See, I deplored the sight of these helmets the moment the first one showed up at a sprint triathlon somewhere. I despised the absurd stinger jutting out impractically behind the rider's skull. I hated the ostentatious, frivolous expense, and the notion that the wearer intended to buy himself some extra speed. Of course every race I went to, there were more. These helmets spread through the elite triathlon ranks like cold sores among strippers. I scoffed.
Soon, setting up my bike pre-race, I'd find myself the last holdout with an old-fashioned bike helmet, that didn't look like what you'd wear to work on the Death Star.
Kona? Check. Alcatraz? Check. Alderaan? Check. Check.
Well, TT helmets were my line in the sand. Bucking the trend was not just a matter of sports and fashion, but a moral imperative not to join the aerodynamic herd.
Triathletes are like competitive sheep, if sheep could compete at something. When the newest pricey gewgaw comes out -- provided it is rumored to confer some athletic advantage -- everyone gets one. Which is why everyone I know has a Quark Power Meter that costs more than his first bike, and a Garmin 310XT, two sets of race wheels, and the ubiquitous time trial helmet.*
Part of my pit-of-stomach revulsion at TT helmets was the poseur factor. Triathlon is saturated with athletes who crash the gates and immediately try to buy their way to the top. I speak of the mid-life crisis surgeon, who attends his first sprint triathlon on a $7500 tri bike with top-end race wheels, but leaves the toe bucket pedals on, because he hasn't actually ridden the thing yet, and doesn't know how to clip in. Or the low country cyclists who ride exclusively where there are no hills to climb, but obsess over bike weight -- this new crankset will save me 75 grams! -- as opposed to riding what they've got, and losing the 29 pounds that have a accrued around their middles.
And so all haughty and superior, I clung to my old, round, plastic yarmulke of a bike helmet, and snubbed the TT helmet crowd as if they were sneetches without stars. I mocked them. Called them cone heads. There was only one problem. Time trial helmets work. I mean, really work. The science is in. Depending on whose study you buy into, they may matter as much as your 1500 dollar rear disc wheel, more than what anything on your bike weighs, and may tie for second behind the body positioning you spent a year trying to dial in, tinkering with seat yaw or stem pitch or something.
I view running and cycling industry articles and posts and studies about the "science" of running and cycling with a jaundiced eye. I don't use the air quotes to suggest that there isn't a ton of real science on endurance sports -- God, is there ever -- but to emphasize that much of what they foist as science is really advocacy. Or speculative entertainment. Or just gussied up, generic advertising with graphs. And some photos of stern men in lab coats observing some skinny specimen on a treadmill, often wearing an air tank. And electrodes.
Lava and Velo News need you to buy stuff from their advertisers. Runner's World needs you to buy those motion control shoes and built-up orthotics, because without a running industry -- the latest Asics whatevers -- they don't have a magazine. As an aside, I tossed my built up shoes and orthotics in 2011 and started running in glorified slippers. Since then I've been running with impunity, after four years of nagging injuries. I agree with this man that the shoes and inserts were making me worse. But with the billions Nike and Asics and the rest pump into advertising, it's hard for the industry to admit that you were better off running in 1975 Nike Waffle Racers -- slippers with waffle soles -- than in the latest Air Max.
I quit subscribing to anything from, for example, Rodale Press, partly because they write down to an audience of giddy initiates, and partly because the same publications contradict themselves like Nathan Thurm. And it isn't just the newbie fanzines like Runner's World, either. Granted, science and medicine -- and athletes -- advance. Carb loading used to require a carb depletion phase, then it didn't. Until it did and didn't again.
But some matters are settled.
Like time trial helmets. Arguing against their efficacy is like arguing for a flat Earth. The evidence is in -- they work. They absolutely make you faster, on the identical effort, vs. wearing a conventional helmet. Free time, just by wearing a pointy hat. But I had my pride. The mouthy critic would be eating major crow, if he broke down and got one. And then a friend at the bike shop, knowing that I had USAT Nationals coming up, handed me a new, black and blue Giro TT helmet for free. Someone had worn it a few times, sweated in it, and brought it back claiming there was something wrong with it. Bike store guy said here, it's yours.
A conundrum.
People who know me and like me almost invariably describe me as "uncompromising," or similar. That, or "you asshole!" Two ways of describing the same phenomenon, I suppose. But so much for that -- these alien helmets forced me to compromise, and I loathed them for it. Two competing values weighed against each other on my internal ethical scales: my strident individuality on the one side vs. athletic advantage on the other.
As I learned in tenth grade -- but occasionally have to relearn -- Emerson wrote that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Truer words never spoken. Tenth grade is a good time to read Emerson and Thoreau, because that's when a fellow ought to grasp that doing something to be different for the sake of being different allows others to influence your choices just as much as does conforming. Sheep or anti-sheep, no matter. Each is equally controlled by the herd. My innate need to be in the minority, to be different for its own sake had -- yet again -- collided with a more reasoned, mature individuality. Wear the helmet, don't wear the helmet, whatever. Just do what you're gonna do, and be who you are.
Overthink much?
And so the man who'd ridden his first two iron length triathlons on a used 400 dollar aluminum road bike, showed up at Nationals in 2009 in a shiny new TT helmet. I was mildly chagrined -- I still deplore how they look -- but there you go. Change is glacial with me.
I ended up biking 57 minutes for the hilly 40K bike leg, at 41 years old. A credible time. That helmet bought me 30 to 45 seconds, and helped qualify me for Worlds. I out biked most men of any age. Wearing the TT helmet, I had both beaten 'em and joined 'em, simultaneously.
Whatever. Time trial helmets still make you look like a douche. Here's a quick primer for the uninitiated, then I'm off to go sell out some more.
One big reason I resisted TT helmets: I didn't want to look like small-time retro super hero, The Rocketeer. A flying bellhop in the very first time trial helmet saves an art deco Los Angeles! At least it's easier to go to the bathroom in his flying suit than in Tony Stark's.
This man at least has the excuse of being European, and also riding in the Tour De France, so I will cut him some slack. He's still a douche,because his TT helmet has a blast shield, but in mitigation it also has plastic mutton chop sideburns, which are novel. NOTE the clothing, however. This man is also wearing a bike onesie, a close relative of the tri-onesie. This means it is harder for him to go to the bathroom than it is for either Tony Stark or the Rocketeer. This will be addressed in further petty, judgemental posts about racewear.
*See also: Skinsuits and --in the case of wealthy luntatics -- oxygen sleep chambers.
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