1. Keep your rests short and infrequent to maintain your rhythm.

2. Eat before you are hungry and drink before you are thirsty.

3. Never ride to the point of exhaustion where you can't eat or sleep.

4. Cover up before you are cold, peel off before you are hot.

5. Don't drink, smoke, or eat meat on tour.

6. Never force the pace, especially during the first hours.

7. Never pedal out of vanity.

Velocio was a really neat guy. He was the one who invented first bikes with two concentric gears selected by hand, later on both sides of the wheel (you had to turn the wheel around), and later invented the modern derailleur. Amazingly, the modern derailleur was seen as a stigma of weakness for nearly twenty years, amidst a great battle of opinion waged by Velocio in his influential magazine, Le Cycliste.

Stunning tours, averaging 12,000 miles per year, turned the man into something of a philosopher. He wrote articles of vivid description of his bicycle trips, in addition to the advice on diet, exercise, hygiene, fitness, self-discipline, and warned against smoking.

Velocio became influential not because of his exploits on the bicycle, but because he showed how these exploits could shape a man and his character. His philosophy derived from the ancients, who considered discipline to be the cardinal virtue. To Velocio, the physical discipline of the bicycle lead to moral discipline, both completing one another.