Confident and Wrong blowhard who brings his friend in to learn about bikes.
Mind you, just being in the bike business does not automatically confer full and complete understanding of how the machine and rider work. But the retail shop puts you in the center between producers and consumers. Much of their communication channels through you.
Magazines, websites, forums, books, films and gossip throw out clouds of information, knowledge, wisdom and fantasy, often completely undifferentiated. Riders and potential riders come in with opinions already shaped by these influences.
Even with good inputs, the learning rider needs to sift and sort for what applies in the individual case. Do you need to train like a top category racer or load like a transcontinental tourist to enjoy our particular type of riding? On the other hand, can you get away with being a haphazard slob with the amount of mileage you're putting on your bike and body?
The nice thing about human-powered vehicles is that very little is outright wrong, However, misapplication of technique or technology can be very unhelpful and occasionally distinctly harmful.
Big gears at slow cadences can -- but don't necessarily have to -- blow up your knees. If you have sufficient strength, augmented by diligent off-bike training, you can grunt around in the big meat all you want. You should set up your riding position for grunting rather than spinning as well, and accept the fact that you will have no snap and little tolerance for changes in cadence. And if your riding position and preparation aren't right, you will cause joint damage.
Riding in shorts in cold weather will lead to long-term knee damage and short-term muscle injury. You need to keep working muscles and joints warm enough to stay flexible and well lubed. Cyclists generate their own wind chill. Riding 15 miles per hour at 40 degrees you are pushing the old kneecaps through an effective 32 degrees -- freezing. The same speed at 50 degrees only gets you up to 36. A lot of riders in northern climes are tempted to show off their gams at 50 degrees. The venerable CONI manual said a rider should wear tights below 70 degrees. Personally I have pushed that to 60 degrees since I moved north, but I still tend to be more conservative than a lot of the aggressive riders and their uninformed disciples around here.
Aggressive riders may sidestep the consequences of their clothing choices by quitting the activity when they can no longer pursue it aggressively. They put in a few hard years and move on, believing when they finally get arthritic knees and quads that feel like dried-out rubber bands, that these are normal symptoms of aging. The "right" thing to do never would have mattered to them because they were not interested in longevity.
Unfortunately, observers equate speed and competitiveness with overall knowledge. This person must know what they're doing because they can always drop me on a ride. That's right. A V-8 is lots smarter than a 4-cylinder.
You might even see bare legs sticking down below a fairly bundled-up torso and arms. Far better to average out the coverage over the whole rider. I cover the legs first, add layers over the core and finally add sleevage. Since I'm older and more sluggish now the transitions may come much closer together. I admit I overdress more often than I under-dress. Having been caught far from home with too little clothing I don't want to repeat that misery. I can always peel a layer and tie it or tuck it.
Older beginners will suffer the consequences sooner. If you're already on the threshold of age-related frictions, and especially if you came from an abusive sport like running, you need to take care of what you have left if you want to continue to use it.
The unifying quality to all experienced misinformation is oversimplification. In this the misinformed get little help from the bike industry, because in any selling situation if a short distortion will get the buyer to fork over, why waste time with a longer, nuanced education? The only time someone focused on the sale will slow it down to address a point the buyer did not expressly introduce is when the consequences have bitten the seller on the ass enough times to make it worth the trouble to try to prevent it. Otherwise, let the mechanics deal with it down the road.
Humans are great at creating one problem to solve another. To some extent this is just how mutation and evolution work. But we tell ourselves we're better than that. Yeah? Prove it.
All the uncorrected impressions and sloppy explanations ripple outward through the world, crossing and recrossing in waves that wash back into the repair shops or stagnate in the corners of garages and basements.
Years in the bike and cross-country ski business have given me a valuable perspective on inside information compared to the wide variety of uninformed or partially informed speculation.
The first bike shop I worked in had the mechanics in the basement. I left that comfortable lair to try to sell some better bikes up on the sales floor so I wouldn't have to work on so much crap. I always intended to return to the mechanics' cave as soon as I had started the Ride Better Bikes Movement, but instead I moved on from the bike biz for a few years. In my current situation the workshop is accessible from the main shop floor. I get to hear every Loud, Confident and Wrong blowhard who brings his friend in to learn about bikes.
Mind you, just being in the bike business does not automatically confer full and complete understanding of how the machine and rider work. But the retail shop puts you in the center between producers and consumers. Much of their communication channels through you.
Magazines, websites, forums, books, films and gossip throw out clouds of information, knowledge, wisdom and fantasy, often completely undifferentiated. Riders and potential riders come in with opinions already shaped by these influences.
Even with good inputs, the learning rider needs to sift and sort for what applies in the individual case. Do you need to train like a top category racer or load like a transcontinental tourist to enjoy our particular type of riding? On the other hand, can you get away with being a haphazard slob with the amount of mileage you're putting on your bike and body?
The nice thing about human-powered vehicles is that very little is outright wrong, However, misapplication of technique or technology can be very unhelpful and occasionally distinctly harmful.
Big gears at slow cadences can -- but don't necessarily have to -- blow up your knees. If you have sufficient strength, augmented by diligent off-bike training, you can grunt around in the big meat all you want. You should set up your riding position for grunting rather than spinning as well, and accept the fact that you will have no snap and little tolerance for changes in cadence. And if your riding position and preparation aren't right, you will cause joint damage.
Riding in shorts in cold weather will lead to long-term knee damage and short-term muscle injury. You need to keep working muscles and joints warm enough to stay flexible and well lubed. Cyclists generate their own wind chill. Riding 15 miles per hour at 40 degrees you are pushing the old kneecaps through an effective 32 degrees -- freezing. The same speed at 50 degrees only gets you up to 36. A lot of riders in northern climes are tempted to show off their gams at 50 degrees. The venerable CONI manual said a rider should wear tights below 70 degrees. Personally I have pushed that to 60 degrees since I moved north, but I still tend to be more conservative than a lot of the aggressive riders and their uninformed disciples around here.
Aggressive riders may sidestep the consequences of their clothing choices by quitting the activity when they can no longer pursue it aggressively. They put in a few hard years and move on, believing when they finally get arthritic knees and quads that feel like dried-out rubber bands, that these are normal symptoms of aging. The "right" thing to do never would have mattered to them because they were not interested in longevity.
Unfortunately, observers equate speed and competitiveness with overall knowledge. This person must know what they're doing because they can always drop me on a ride. That's right. A V-8 is lots smarter than a 4-cylinder.
You might even see bare legs sticking down below a fairly bundled-up torso and arms. Far better to average out the coverage over the whole rider. I cover the legs first, add layers over the core and finally add sleevage. Since I'm older and more sluggish now the transitions may come much closer together. I admit I overdress more often than I under-dress. Having been caught far from home with too little clothing I don't want to repeat that misery. I can always peel a layer and tie it or tuck it.
Older beginners will suffer the consequences sooner. If you're already on the threshold of age-related frictions, and especially if you came from an abusive sport like running, you need to take care of what you have left if you want to continue to use it.
The unifying quality to all experienced misinformation is oversimplification. In this the misinformed get little help from the bike industry, because in any selling situation if a short distortion will get the buyer to fork over, why waste time with a longer, nuanced education? The only time someone focused on the sale will slow it down to address a point the buyer did not expressly introduce is when the consequences have bitten the seller on the ass enough times to make it worth the trouble to try to prevent it. Otherwise, let the mechanics deal with it down the road.
Humans are great at creating one problem to solve another. To some extent this is just how mutation and evolution work. But we tell ourselves we're better than that. Yeah? Prove it.
All the uncorrected impressions and sloppy explanations ripple outward through the world, crossing and recrossing in waves that wash back into the repair shops or stagnate in the corners of garages and basements.
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