As you may know, I am both a cyclist and an opinionated person.

I also belong (depending on to whom you pose the question) to a few different cycling sub-cultures: I shave my legs, race, and ride a fast road bike, so you could call me a Roadie (or a proto-roadie, anyway). I also commute by bike year ’round in all kinds of weather and traffic conditions, so you could call me a Die Hard Commuter. I’ve done one overnight bike camping trip and I seem to have another one coming up very soon, so you could say that I’m also a Cyclotourist.

Now, if you’re new to the cycling community, you may find yourself mystified by the distinctions within it. At first, perhaps, you decide there are two types of cyclists: Roadies and Mountain Bikers. Soon, however, you realize that the mere fact that someone rides a road bike doesn’t actually mean that person is a roadie. Likewise, there are plenty of Mountain Bikers who also ride road bikes … and then there are all those people tooling around on hybrids, Dutch bikes, bakfietsen…

Needless to say, the work of cycling can be a strange and confusing place.

Relax: I’m here to help. You see, I’ve created a few easy pie charts to help you classify both yourself and your bike buddies in just seconds. Just refer to the helpful graphs below and figure out where you fit.

Let’s start with Roadies!

Roadies: They’re part lycra, part carbon fiber, a big part opinions, and no part leg hair.

The ‘Roadie’ segment may be the most visible part of the cycling community, if only because they (should I say ‘we?’) are often dressed in bright colors and tend to travel in packs.

Though both subgroups ride road bikes, they are fundamentally different from the Retrogrouch segment:

Retrogrouches are to steel and wool (but no so much steel-wool) as Roadies are to Lycra and Carbon Fiber. Like Roadies, they come with a lot of grit and strong opinions.

Retrogrouches and Roadies don’t always get along. Some Roadies think all Retrogrouches are sluggish sticks-in-the-mud who live in the past; meanwhile, some Retrogrouches think all Roadies are lightweight, smooth-legged poofters who like to run around in their Underoos.

Hm.

Actually, ‘lightweight, smooth-legged poofter who likes to run around in his Underoos’ is a pretty good description of your friendly author.

Both Retrogrouches and Roadies, however, may do time as Die-Hard Commuters. Die-Hard Commuters are like the Sherman tanks of the cycling world: unstoppable forces of human-and-machine power that laugh in the face of danger (or at least in the face of nasty weather).

Some Die-Hard Commuters, however, would consider themselves neither Roadies nor Retrogrouches.

Panniers, rain gear, practical bikes with upright positioning: the Die Hard Commuter will rock anything that makes sense on the trip from Point A to Point B.

Die Hard commuters can, in fact, belong to any subset of the cycling community. They know the rules of the road and are pretty much universally respected for their brass balls and unflappable commitment to riding the bike whenever and wherever it is even marginally possible to do so.

Some of us have even considered whether pedal-boating across the river can be considered a valid ‘bike commute’ phase. I’ll allow it.

Naturally — they already own the equipment, after all — there’s some overlap between the ‘Die-Hard Commuter’ and the ‘Cyclotourist’ community. Cyclotourists are those of us who take vacations on our bikes, rather than taking our bikes on vacation. You will know them by their enormous panniers, increasingly-wild facial (or leg) hair, and strong opinions on camping equipment.

Cyclotourists: known for their enormous panniers and arcane knowledge of camping equipment, the Cyclotourist often gets along well with the Retrogrouch.

Meanwhile, Mountain Bikers are also often (but not always) Die-Hard Commuters or Cyclotourists. Their familiarity with rough terrain and various weather conditions — coupled with their taste for adrenaline — gives them a natural advantage in entering either of these sub-groups. However, some of them have little or no road-riding experience, and riding on the road is fairly essential to the Die Hard Commuter or Cyclotourist.

Adrenaline addiction, balls of brass, and (of course) mountain bikes: the Mountain Biker in her natural habitat is easy to spot, if not always to catch.

There are even some amphibious roadie/mountain biker hybrids who do very well either on road or off — and especially on the Cyclocross course, where their excellent bike-handling skills and aerobic aplomb allow them to dominate would-be ‘crossers who have only trained on the road.

It is fairly safe to say that none of these groups is particularly fond of a subset of the bike world known as the ‘fixter*.’ These are the folks who have bought into the recent trend for skinny jeans, messenger bags, and fixed-gear bikes, but who haven’t actually bothered to learn to ride them.

I actually have no problem with people who choose to wear skinny jeans and ride fixed. I know quite a few of these folks, including some who are entirely capable of getting out their geared road ride and smoking my bacon. Likewise, if you work at a place that lets you wear jeans and you commute by bike, it makes perfect sense to wear skinny jeans rather than roll them up or use pants clips. Heck, when I wear jeans, I wear ’em skinny — mainly because I’m so used to my all-Lycra-all-the-time lifestyle at this point that wearing regular pants just feels weird.

It’s the folks riding flashy new fixies on the sidewalk, mowing down pedestrians left and right because they lack brakes, that I generally want to strangle.

And so, last and least, one more pie chart, so you will know if you are a fixter and will be able to hit your local League of American Bicyclists training course and gain some bike-handling skills:

Fixters: Scourge of the Sidewalk; Paraiah of the Pedestrians. If you recognize yourself in this pie, well … I’m glad you’ve bought a bike. Now all you need to do is learn how to ride it!

I hope these pie charts will assist us all in better understanding the subcultures within the cycling world, that we may more effectively classify ourselves and deride those unlike us — errr, or classify ourselves and reach out to cyclists of other ‘cycle-ways.’

Notes
*I believe this term was coined by that arbiter of cycling-culture taste, BikeSnobNYC. I hope he doesn’t mind me borrowing it.