With the riders of the Tour de France struggling through the Pyrenees in the final days of the 2010 race it seems appropriate to offer up this local story, the saga of the Tour de Pants. Held right here in Norfolk, the TdP featured no epic climbs or all-out sprints, but did involve a dozen people dropping trou at the Pagoda, the bus transfer station, and on the Elizabeth River Ferry. So pick up a baguette, strap on your helmet, and have a wild read. And please, feel free to take off your pants at any point in this story.

I totally won the Tour de Pants, but I cheated.

Rider, meet pants.

Reflecting on my victory, I realize I was the only rider in the race with gears. They hadn’t specifically prohibited bikes with gears, but when you’re the only guy in the race who has them, and you stop to think about how you beat a bunch of other people who ride a lot more than you do, you begin to feel like a sissy. When the race started I was too busy reading the instructions to focus on the gears issue. The photocopied cue sheet identified seven checkpoints where we were supposed to get off our bikes and change our pants. I had planned ahead—I carried a bagful of shorts, and I wore spandex underneath so I wouldn’t expose myself to any children or old ladies while I was changing.

Even in the shade it was hot, one of the hottest days of the summer so far, something like 98 degrees. I was already sweating just standing still. Everyone crackled with nervous energy as we awaited some stragglers. The group was mostly in their 20s, mostly male. Liz Schleeper, 43, and I, 37, were the oldest. We assembled into five teams of two for the race, and Liz and I, feeling old I suppose, stuck together. I snapped a photo of us with my iPhone, two grinning faces side-by-side. We were also the only two in the race who wore helmets.

The mastermind of the event, Rob Kurtz, glowered and paced. He gets intensely focused when he’s running a race. He plans them for weeks, invites his friends and acquaintances in the bike scene via a loosely organized email list. He maps out the route in advance, and prints the cue sheets. He also makes spoke-cards, laminated rectangular mementos for the event that get tucked in between the spokes of your wheel. As he handed out spoke-cards, each bearing the words “Le Tour de Pants,” and cue sheets to us, he gave us some pointers.

He told us there was a checkpoint in Portsmouth, across the river. There are no bridges for bikes. “The ferry runs every half hour,” he said, “at quarter of and quarter after. It’s 4:30 now, so you’ll have to decide if you want to hit any checkpoints over here first, or head straight to the dock.”

Liz and I did some quick calculations. There were some checkpoints on the way to the ferry but we weren’t sure we could stop, change pants, and get going again in time to make it to the dock before 4:45. Other riders started to depart. We hopped on our bikes and sped off, deciding to go straight to the ferry. Three other teams took the opposite approach, aiming to hit Norfolk checkpoints first, and then take the later boat. One other team headed toward the dock with us.

There are some features that characterize this group of bikers, the ones who ride in so-called “alleycat” races like the Tour de Pants. They’re mostly young and male, as I said. They don’t wear helmets, usually. They don’t wear tight, colorful spandex, either. These guys aren’t trying to look like Lance Armstrong (although he may have inspired them to ride). They wear funky clothes, like knickers, sleeveless wool jerseys, and little Italian racing hats. They have retro facial hair, like handlebar mustaches and lambchops. And, most importantly, they ride fixed-gear bikes. The fixie, a bike with no gears, is a hallmark of the true bicycle hipster. It’s an urban cyclist’s badge of coolness, a nod to the cult of the bicycle messenger, the working man’s bike. Everyone in the race, except me, was riding a fixie.

Photo by Liz Schleeper

Fixie riders, I noticed as we crossed over perpendicular streets, never used the brakes. A fixie has only one brake anyway, on the front tire. But when you’re riding a fixed-gear bike, you don’t usually need it. They pedaled forward to accelerate, and then simply slowed their legs, using muscle power to resist the turning pedals, to stop. They never squeezed the front brake at all, they never changed gears. It gave smoothness and quietness to their ride, as if rider and bike were a single machine. Until I was surrounded by fixies, I never heard the noise of my own bike chain grinding as the derailleur pushed it onto a cog, or the squeal of my rubber brake pads pinching the rims. Now these ordinary sounds seemed embarrassingly loud, like when, a few days earlier, my 5-year-old son had blurted out, “Daddy, your breath smells stinky,” in the grocery store.

I knew immediately I had to have one. Not only because then I could more easily infiltrate this scene of cool bike nerds, but because it resonated with my personal love of bikes as transportation. The fixie is cool because it is simple. It is a model of perfection, an instrument without adornment or unnecessary parts. When the Wright Brothers built bikes, before they moved on to airplanes, they built fixies. The fixie gradually gave way to innovations—multiple front and rear chain rings, derailleurs, caliper brakes, etc. A modern bicycle isn’t impossibly complicated, but it has significantly more parts than its predecessors.

Our rival team had a bit of a jump on us. We passed them at the Pagoda near Downtown, where they were hopping up and down, swapping their shorts in an effort to squeeze in one checkpoint on the way to the ferry. Liz and I pressed on, not wanting to miss the boat. We beat them to the ferry, but they boarded before it pulled away from the dock. Now they were one checkpoint ahead of us. We didn’t know where the other teams were, but they must have been hitting checkpoints in Norfolk and planning to take the later ferry. The other team consisted of Ben and Jay, two stalwarts of the Norfolk fixie scene. Ben is white, naturally good-looking and muscular, with a broad mouth and corn-colored hair. Jay is black and very compact. He covers his balding head with an old-fashioned biking helmet made from bands of cloth—about as effective in a crash as the old-fashioned leather helmets that football players used to wear. They stand with Liz and me on the upper deck of the ferry and watch small sailboats glide lazily on the Elizabeth.

The race heats up again when we reach Portsmouth—we spring from the ferry and mount up on the dock, then Liz and I chase Ben and Jay to the Portsmouth checkpoint, a house in historic Old Town. We snap our photos as we change pants and then bike back to the ferry, where we have only a few minutes wait before boarding again. The ferry itself is another checkpoint. Liz and I search around for a spot on the boat where we can change without attracting attention from the families who are on board with us. We settle for the upper deck, just below the pilot’s window, where we hope we’ll be out of sight. We drop our pants and don another pair from the bag.

Tour de Pants, Part Two >>