It is a peculiar thing to be in an apartment filled with young men collectively shaving their legs.
And yet there I was, taking a pair of clippers to my mangy quadriceps. This was nearly a quarter century ago now, in South Carolina no less—where even in Lance Armstrong’s heyday, a dude shaving his legs warranted a side eye.
But it was a tradition of sorts on my collegiate cross country team that the runners shave their legs before the championship meet of the season.
“It makes you feel fast,” assured one senior.
“Aero,” a junior concurred.
“Quick and sleek,” nodded a third teammate in agreement.
We left it at that: a performance enhancer. Left unsaid was the tenderness of the act—how something as intimate as sliding a razor across your skin could pass as just another locker-room ritual, sidestepping deeper talk about bodies, vanity, or vulnerability. Masculinity, it seemed, thrived in the spaces where we could perform tenderness without ever naming it.
But who was I, awkward, Magic-The-Gathering-playing nerd who’d somehow clinched a singlet on a lower-tier NCAA team, who was I to press the point?
And so I put the beard trimmer to my thighs, the ant-sized clippings of the preceding man still lingering on the blades, and blitzed off my simian locks. After a first pass with the trimmer, I stepped into the shower with my Gillette, lathered up with Barbasol like a frosted cake, and cautiously passed the razor over my legs.
It must have taken an hour. There’s a strange vulnerability in the act—exposing skin that’s been hidden under the scruff of indifference, like meeting your own body for the first time stripped of its usual armor, learning to see it with new eyes.
Because once I stepped out of the tub, I did feel stronger. Hot damn, I thought, flexing my quads, watching the musculature from a season of cross-country workouts ripple in the mirror. So this is how bodybuilders feel.
The sensation lasted a weekend. And then I got the most wicked razor burn I’ve ever experienced.
There’s an art to shaving your legs.
This is especially the case if, like me, you’re blessed with thicker hair. You can’t rush in and whip, whip, whip willy-nilly over your shins and thighs. You’ve got to take your time, be patient, learn the ropes of your own surface.
At first, leg-shaving was a rare tradition, like a pre-race pasta binge. But then after college I found cycling. And with competitive cycling came a return of the razor, not as occasional ritual but as a regular part of the routine.
Shaving remained uncomfortable at first. Skin is vulnerable to nicks, slices, and shears, which makes the whole endeavor uneasy. But then, road rash is worse; grubby hair sticks painfully to raw abrasion. Better to shave your legs a couple times a week, and have one less thing to worry about when you inevitably go sliding across the tarmac.
I got pretty good.
Above the knee, my technique was to bear the blade downwards on my thighs. I could never shave against the grain of my upper leg without irritation. So my quads were always stubbly. But I could draw the blade up my lower leg without issue, making my calves and shins ever sleek, suitable for dancing on the pedals to accelerate uphill.
My knee was the exception—a stubborn knob of bulges and swells, I could never quite get the blade to catch the last bits of hair around my knobby patella tendon. Even when I switched over to a women’s razor, with blades angled in a more forgiving manner, I couldn’t crack it. My knee remains undiscovered country, a rocky promontory that I never quite mastered with edged metal and lather.
Shaving is a process of self-discovery, I think.
All those contours and edges—the bumps, curves, and ridges of bone, cartilage, and tendon—they become a landscape of immediate interest now that you’re bearing a blade over it.
How funny that it takes a razor to understand ourselves better. Perhaps that’s the lesson from shaving: it’s only when we place ourselves in the path of a little danger—when the blade slides against the skin—that we gain the clarity to notice what’s always been there hidden beneath the surface.
Take up thy razor, literal or otherwise. Not to make yourself quicker, sleeker, or more aerodynamic, but to strip away the layers that keep you from sensing who you are. Go forth. Feel what’s fragile and run your hand over the raw edge of being.
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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading.
A fun one! Great introspection. Left unsaid was, "Wow, many women do this multiple times a week for decades on end?!" A bit of appreciation for how other people live goes a long way. As well as how such a habit bends traditional masculinity. Love it, nice work