Okay, so I'm gonna go out for a ride on my nice, shiny new Puch Royal X, complete with the Lyotard Berthet pedals and the Ideale 90 saddle. But it's some time in 1978, and I still didn't have cycling shoes. All of the money had gone to buying the bike, right? My choices for footwear were either the chunky Nikes I'd just gotten, or an older pair of Adidas running shoes. I noticed that the shoes were coming apart ... but wait, there in the medicine cabinet was some surgical adhesive tape, for holding gauze bandage pads in place. The very stuff, right?
So I've gone rolling on out Rivoli Drive in Macon Georgia, on a beautiful late Spring day. It's hot, and the red Mariplast bottle with the finger grooves and the Guerciotti emblem has come out for a good swig repeatedly. I'm a way cool 16-year-old, hip, with-it, riding my flashy European racing bike. I am a walking (or in this case, cycling) encyclopedia of pose.
Several miles later, and a nice sweat going, I reach the intersection with Bass Road. It's a stop sign, and as always, people are driving fast. I stop and go to take a foot out. Nothing happens. I'm wobbling, I actually properly loosen the toestrap, and it's absolutely no dice, and I fall over in the road just like Artie Johnson on his tricycle on "Laugh-In ..."
All the old bike experts raved about how the nice flat platform of the Berthet pedal supports your feet and distributes the stress all across the small bones of the pedal extremities. What they never warned about was what happens when surgical adhesive tape wrapped around your shoe heats up and glues your foot in place ...
Russ Fitzgerald
Greenwood SC
rfitzger@emeraldis.com
http://www.emeraldis.com/
http://www.lostweekend.homestead.com