1. You put your entire leg through a rip in the crotch of your shorts when trying to find the leg hole
2. You ‘sense’ wild camping opportunities, like a Jedi
3. If you are a woman, there is consistently a crust of peanut butter in your facial hair
4. If you are a man, your beard and pubic hair became entangled months ago. There is peanut butter everywhere.
5. To lose another biker, your preferred strategy is to dine exclusively on cabbage and seed the slip stream with farts
6. You begin stories with the words ‘yeah well, when I was in Turkmenistan…’ and end with: ‘and then I had to hold the poor bastard down and cut his fucking arms off with a cone spanner’
7. You believe there is always another day in your underwear, until they become adhered to skin (You then use tyre levers to undress)
8. You have a chronic fungal infection of your genitals which a family doctor has described as 'untreatable'
9. You once had a saddle sore that could be aptly described as ‘Himalayan’
10. You have been refused a visa on sight
11. You have been refused a library book on sight
12. You have had a difficult conversation with a loved one after being discovered in a compromising situation involving mood lighting, Marvin Gaye on your iPod, and the Rohloff user manual
13. You have black outs and come to, covered in crumbs, next to empty jumbo-packs of blueberry muffins
14. You have black outs and come to, covered in crumbs, next to empty jumbo-packs of blueberry muffins, and the corpse of a man who’d said ‘I think you’ve had enough’.
15. You have attempted to change gear whilst pushing a shopping trolley around a supermarket
16. You have been removed from Crazy Guy On a Bike for constructively contributing to the cycle touring community
17. You believe that the concept of Hope, in all its guises, is for pussies
18. You have been deported from a developed nation for ‘Suspected Fleas’
19. You only use Lonely Planet guidebooks for mopping up spilled rum
20. Looking at elevation charts gives you roughly as much pleasure as witnessing the birth of your first child
21. If riding solo – you talk to sock puppets
22. If riding in a pair – you create conversations between sock puppets when bored of each other
23. You have entered a supermarket wearing a Buff as a full face mask which inadvertently resulted in the mobilization of a SWAT team and a hostage negotiator
24. You hide malnourished refugees in a rear pannier and take them across international borders for money
25. To save weight you have trimmed the bristles on your toothbrush, cut the labels off your clothes, removed bellybutton fluff, donated bone marrow, filed down your nail file, and chucked your water bottles. You now drink from puddles.
26. You have swapped your tent for a bivy bag, swapped your bivy bag for a bin bag, and now sleep under napkins.
27. You make Do To lists that begin: ‘find old To Do list’
28. On mountain passes you celebrate by vigorously twerking in baggy Spandex and offending local people
29. Your mullet is longer now than the one your father had in 1986
30. When you sit on something hard there’s a knocking sound and an echo
31. You almost died from asphyxiation after falling asleep in noodles
32. You have developed a friendship with an inner tube you affectionately call Ol’ Patchy
33. When eating you often hear the words ‘wow, I wonder when he’ll stop’ and sometimes ‘give him more, let’s see what happens’
34. You have successfully bartered the price of seventy five Yorkies, three rolls of electrical tape and some livestock
35. Rinsing your clothes in soapy water is reminiscent of the The Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 and sometimes results in the death of nearby bird life.
36. You scratch your ass with a multitool
37. You eat with a multitool, and then say ‘Ahhhh man! Not again!’
38. You have received hospital treatment for the ingestion of Molten Caramel Max Flavoured Milk, although you maintain that seven litres was not excessive, and that there should be a warning on the bottles
39. You have slept through at least one natural disaster, humanitarian catastrophe and international rescue effort
40. You have exchanged a good friend and cycling companion with a people trafficker in South East Asia for Shimano accessories
41. You photograph your own ass to find out what’s happening with it. It’s never good news
42. You once misread a map and found yourself on an antipodal spot on the earth’s surface
43. The pattern of veins on your calves resembles the creative stylings of a meth addict with an etch-a-sketch
44. You have survived for seven weeks in the Andes on toe nails, toothpaste and moths
45. You never take lifts, but sometimes give backies to tired motorists
46. You have at least considered manufacturing a pedal-powered contraption to cross oceans
47. You sometimes wonder whether you had a birthday last month
48. You patch punctures with the skin of vipers and use their fangs as tent pegs
49. Last year you sustained a penetrating injury to one of your buttocks whilst climbing into a large rubbish bin behind a supermarket to search for boil-in-the-bag curries
50. On occasion you brush your teeth with Pepsi
51. You sometimes sleepwalk, sleepcycle, sleeproughcamp and wake up in restricted military facilities
52. When you return home you plan to camp in your mother’s back garden, eat Nutella straight from the pot, cook goats meat over open fires and regale the neighbours with rambling stories of Mongolian back roads
53. You have used your multifuel stove bottle as a Molotov Cocktail during Critical Mass
54. Every bit of kit has four functions: your saucepan is also a sun hat, a handlebar bag and a bed bath
55. Your clothes are held on by sweat and cable ties
56. Your towel looks like something you might wrap a dog in, if the dog had been hit by a car and was bleeding badly. But only if you really hated the dog.
57. Your blog posts use Shakespearean puns for titles to demonstrate your literary prowess.eg. ‘Beware The ides of the M1, greater London’, ‘To Basingstoke or Banbury, that is the question’, or ‘A bike! A bike! My kingdom for a bike!’
58. You write helpful How To articles and opinion pieces for websites entitled things like: ‘Cycling Somalia – the underrated side of a religious war’ and ‘Padded Spandex or Adult Nappy: How much padding is too much?’
59. You have removed all potentially life-saving drugs from your medical kit and have since replaced with extra shoelaces and herbal tea
60. You endlessly compile inane click-bait listicles just so people will visit your blog
