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Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

Aerodynamics is one reason. But most riders are not in the Tour de France or in any context where it makes a difference. More pragmatically for us mere mortal cyclists, you can massage your muscles, clean off dirt, treat wounds, apply sunscreen, etc without getting tangled up in nasty leg hair. At some point it's just a hygiene thing.

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Hair removal is about esthetics, and has nothing to do with hygiene. Hairs in many cases help keep disease at bay and thus are more hygienic. A person mentioned ticks - the common way to miss a tick is to have one on your head, where it's difficult to see from all the hair, but I don't think many people, especially not women, shave their heads because of good hygiene.

You should of course feel free to remove hair if that's your preference, but it's not to be confused with good hygiene.

When you combine an open wound with sunscreen, road grit containing petroleum byproducts, and standing water from farms (all extremely common) you have a very serious hygiene problem if hair prevents you from cleaning it properly in the field.

Seems like an edge case. I normally don't have all of those at once. If I did I would indeed consider shaving around the wound before cleaning, sure. Never happened though.

Yeah, an edge case. Because you've never experienced it, it didn't happen /s. As I said, all extremely common, at least in my experience. Getting sick on "farm backwash", usually by water bottle, happened semi-regularly. Sunscreen dripping into wounds from scraping veg and rocks along a mountain bike trail, that's a special hell that I'd be happy to describe to you. It's very real, especially if you're on a multi day trip without access to services. Which is a thing people do, btw.

Back to the OP, hairy legs makes things harder for long distance cycling. Especially multi-day cycling. The level at which this bothers you is a personal decision of course. I'm an average amateur mountain biker and I don't bother shaving. But I only ride 2 hours at a time! If I was going for longer trips ... yeah definitely, leg hair is a liability.

Never had this issue in my life, and I am almost forty. Seems like a big stretch.

Can confirm, sunscreen is so much easier to apply without leg hair. And leg grippers on bib shorts work much better.

Also, finding ticks after a hike is much easier without body hair.

hahahaha, nobody has leg hair so thick they can't see a tick.

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