This is the position you should assume when you are in the saddle of a bicycle. Of course no one, man or boy, can keep up in this position all the time, but you should keep as near it as you comfortably can. Comfort is really the basis of all such positions, and while, to a certain extent, comfort is the result of habit, still a more upright position is more natural to one than to another rider.
INCORRECT ROAD POSITION.
This upright seat is dependent on itself. That is to say, you should get in the habit of taking it so easily that, supposing you could ride with handles, you would sit thus nevertheless. In other words, you should not depend on your hands and the grip they have on the handles for support at all. The hands and arms are not needed as you sit in a chair, nor as you walk, nor as you ride a horse, except as guides in one case to guide the horse, in the other to keep your balance while walking, and finally on the bicycle to guide the wheel and keep yourself balanced on it. If you will examine the two cuts accompanying this article, entitled, respectively, "correct road position" and "incorrect road position," you will at once see the difference. The incorrect position shows a rider "leaning" on his hands and arms. The seat is a very common one, unfortunately, and if you examine the next twenty riders you meet, especially those who have ridden fifteen or twenty miles, you are likely to find most of them in this condition. The arms are rigid, the body is leaning on them. This thrusts the shoulders back until the shoulder-blades touch each other behind the shoulders. The lungs and neck are pushed forward, and every single muscle and nerve in the upper part of the trunk and neck is out of place. The result is that neither heart nor lungs get good opportunity for action, and the shape of your upper body is slowly but surely being deformed. In the other position, the correct one, the rider could at any moment take his hands from the handle-bar and not alter his position in any way. The two contrasted speak for themselves.
CORRECT SCORCHING.
It may, of course, be said that when a rider becomes tired with riding, the incorrect position is a great rest. In the first place, this is not true if he has faithfully learned to ride in the upright seat. Then the other becomes uncomfortable. In the correct position the wheelman has his arms a trifle bent, at the elbow, so that when he goes over any unevenness in the road his arms give, and he avoids the shaking of his whole body by the jounce, to say nothing of the certainty of giving his wheel an unpleasant shaking up.
In the most modern wheels the position of the rider is almost that of a pedestrian—that is, the pedals are almost under the saddle, so that he treads directly up and down. This helps him in keeping his seat without the aid of hands and arms, and it makes all the muscles of the legs and thighs work in their proper places, and the whole action of his body thus becomes natural. All this can be seen in the "correct position," and there can hardly be a question that this is the natural position for a man to take when he mounts his wheel for a run of a few miles. It naturally brings part of the weight of the body on the pedals, relieves the very uncomfortable weight on the saddle, and helps a rider to balance himself without the use of handle-bars, thus avoiding the "wriggling" of the wheel, which is so tiresome and so deadening to a steady road gait.
The position of a man who is racing is, of course, quite different, and it has a parallel in horse-racing. A jockey when he is riding a racing horse in a big race rises in his stirrups, leans far forward, and crouches on the horse's neck: but because a jockey does this in a race—and advisedly so—is no reason for a gentleman to do the same when he is out for a jaunt on his cob of an afternoon. The two seats are both correct, but each belongs to its sphere. So it is with the bicycle. The racing or "scorching" position is a difficult one to represent in a photographic reproduction, because each man has his own particular ideas, and as most men who race make a study of the subject, the result is that there are many different ideas. The general principle is, however, to get a strong purchase on the handles in order to give yourself greater power in thrusting down on the pedals, and at the same time to curl up the body in order to give as little resistance to the air as possible. Any one who has ridden against the wind will realize what an enormous difference the air makes on his speed, and this is, of course, multiplied when the rider is going at a record-breaking speed.
