Musette 101 with Ted King
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If you’ve been following our social feeds of late you’ll know our current holiday offers include the opportunity to get a custom Peloton SWRVE musette bag. It’s pretty sweet, but we desire to be good citizens of the peloton, so that means we can’t just send a musette bag out into the world without ensuring we all know proper musette technique. So we asked Ted King, ex-World Tour pro and all-around road racing guru, how to properly grab a musette bag. He’s grabbed musettes at grand tours, he’s grabbed musettes at the Tour of Flanders, he’s grabbed musettes in some of the most challenging environments in the world. So, here is Mr. Ted King’s Musette 101.
peloton/Yuzuru Sunada
[Ted King] Tip number one: don’t put it into your wheel. Tip number two: don’t crash… And so forth…
Just kidding.
98% of the time, the rider sees the soigneur before the soigner sees the rider. The soigneur’s job is to be quick-draw-McGraw: have one bag held up as often as possible. A bag is taken? Quickly reload from one arm to the other hand. Go, go, go!
You’re basically grabbing a shoelace at 20mph, so grab with confidence. A background in ball sports will likely benefit you for hand-eye coordination.
Depending on the caloric payload, the bag might be heavy. Grab with strength so that the inertia of the heavy bag at rest doesn’t yank you and your spindly arm off your bike.
Don’t veer. Look from far away where you soigneur is standing and be in position, ready to get cut-off by a bunch of yahoos at the last minute. Once grabbing your bag, get the heck out of dodge. Throw the bag over your shoulder, two hands now on the bars, and sprint up to the lead riders. At which point you’re safe to grab some grub from the bag.
Don’t toss the bag randomly when you’re finished. Either go to the side of the road and throw it from low, to the ground at the side. Or, even easier if there’s still some food in it, toss it well off the road. You look like a dummy if you crash in the feed zone. You look way the heck dumber if you’re the dude upright, but have caused someone else to crash.
Consume your UnTapped and happily ride off into the sunset.
Good stuff Ted, thanks! To see what Ted is up to head to IamTedKing.com. To learn more about UnTapped, Ted’s maple syrup based nutrition company, go to untapped.cc or check out the video below.