I was a member of the sweaty back club this morning. I recently built a 2001 LeMond Buenos Aires to be a fun bike to ride on really nice days. Until now I've been getting by with hauling in extra clothes and lunches on the fender-beauty when I saw a nice day ahead on the calendar so that I could ride completely unencumbered. Today was my first day back after a vacation that centered around rolling my LHT fully loaded over 340 miles of crushed limestone and mud, so waking up to sunny skies and smooth pavement, I just had to hop on a road bike. I tossed my stuff in a backpack and reveled in the bliss.

As for who exactly represents "the rest of us" I suppose that's a relatively philosophical discussion, but when I got to work this morning I noticed something that seemed relevant. I parked where I normally parked, with a rack all to myself. The adjacent rack happened to be loaded with the variety of bikes that I think are representative of the majority of bike commuters (though perhaps not the type who participate in this forum). The juxtaposition of these images strikes me as being fairly symbolic.





So yeah, I feel like I'm fairly different from the majority of my fellow commuters. Even my regular commuter with its rack and panniers is more like my LeMond than it is like the other bikes above.

FWIW, just behind where I was standing to take these pictures, on my side of the aisle, was a recumbent with a full wind screen. There was an e-bike just out of frame on the more heavily used side.