If you live in a city and you drive an automobile, odds are you’re not a fan of bike riders.  In a city such as Boston, a significant portion of the biking public is stoned or spacey college kids who blindly coast around town and put themselves in harm’s way at every possible juncture, usually without knowing it.  These people are scary and annoying but are so out of it that I can’t take issue with them.   Another large percentage of the biking population consists of tattooed hipster kids who wear ill-fitting skinny black jeans and sneakers that are so cool I don’t even know where they are sold, and who, despite advances in communication, make a decent living by hanging out together at a bike shop near my house, swerving around town and zipping through traffic wearing backpacks and radios, and carrying messages that are presumably so important they couldn’t be sent through fax or email. 

Because of their alternative existence, it is not shocking that these messenger-types have a high threshold for risk and thus, are intentionally bad operators.  Given their love of danger, the fact that they don’t wear helmets, and the fact that they seem willing to perish to make sure some marginally important document gets delivered I am inclined to afford them more respect and admiration than I afford to the folks who make up the lion’s share of Americas biking public over the age of 12; pretentious middle aged yuppies who worship Annoying Lance Armstrong.

 In Boston, these people have a unique condition where they are physically unable to operate a bicycle without 1,200 dollars worth of spandex clothing that includes the name of some European telecom company and shoes with little clips that they wear into farmer’s markets and restaurants and into the Pilates studio to say hello to their wives.  

If these people restricted their life’s passion to the weekends where it was merely an annoyance to their spouses and children I would just think they were lame for wearing aerodynamic outfits and helmets with a mirror attached to them but the trouble with these folks is that they want everyone to know how important biking is in their life. 

The best way for them to exhibit their bicycling chops is to ride their bikes to work from deep in the suburbs, which displays their commitment to fitness, and more importantly, fuels their sense of superiority over their co-workers who go to work in a damn car like everyone else but who have to listen to these people talk about how they shower at work and how they'd "go crazy" if they didn't ride 600 miles a month.  In addition to aggravating everyone at work, these mid-life crises in stretch shorts manage to muck up traffic for all of us normal folks who get our exercise in private.

Unlike their hipster-messenger brethren who dare you to kill them when they cut you off or ride the wrong way down a one way street, these guys cause a zillion almost-accidents due entirely to their insistence upon following all rules of automobile operation even though they can do zero things a car can do, such as be seen or heard.  Additionally, due to endemic delusion about how fast they ride their bikes, they all stop at traffic lights and line up in the middle of the street so that they can reduce the number of cars that make it through a light on any given cycle by about 60%.

A few weeks ago, Tony Kornheiser, a caustic and often-annoying sportswriter and ESPN personality was chastised for saying the class of exhibitionist yuppie bikers ought to cede control of the roadways to automobiles or risk consequences, such as the hood of his car.  Lance Armstrong took such umbrage at the comments that he interrupted his busy life of self-promotion and enrichment through questionable Nike-based pseudo-charities, dates with teenage starlets, and shirtless friendship with Mathew McConaughey while various women raise his offspring to go on his Twitter account and call Kornheiser “ignorant”.  Perhaps he’s ignorant, or perhaps he’s sharing the sentiments of the 299.995 or so million people in this country who don’t give a crap about bike racing or your need to wear tight-fitting clothes. 

I can’t even imagine what kind of mindset is required to join the yuppie cycling circles, but I think I’ll get close to the feeling when I stop at the intersection of Commonwealth and Massachusetts avenues to do pushups and crunches on my way to work next week. Conveniently, all of the “look at me” bikers will be stopped at the lights so I’ll be sure to have an audience – who knows, maybe I’ll start a trend.