Fred Flinstone is a rank amateur.

Richard Nixon was strictly bush league. 

I can top both of them when it comes to five o’clock shadows. Mine’s more like a one o’clock shadow.

I wasn’t always like that. I vaguely remember not having to shave in the fourth grade.

The heavy beard growth is definitely something I inherited from my father’s side of the family.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s a fairly big pain. You’re always self-conscious about your beard popping back up just hours after you’ve shaved. 

I’ll shave real quickly before going to aerobics then again before I go to work in mid-afternoon. 

There are days where I will shave three times especially if I go to 6 a.m. aerobics and I’m heading somewhere after 7 p.m. and I get a chance to go home.

When it comes to hair, I’m not lacking much of it anywhere including in rather annoying places such as my ears.

Some people have even suggested that I shave my back. I do shave my neck every three days or so but I draw the line at my back.

Besides I don’t think it is that bad although I occasionally do get solicitations from environmental groups wanting to know if I’d like to help my primate cousins survive in the rain forests of Africa.

Besides trying to keep the yabba-dabba doo face look at bay I also shave my legs.

I started shaving them back in the days when I was bicycling close to 10,000 miles a year and a misguided soul by the name of Gary Pogue tried repeatedly to talk me into a form of bicycling torture known as criterium racing.

If I raced, he warned me, I would have to shave my legs since it wasn’t a question of if I crashed but when I would crash meaning I would have road rash.

Road rash is a nice way of describing what happens when a large segment of your body is turned into a bloody, infected mess when you crash as the pavement acts as sand paper and plows your hair follicles inwards along with enough dirt and germs to excite the producers of Grey’s Anatomy.

For the longest time I never quite understood the importance of shaving legs from Gary’s perspective. Every time he raced, he’d shave his legs a week before.  If you’re going to shave your legs believe me the last thing you want to do is have, stop shaving for a period and then shave them again. The irritation of hair growing longer on your legs will drive you nuts.

I started shaving three weeks before my first “race” in Patterson. It was a royal pain. I soon discovered I had to shave my legs at least every two days or these irritating nubs would come up. Making matters worse, I spend a fortune on razor blades.

The need to shave hit home a week later during an organized ride when a rider suddenly stopped in front of me, I hit his back tire, went head first over the handlebars and landed on my back while going uphill.

My legs came through with flying colors. I wish I could say the same about the bloody mess on my back although the biggest concern a doctor who was riding behind us had was that I may have broken my neck. When the emergency room staff at Auburn Faith Hospital determined that wasn’t the case and unstrapped me from a backboard I had been on for more than three hours the real fun began. A nurse spent 20 hellish minutes alternating between putting peroxide on my back and pulling out hair.

It taught me one thing: If God had intended me to bicycle 10,000 miles a year, he wouldn’t have supplied me with the ability to grow hair on all parts of my body that could conceivably make contact with the pavement in a crash.

What sparked this hairy venture down memory lane is a claim in a men’s health magazine I saw the other day bragging that the product depicted “delivered a close shave that carried you through the day.”

Excuse me for sounding a bit sarcastic, but unless it has Nair on its blades there is no way that it can at least push back the time from when my one o’clock shadow starts appearing.

Making matters worse is my facial hair could inspire a “Cowsills” song. But instead of singing about “cover my head with hair, long beautiful hair” they’d have to come up with lyrics to describe a mustache that looks like Don King’s barber had tidied it up.

This column is the opinion of executive editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Bulletin or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA.  He can be contacted at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com or 209.249.3519.