Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Green Team Tip: The Life of a Race Shirt

If you are anything like Michael & I you have a lot of race t-shirts piled high in the closet. But not all race shirts are created equally...

There are the favorites, the ones you always wear and choose to pack when going on trips. There are the back-ups, the ones you occasionally wear around the house or toss on for the drive home after a workout. Lastly there are the bottom of the barrel ones, the ones you have never worn and never plan to.


Michael's favorite shirt is the grey long sleeve from the 2004 Buda 30K. Ironically, I was the one wearing mine when we took this picture in Boston. My favorite race t-shirts are from the Skeese Greets Tri because they come in women's sizes & are soft American Apparel brand.

Each type of t-shirt has its own life and we're here to help each of your t-shirts have the most productive life possible.

For those shirts that will never been worn, the best idea might be to quickly donate them. There are a number of Austin organizations that accept donations of lightly worn clothes. Among them are East Side Community Connection, Safe Place, Lisa's Hope Chest, and Goodwill.

When you need to pack your bike for a trip, it's always useful to bring along some rags to help keep things a bit cleaner at your destination. Worn out back-up t-shirts are perfect rags. They can also be wrapped around the bike to serve as a bit more protection during travel. After your event, you can use the shirt to wipe off the "dirt." The hotel you stay in will be quite happy with your choice of using an old t-shirt instead of their white towels.

For those t-shirts that you never want to part with, they can be saved forever or recycled into a quilt. Unfortunately this means learning to make the quilt or convincing your mother to spend her time making you one. My collection for mom is waiting eagerly for the day it'll become something else.

What is your favorite race shirt? What do you do with the unwanted ones?

**********
-mich



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3 comments:

Skeese Greets said...

Thanks for the t-shirt love, Michelle! Glad they're your favorite race shirts!

I take race shirts & volunteer race shirts to the clothing donation drop bin on S. Lamar by Starbucks (in the RaceTrac gas station lot.) It's convenient!

Danger S. Kitty said...

I love this line of thinking! Does the Human Race shirt count? I love that one and work out in it all the time!

I am a volunteer feral trapper on the East side (Trap/Neuter/Release program), so I use old shirts as blankets, carrier liners for recovering kitties.

Anonymous said...

My favorite is a Human Race shirt too, but not the copycat Human Race 10k, but the original HumanRace and their Mudman t-shirt. It says in big letters in the front MAN VERSUS (in small letters washing) MACHINE.

It was for a an offroad duathlon over a tank testing ground. At one point you had to take yourself and bike through 4ft deep muddy water.

Another is my 2002 ITU World Championships t-shirt, great fit, discrete logo and design.

But you are right, I should clear out all the ones that I really won't use, but before I do, I need to write DNS across the front. See Rule-1 here: http://www.tri247.com/article_1530.html which also covers other triathlon t-shirt rules, I can't believe its 7-years since I wrote it...