If one pursues athletic cycling for long enough, one will be told that shaving the legs is just about mandatory. We are talking about men here. It will not be a surprise to anyone that, in our society women generally shave their legs, and men generally do not.
Why should a male cyclist defy societal convention and shave the lower extremities? There are usually three reasons given:
Smoothly shaved extremities make receiving therapeutic massage an easier proposition.
Sooner or later one will go down and get scraped and lacerated. When this happens, the wounds are easier to clean on a shaved leg, and hair does not get into the abrasions and lacerations. This decreases the likelihood of infection.
The Pros all do it.
Two of those reasons have some merit. I say some merit.
When I was younger, I bought the whole line. Despite some initial reluctance, I decided that my legs needed to become clean-shaven.
Sounds relatively simple, doesn’t it? I had shaved my face, in fact had been shaving my face for six years before I grew my first beard. (I grew the beard because I didn’t particularly like shaving. So why was I planning to scrape my legs?) In short, I was familiar with shaving. Or so I thought.
I went out and bought supplies. Fresh new razors. A couple of cans of shaving cream.
I followed some of the advice I’d been given. Took a good hot shower, and then started the job. I lathered one leg from ankle all the way up. (That raised an interesting question. Just how high should this leg shaving go?) And so I went to work, starting around the ankle and working upward. Two rather painful nicks around the achilles tendon, but not too bad. The lower leg went okay, except for a few areas where I had some pre-existing cuts and scrapes. (Ouch!)
Then I got to the knee! That was where the bloodletting began in earnest. How in the Wide Wide World of Sports does anyone manage to shave a knee!
The upper leg wasn’t too bad, if one discounted the visibility problems. There’s a lot of upper leg, and most of it is not directly viewable. Mirrors help, but then one has to correct for mirror image movement. About five more good nicks occurred there. I didn’t realize how serious one of them was until the blood dripped on the floor. (At least it didn’t require stitching.)
The second leg went along about like the first, only more so. Finally finished, I decided I needed to jump back into the shower…
OUCH!!!!!
Galloping thunder blazes! Absolutely everything felt scraped and abraded, and it all stung like mad. I had the thought that I could have produced the same effect with an angle grinder instead of a razor.
But my legs were cleanly shaved. And oh boy! Did that ever feel weird. Windy. Chilly. Odd.
Eventually, after some years of this self-inflicted wounding, I got out of the habit of leg shaving, and blood sacrifice. The thing is, I almost never receive therapeutic massage. And since I’ve not raced in many many years, I almost never fall or crash. The risk of infection from abrasions is very low, but I’ve suffered quiet a few infected razor cuts. Not a winning proposition.
I figure I’ll just let the Pros do the leg shaving. It’s one of the many things they do to entertain us. And they do it so well. I’ll leave the leg butchery to the experts from now on.
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