Shaving my Legs...

The burn isn’t the only embarrassing thing about my legs. They are also hairy.

In certain cycling circles, having hairy legs is intolerable. It’s the cycling equivalent of having spinach caught between your teeth. Pros like Wiggo and Cavendish shave their legs for a variety of – mostly legitimate - reasons,

1)        Because of Aerodynamics. I’m not convinced on this one, but maybe over a 25 mile time trial it might save a second or two.

2)        Because they get massaged after training and racing and smooth hair-free legs are easier to work on than hairy ones.

3)         Because when they fall off their bikes, the resulting cuts and grazes are easier to clean up without hairs getting in the abrasion and encouraging infection.

4)         Because they think it looks better.


Amateurs shave their legs for only one reason;

-          Because they want to look like pros.

So naturally, I’ve shaved my legs. 

Past tense you’ll notice. I did it about 10 years ago, yet whenever it is mentioned (and it comes up surprisingly often) it always provides plenty of sniggering amusement, not least from my wife.  But before I recall the sorry circumstances of my depilation, let me set out the arguments in my defence.

Back then, I used to do a bit of bike racing. I used to compete. Not very successfully, you must appreciate. In fact in six years of racing my total prize money amounted to £4.50. I was what the word mediocre was invented for. In fact, my racing was so monumentally mediocre my only ambition at the start of every race was not to come last.

But for a few years, I’d head off to Spain for a pre-season cycle training camp, hopeful that this would be the year my fortunes changed. ‘Camp’ was perhaps a good word in this context, because almost all the blokes there– some 50/60 – had their legs shaved. The first year I turned up au naturale, I felt like a chimp on a bike; specifically the PG Tips drinking Tour-de-France riding chimp from those now politically incorrect adverts of the 1970s.

With my hairy legs the seemingly the lone pair among a forest of shaved (and in some cases shamelessly oiled) legs I felt judged and scorned. I felt amateur, I felt hirsute. Next year, I told myself, the hair would have to go.

Ladies reading this will be aware of the limited options involved here, all of which involve varying degrees of discomfort or indignity.

Waxing my legs was never going to happen – not while I still had breath in me anyway. The prospect of ripping out hair from follicles that had for the last few decades been happily buried in my legs was not even to be contemplated. My mind was definitively made up after reading travel writer Tim Moore’s account of trying this method, which he described as, “no more painful than the last time I pulled off a pair of flaming Elastoplast trousers”.

So waxing was out.

What about shaving? After all, it’s not as if I’m unfamiliar with a razor, having been clean-shaven all my life. But where to start on a pair of hairy male legs?

For Cath, with legs shaved for a lifetime, it’s an easy task of gently running a razor up and down her shins. But for me, with fecund legs, sprouting hairs like a tropical rainforest, any razor applied to my virgin shins was going to find itself choking to death pretty quickly.

Maybe the trick was to kick-off with a pair of industrial clippers to get the worst of the thatch out of the way, before tidying up with a beard trimmer….and getting that final billiard ball finish the old-fashioned way with razor and shaving foam. But this all felt a little too agricultural to me; more like harvesting crops than removing body hair. In any case, with this option there was the very real prospect of missing bits. Could there be a greater humiliation than having a line of missed hair running down the back of my legs like a seamed stocking, where thanks to a combination of ineptitude and inflexibility I had missed a stretch.  It didn’t bear thinking about.

What about Laser treatment. Oh come on….

So that left the cream option. Back then, before being bizarrely rebranded Veet, the hair removal cream of choice was known as Imaac.

I’d had only passing acquaintance with the stuff, which in a male world more usually featured on rugby tours, where it is liberally applied to the eyebrows of sleeping teammates, leaving them with the sort of constantly surprised look you associate with lego people.

Cath had Imaac (which was a good start), but not in the industrial qualities I was clearly going to need. My legs were, after all, a greenfield site; there was a lot to clear here…not just a little bit of pruning to do. Unable to face the excruciating prospect of buying Imaac myself, I sent Cath to Boots. On her return, I retired to the bathroom, closed the door and then, thinking better of it, I locked it. 

I’m about to get naked here so If you wish to skip to the next blog entry, I quite understand.

Perching on the side of the bath, I unscrewed the cap and squirted some of the foul-smelling stuff out. The tube comes with a dinky plastic pastel-coloured tool, not unlike a feminine brick-layers trowel. And with this wholly inadequate device I started ladling the stuff on.

There is an added frisson of tension in this operation, as the goo must stay on the legs long enough to do its nefarious work, but leave it too long and it take on agent orange- like qualities, apparently melting the skin. Or something.  So the clock was ticking.

It was only as I was spreading the stuff on my legs that the key question hit me. How far to go?

Just above the knee perhaps? Well that would be OK when wearing cycling shorts; I’d have the hair-free look I was seeking, but when naked I’d look as if I was wearing a pair of mohair Bermuda shorts.
 But if I went higher, then how high?

If I crept up to mid-thigh I’d run the risk of having a band of hair showing below my swimming shorts if I went for a dip – which I fully intended to do.  I’d look like a kind of Neapolitan ice-cream from the waist down.

But I’d also booked a sports massage during the training camp (another pathetic attempt to make myself feel like a pro). If I only depilated to mid-thigh, the poor masseur would literally have one hand in a sea of hair, the other one on freshly-mowed skin.

So, was it a case of going right up to groin level?

(This would be getting a little too close for comfort and again, whenever I got naked, I’d look like I was wearing a pair of hairy budgie-smugglers….)

But the decision had to made and made quickly. The stuff was already on my legs and the clock was ticking. Prevaricate too long in weighing up the options and I’d have melted my legs anyway.

In the end I went for the last option – ‘all the way’; in for a penny in for a pound.  So I covered myself in stinking cream and sat there, white legged…red faced… (hearing the occasional muffled snicker from outside the bathroom door) … waiting for a whole bunch of chemicals to do their evil thing.

Rinsing it off was a bit of a shock.  The legs holding me up were no longer mine. Below me were a pair of (if I may say it myself) rather shapely hair-free legs. I tentatively ran a hand down them. Nice. I was beginning to worry now – was I starting to fancy my own legs?

That night, as I lay in bed with Cath, she was appalled. (I’m not sure there is a more appropriate word). “It’s like I’m in bed with another woman” she said when I cuddled up to her.  I didn’t want to say anything, but her legs were a bit stubbly, mine were lovely and smooth…..

The next day I flew to the training camp. No one commented on my legs. But more importantly, no one commented on my hairy legs….either.  I felt part of the club. I had arrived. In a cycling sense,  I belonged.  I even imagined I went that little bit faster.

And that, I thought, would be that. I’d let the hair grow back after the camp and all would be well. Cath would start talking to me again and I’d be able to sit around the pool in the summer without causing undue alarm or widespread hilarity.

Except that something unexpected and altogether unwelcome started to happen.

A week or two later, large, unsightly, red wheals began to emerge on my legs. Slowly, continent-shaped blotches began to wrap themselves around my calves and thighs. They turned from to a light pink to an angry red. They were not going away.  In fact they were growing like those cells that you see on microscope plates, dividing, and multiplying again and again …. growing like some chilling sci-fi virus that would slowly eat its victim alive; the sort of contagion that Dr Who might have to deal with.

I clearly had to go to the doctor.  (My GP, not the Time Lord). 
But this was a slightly awkward one.

The first hurdle wasn’t too bad. When I rang for an appointment, I was asked what the problem was. ”Rash”, I replied. Easy.

But face to face with the doctor, whose wife knows my wife…I had to come clean.

“So, what seems to be the problem” he said. Keeping my trousers on I took a deep breath. On the way to the surgery I’d been weighing up the various forms of words available to me, desperately searching for a combination that didn’t make me sound too odd. I soon realised that no such combination of words existed. There was no way around this ….so I just ploughed on.

“I immaced my legs….. and….well….. this happened”, I said, pulling up my trouser leg.

“You immaced your legs”, he replied slowly and carefully, just to be sure he’s heard me correctly.
“Yes”, I said in a small voice…”You know, like….errmm ….professional cyclists and swimmers do”.

He raised a singular eyebrow and made no further comment.

The treatment was – God bless the NHS – 10 weeks of sunbed treatment. Each week, I’d head off to hospital for a few warming minutes under the sunbed lamps.  It was glorious. It was warm and relaxing. The paper pants I was required to wear were a sartorial low point, but other than having to explain to a few nurses why I needed the sunbed treatment in the first place…(The line, ‘I immaced my legs never ceased to raise a smirk) it was wonderful.

Granted, I soon began to look like a daytime TV host, turning a slightly unlikely shade of orange, but the wheals left me, the hair grew back and I was once more, my old self.

Rest assured, I shall be cycling to John O’Groats with legs as hairy as the good Lord intended.