On Getting Dropped by a Fred

The sport of road biking is inherently a dorky one and, as such, its divided into varying degrees of dorkiness. The racers are the cool guys, and the dudes & dudettes with all sorts of knick knacks bolted to their bikes and sporting white cotton gym socks are referred to as “Freds”. Freds are routinely teased but the cycling community is a close one, so its all in good fun. A road racer’s pride can suffer a small degree of bruising when being passed by one of these Freds, which is exactly what happened to Corey and I yesterday. I wrote a short little blurb about it on a forum I subscribe to, and I thought I’d share:

So I met my buddy on my afternoon commute yesterday and we decided that a 40 mile loop on such a beautiful day would be just the thing for loosening up sore legs after the previous day’s intervals. We’re tooling along soaking up the rays when we hear a whooping “How yaaa doin’?!?!” on our left. Overtaking us is this bike covered with more gadgets than I could even assess with a single glance, piloted by a rider clad in knee high red wool socks, a helmet from 1976, and a long salt and pepper beard blowing horizontally across his face. He drops in ahead of us so fast that I looked down to make sure I hadn’t flatted.

As I see him become smaller and smaller on the road ahead of us, his t-shirt fluttering madly in the wind, I smiled to myself and took pleasure in sharing the joys of such a wonderful pastime.