Good for a Laugh.

One of the good things about having someone like John on the team is that he is always ready to give us all a laugh. If he's not telling us one of his funny tales of the time he spent in the film industry he is cracking a joke or doing something that the rest of us find really humorous such as mentioned in yesterday's posting. One evening in France after a long and hot day the talk came around to the subject that is often on the minds of all long distance cyclists- that is the subject of CHAFING. Now chafing can be really painful especially as the temperture rises and the mileage mounts up. In order to help combat the problem most cyclists wear padded lycra shorts and a lot of us also use a cream that we apply either directly on the skin in those secret little places or else on the chamois pad of the shorts.During our evening discussion John told us that he wasn't using a chamois cream but he also let slip that he was wearing cotton underpants as well as his padded shorts. Now this is a total NO NO!! If you wear cotton underpants they will just absorb all your perspiration and all that dampness just helps to make you very sore indeed. The idea is to wear the padded chamois lycra shorts and NO underpants. Poor John - no wonder he had been suffering. When the rest of us had finished laughing (which took a good few minutes) John told us that he hadn't realised and that no one had explained this to him bearing in mind that he is not a cyclist as such. So between the bouts of laughter we explained to John all there is to know about the black art of wearing padded lycra shorts and the use of chamois cream. The following evening at the end of the day's ride we were suprised to see a large white greasy mark all over the rear end of John's shorts. When asked about it John explained that as he didn't have any chamios cream he had used baby nappy rash cream-more laughter. Unlike chamois cream the nappy rash cream is oily and is not absorbed by the pad in the same way that proper chamois cream is. By the end of the trip Jason and I could tell how far we had all cycled that day just by looking at the size of John's oily patch. The bigger the patch the further we had travelled. This proved almost as accurate as the bike computers. As I said at the beginning -you can always rely on John to give you a good laugh....!!!!