The Fixie Mentality

Chris and I have had a long running, “today I saw a Fixie doing [insert foolish act here],” tirade going for several years now. We gripe about them riding up alongside cars at a traffic signal only to be re-overtaken when the light changes because they can’t sprint off the start with their one gear. We rant about their freakish parts selection, like a carbon spoke wheel on the front but a traditionally laced wheel on the rear because the carbon wheel company doesn’t make a matching rear track version, but the bike owner just has to have those wheels. Most of the time the things that make us laugh are due to their slavish devotion to the fad just for the sake of being different, standing out, thumbing their noses at society, swimming upstream, or simply cutting off their noses to spite their own faces. Then there are those times when they transcend fashion and cross the line into stupidity. I saw something today that pretty much takes the cake for that – chainstay wrap. Huh? What? It’s a fixed-gear, single-speed bike with horizontal dropouts and no derailleur or tensioner. If his chain is so loose that he has chainslap issues, he has much larger issues to worry about! Time to put that bike on the rack and climb on board the short bus, dude!