A Beginners Guide To Bike Touring

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A Beginners Guide to Cycle Touring: How to prepare

Step 2: Take some 200-grit sandpaper and rub your rear-end and the insides of your legs for about 20 minutes. Rinse with salt-water. Repeat. Then, sit on a softball for 8 hours. Do this daily for at least 8 days.

Step 3: Each day, take two twenty-dollar bills and tear them into small pieces. Place the pieces on a dinner-plate, douse them with lighter fluid and burn them. Inhale the smoke (simulating car-fumes). Rub the ashes on your face. Then go to the local motel and ask them for a room.

Step 4: Take a 1-quart plastic bottle. Fill it from the utility sink of a local
gas-station (where the mechanics wash their hands). Let the bottle sit in the
sun for 2 or 3 hours until it’s good and tepid. Seal the bottle up (kinda,
sorta) and drag it through a ditch or swamp. Walk to a busy road. Place your
spagetti-strainer on your head and drink the swill-water from the bottle while
doing deep knee-bends along the side of the road.

Step 5: Get some of those Dutch wooden-shoes. Coat the bottoms with 90-W
gear-oil. Go to the local supermarket (preferably one with tile floors). Put
the oil-coated, wooden shoes on your feet and go shopping.

Step 6: Think of a song from the 1980’s that you really hated. Buy the CD and play 20 seconds of that song over and over and over for about 6 hours. Do more deep knee-bends

Step 7: Hill training: Do your deep knee-bends for about 4 hours with the
salt-soaked spagetti-strainer on your head, while you drink the warm
swill-water and listen to the 80’s song over and over (I would recommend “I’m a cowboy/On a STEEL horse I ride!” by Bon Jovi). At the end of 4 hours, climb onto the hood of a friend’s car and have him drive like a lunatic down the twistiest road in the area while you hang on for dear life.

Step 8: Humiliation training: Wash your car and wipe it down with a
chamois-cloth. Make sure you get a healthy amount of residual soap and
road-grit embedded in the chamois. Put the chamois on your body like a
loin-cloth, then wrap your thighs and middle-section with cellophane. Make sure it’s really snug. Paint yourself from the waist down with black latex paint.  Cut an onion in half and rub it into your arm-pits. Put on a brightly colored shirt and your Dutch oil-coated wooden shoes and go shopping at a crowded local mall.

Step 9: Foul weather training: Take everything that’s important to you, pack it in a Nylon corodura bag and place it in the shower. Get in the shower with it. Run the water from hot to cold. Get out and without drying off, go to the local convienience store. Leave the wet, important stuff on the sidewalk. Go inside and buy $10 worth of Gatorade and Fig Newtons.

Step 10: As Archimedes hypothesized: “Use a simple lever to move the Earth from one place to another”. After doing that, go around your house and lift heavy things that you never imagined a person could lift. Surprise yourself. Do 1,000 sit-ups. Then 10,000. Eat lunch. Repeat. Argue with every girlfriend/boyfriend you’ve ever known and be RIGHT. Solve all the problems of politics, faith and economics. At the end of the day, get into a huge tub filled with hot soapy water and relax, because tomorrow is another BIG DAY ON THE BIKE!

Step 11: Headwinds training: Buy a huge map of the entire country. Spread it in front  of you. Have a friend hold a hair-dryer in your face. Stick your feet in
taffy and try to pull your knees to your chest while your friend tries to
shove you into a ditch or into traffic with his free hand. Every 20 minutes
or so, look at the huge map and marvel at the fact that you have gone nowhere  after so much hard work and suffering. Fold the map in front of a window-fan set to “High”.