Buying something you already own feels pointless – but here I am, browsing the Amazon Spring Deal Days offers to find a new cycling gilet, even though there’s nothing wrong with the ones I already have at home.
It’s actually not even me who needs one, but purchasing cycling gear clearly falls under my role as the trusted cycling expert of our household, unless, of course, you ask my 11-year-old daughter, who apparently already knows ‘everything’. I digress.
As a cycling family, we generally own many multiples of cycling kit, including gilets. We’ve also been ahead of the curve by not gendering our kit, though some items, namely sports bras and shorts, tend to live in his or her kit drawers. Having very similar measurements for most of our lives has meant that my partner and I have been able to share a communal jacket and gilet drawer.
Until now.
After a reasonable hiatus from cycling, he decided to get back into riding and racing after a couple of years of solely doing gym strength training. He started with a cyclocross season, backed up by lots of indoor riding, which meant that, apart from shorts, jerseys, and raincoats, we hadn’t really thought much about other kit.
But now that he’s signed up for some gravel event, he needs to start riding outside a bit more. That’s when the first problem arose. Nothing that isn’t over 90% Lycra fits him now. We have a dedicated gilet drawer, and the most he can do is get two arms in, but there’s no way a zip is going to come together now that he has the sort of upper-body muscles a track sprinter would be proud of.
While this impressive adaptation to strength training in such a short timescale would have most people wanting to know his secret for muscle bulking*, it also means I now have to buy my real-life Ken a new spring cycling wardrobe.
This wasn’t on our spending radar for the month, but as I see him riding off the drive with a flappy oversized raincoat and thermals that are older than most pro tour riders, I feel it’s only fair to stretch the monthly disposable income a little more to enable a gilet to stretch around his newly jacked torso.
*Spoiler alert – it’s eating a lot of biscuits while watching bike races late at night.*
For more excellent deals in the Amazon Spring Sale, check out these offers found by my colleagues:
Explore More
