Trainer Kit.
I have a rack of cycling kit in the downstairs bathroom. Hangers loaded with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of lycra. I have bins of stuff I rotate in as the trainer season ends and the road season starts. Mostly I wear team kit during the road season. What I wear on the trainer varies greatly.
A lot of it is worn out and socially unacceptable. I inflict it upon my family because it makes me giggle, but also because I know what it originally cost and am too cheap to throw anything away until it grinds my lady parts into hamburger. Some of it is old team kit from previous sponsors. Some of it is replicas of professional team kit. Some is unbranded stuff I bought when I was new to cycling.
Yesterday I advertised a Belgian flooring company to the family and the mice that inhabit the trainer dungeon. Today I pimped a certain letter-carrying super-domestique doper's clothing line. Tomorrow it will be an old team sponsor that would probably appreciate my translucent bib shorts even less than my children do.
After each workout, I shower and dump the nasty, sweat-soaked kit into a pile in a specific spot on the bedroom floor. Every morning I step on a soggy chamois in the dark. I could move the pile, but that would be breaking the pattern, and I'm a creature of mostly bad habits. When the pile gets too big and I start running out of advertisements to wear, I bundle it all up and carry it down to the laundry room and wash it in a combination of the most delicate detergents to preserve the fabric and WMD-grade chemicals to kill the bacteria. Then it all gets hung up in the shower we can't use as intended because it's always packed with semi-damp clothes. A couple days later when it's dry it gets sorted and the process starts all over again.
Soon the good stuff will come out again and the deteriorating rags will be stowed. Sooner or later the lycra atoms will stop holding hands and my children and the trainer dungeon mice will be faced with years of mental trauma counseling.
Until then, at least I have something to wear.
A lot of it is worn out and socially unacceptable. I inflict it upon my family because it makes me giggle, but also because I know what it originally cost and am too cheap to throw anything away until it grinds my lady parts into hamburger. Some of it is old team kit from previous sponsors. Some of it is replicas of professional team kit. Some is unbranded stuff I bought when I was new to cycling.
Yesterday I advertised a Belgian flooring company to the family and the mice that inhabit the trainer dungeon. Today I pimped a certain letter-carrying super-domestique doper's clothing line. Tomorrow it will be an old team sponsor that would probably appreciate my translucent bib shorts even less than my children do.
After each workout, I shower and dump the nasty, sweat-soaked kit into a pile in a specific spot on the bedroom floor. Every morning I step on a soggy chamois in the dark. I could move the pile, but that would be breaking the pattern, and I'm a creature of mostly bad habits. When the pile gets too big and I start running out of advertisements to wear, I bundle it all up and carry it down to the laundry room and wash it in a combination of the most delicate detergents to preserve the fabric and WMD-grade chemicals to kill the bacteria. Then it all gets hung up in the shower we can't use as intended because it's always packed with semi-damp clothes. A couple days later when it's dry it gets sorted and the process starts all over again.
Soon the good stuff will come out again and the deteriorating rags will be stowed. Sooner or later the lycra atoms will stop holding hands and my children and the trainer dungeon mice will be faced with years of mental trauma counseling.
Until then, at least I have something to wear.
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