On sponsors, laundry, and landmark events

Padraig over at Red Kite Prayer has a philosophy with regard to wearing old cycling kits: any company willing to support cycling with sponsorship dollars for whatever period of time, he’s willing to support by wearing their kit.

I think that’s a good approach. I’ve got a few teammates whom I’ve only ever seen training in this year’s kit. And while I admire their loyalty to our sponsors, my cycling budget isn’t vast enough to purchase enough kits to train in nearly every day of the week, and my patience for doing laundry isn’t high enough to wash the same ones over and over.

So I usually just wear team kit on race days (typically a couple times a week) and wear whatever else is clean on all the others. Besides, the kits advertising a shop other than Revolution were given to me by Steve’s boss, gratis. And since they also have the name of his insurance agency on the bum, I may as well give him some exposure, natch. Because let’s face it, amongst bike racers, my butt is as wide as a billboard by comparison.

As for supporting the companies that support cycling, I hadn’t even heard of HTC before they signed on as a sponsor of what is now HTC-Columbia last year. They make mobile phones. I needed a new phone, so I bought one of theirs. Mostly because they sponsor a cycling team. Turns out I quite like the phone (or at least the platform for the android operating system, which, with zero intervention from me other than signing in, linked my email, calendar, address book, and pretty much everything else I do online to my phone). Also turns out it has a built-in twitter app.

I like to make fun of twitter. I especially like to make fun of people that tweet every time any of the following landmark events occurs in their lives: their music player starts the next song; they buy a cup of coffee; they have a bowel movement, regardless of whether it’s gratifying or not. Seriously, the line between newsworthy and not is not nearly that fine. I know we bloggers think that every little thing about our lives is legitimate content (take this post, for instance), but if bloggers are egotists, constant tweeters (of what could in many cases rightly be described as anti-content) are clinical narcissists.

Nevertheless, I’ve embraced twitter. Most of the people I follow are guys from the neighborhood. It’s great for announcing group rides in Corner Canyon that I never attend. It’s great for announcing that the midweek race is once again canceled due to weather. It’s also great when you set your DVR to record the Giro with the anticipation of watching as if it were live that night, only for someone to tweet a spoiler. I especially love that part.