On the Bike

I’m working in my kit again. I thought I could escape, but then my phone started nagging. So I sat down to answer it and to reply to that thing, and to edit that other thing, and to make still another thing. So here I sit, still, in my cushioned office chair, wearing padded bibshorts that feel like a diaper. On the bike, I don’t notice. Off the bike, they shift and bunch like an oversize maxi-pad.

Before the time of Lycra, cyclists wore wool shorts with actual suspenders and leather chamois sewn into the crotches. The wool chafed and sagged and the leather turned stiff and coarse like heavy grain sandpaper. These days, bibshorts are a weird, one-piece contraption, the parts sewn together painstakingly by women in a factory somewhere in Romania. The sewing process is not easy. The Lycra is pieced together and the seams placed just so. No one wants a seam in the vagina.

I’m a Title IX girl. I swam in college, my team funded