Safety

I stumbled across a website called “How not to get hit by cars” which I thought I’d check out. After all, I’d like to know how not to get hit by cars, wouldn’t you? I thought the website had a lot of good information, but I have to admit that I got distracted from it by the Great Cycling Safety Controversy.

Apparently, not everyone can agree on how not to get hit by cars.

This is different from the controversy about whether you should wear a helmet or not when you ride. (You should, by the way. See how effectively I dealt with that controversy?)

The controversy seems to involve two schools of thought, one fostered by a man by the name of Bluejay and the other fostered by a man by the name of (appropriately enough) Foster who adds

M.S., P.E.
Cycling Transportation Engineer Consulting Engineer,
Expert Witness & Educator in Effective Cycling,
Bicycles, Highways & Bikeways, Traffic Laws

after his name, all of which sounds very impressive.

Mr. Bluejay (I’m sorry, that just sounds like someone out of a book by Beatrix Potter) doesn’t offer us any of his qualifications for dispensing safety information, he just dispenses the information and leaves it up to the reader to decide on its value.

So, what’s the difference?

Here is the crux of Mr. Foster’s philosophy:

Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.

That is the guiding principle that cyclists should recognize and government and society should obey. But government does its best to prevent cyclists from recognizing this principle.

He goes on to add:

Bikeways neither make cycling much safer nor reduce the skill required. They probably do the reverse.

Government knows that bikeways don't make cycling safer, but it uses the public superstition that they do.

Well, I will admit to you that I know that a bicycle is classified as a vehicle with all of the rights and privileges and responsibilities appertaining thereunto. (If you aren’t a lawyer, how often do you get to use a phrase like appertaining thereunto?) I also have to admit that I like Bikeways (by which I am assuming the author means bike lanes). We don’t have many of them around these parts, but I like them.

Well, actually, we have one bike lane around here. It's about two miles long. Oh, and it isn't continuous. It reaches a corner and then disappears. Half a mile later, at another corner, it reappears. What you're supposed to do between those two corners, I don't know. Teleport, probably.

Mr. Bluejay’s method can be summed up like this:

Ride as if you were invisible.

It's often helpful to ride in such a way that motorists won't hit you even if they don't see you. You're not trying to BE invisible, you're trying to make it irrelevant whether cars see you or not.

In other words, wear bright colors and lights and anything else that will make you stand out, but assume that the driver of that car doesn’t see you and act accordingly.

I like this advice. I like this advice very much.

Mr. Bluejay also says that sometimes obeying the law may be hazardous to your health.

Here’s a question for you –

You are a law abiding cyclist on a two lane road. You want to turn left, but you have to wait for oncoming traffic to get out of the way. Do you:

1. stay in the middle of the lane with your arm stuck out indicating your upcoming turn while hoping that no car is going to come up from behind you and plaster you across the pavement
2. pull your bike off the road and wait for traffic to clear and then move across to where you want to be
   
3. decide that you didn’t really need to make that left hand turn right there and maybe you’ll just keep going straight for awhile

A vehicle would certainly chose 1., right? But is it safe? You tell me.

On a group ride a couple of days ago there were about twenty of us. We came up to a stop light which changed to red on us before the entire group got across. Some riders ran the light, others hit the brakes and waited.

Everyone has different ideas, and thinking about them all is making my head hurt. I think I'll go for a ride. If I can figure what to do, that is.

See you on the road.

Say What?

Lunicycle’s recipe for success:

A couple of days of so-so nutrition and inadequate hydration topped off by an evening filled with stress and very little sleep. Then you go for a ride.

I tried this recipe for success myself just this morning, and it was absolutely successful if you want to ride like me. If you don’t want to ride like me (a thing which, by the way, I don’t recommend) then you might want to try someone else’s recipe for success.

I fooled the dogs and the wind this morning by dragging myself out of bed later than usual and thus hitting the road later than usual. I can imagine the wind having woken up and checked, finding me still in bed and rolling over for just that little bit of extra sleep that makes all the difference. Then, happy and comfortable, the wind wakes up and finds me out on the road. “Hey,” says the wind. “What do you think you’re doing out there without me?!” and the wind then comes to join me on the road.

Having learned (so I thought) something about this area of the county, I finally constructed a route for myself that wasn’t just out and back again, only to find that I don’t know this part of the county half so well as I thought. The route I had chosen was about ten miles shorter than I thought it was, so I had to tack on a randomly chosen loop to get the extra miles.

I spotted a guy being taken for a drag by his dogs. The man was standing on a skateboard holding the lashes of two good sized dogs who were jogging along nicely and pulling him behind them. This is the easy way to take your dogs for a walk, I suppose.

I also spotted a dead snake by the side of the road that was over three and a half feet long at the very least. This was a little startling. It was so startling that I kind of jumped (not a thing I recommend doing while riding a bicycle, by the way) a bit later when I saw what turned out to be a garden snake.

Okay, it was a garden hose but it might have been a snake.

I passed three other cyclists. I prefer to phrase it this way for my own self-esteem, but the fact is that we were headed in opposite directions. I don’t think I knew any of them, but I hope they were near the end of their ride, because one of them was covered in sweat.

Well, I don’t suppose I know for a fact that it was sweat, but he was certainly covered in something, and if it wasn’t sweat, I don’t want to speculate about what it was. It was good to see other riders on the road, even if they were headed away from me and I couldn’t draft off them.

I got back to the neighborhood a mile short of the distance I wanted with some very tired legs indeed, and I forced myself to ride around the neighborhood as hard as I could go. I actually passed my Lovely Lovely sitting on the porch and didn’t see her. I was too busy acting as my own coach, which basically means fussing at myself to keep the pedals spinning around at a reasonable rate of speed. I don’t know why I did this, but it seemed to help.

Today’s ride end up being harder than I anticipated (or possibly I was weaker than I anticipated – it pays to think of all the possibilities) but even a hard ride is a good ride. (Sometimes a hard ride is an especially good ride.) I ended up with a good distance and a good pace.

Now I’m going to get some rest.

See you on the road.

Group Ride!

Has it been awhile since I’ve been on a group ride with my fellow Seyboros?

This is a rhetorical question, which in this case means "a question I already know the answer to."

Well, I guess it has been awhile, because when I let it be known that I was going to go on the Memorial Day ride, I was counseled by Jörg to wear a name tag and was greeted with shouts of “Hey! New guy!” after I arrived.

I pulled my bike out of the back of the 2000 pound beast, only to notice that my computer sensor had fallen to the ground and my chain had come off. How appropriate.

It was nice to be greeted by people, even if they couldn’t believe their eyes.

Once we got moving, we had a great time, if a bit peculiar in spots. For example, I’m used to hearing shouts of “Dog left!” or “Car up!” but “Cow right?”

That’s a new one on me, and I thought it was a joke, but, no. There was a small cow trotting along beside the road. It was following the fenceline and sticking its nose into every crack in the fence, apparently trying to get back in where it hadn’t gotten out from and unable to figure out how to do so. (When we rode back by at the end of the ride, it had apparently found the way.)

I could hear snatches of conversation all around me. Triatheletes were trading battle stories. Roadies were talking of dogs of the past. Work stories, cycling stories, family stories, laughter, they were floating all around me, and I thought back to my first ride with the club. Somehow, I hadn’t known that cycling would be so social. I had this idea in my mind of everyone riding along, together, but each in his or her own world, and the nonstop conversation surprised me.

How do you tell if a hill is hard or if the pace is difficult? The conversation stops. But let the road level out or the pace slacken a bit and it’s back again.

We have a good time together out on the road. I eventually found myself riding next to Lisa. While we were on terrain unknown to me, we were practically in Lisa’s backyard, and she had more than a passing familiarity with every dog on the route.

“Okay,” she’d say, “There are four dogs who live just on the other side of that bend, and they will run at you.” She was right, too. Dogs must like Lisa a lot. They chase after her everywhere she goes.

There was one dog that got encouragement. It was a very small puppy, but it exploded into barks as we went by, and people began calling out, “Come on, dog!” This may, in future days when this dog is no longer so small, prove to have been a tactical error.

We passed a field full of cows, stately matrons all, who watched us go by, heads swiveling slowly to keep us on view. (I later passed these same cows in the 2000 pound beast, and they ignored me completely. Apparently they are only interested in cyclists.)

I was treated to the sight of a rider I didn’t know playing with her helmet as she rode. This seemed odd to me, and then a wasp flew out from underneath it! Apparently it had flown in through one of the air vents and she had been trying to get it out again. I'm sure both the wasp and the rider were happy that it succeeded.

We rode twenty miles out to the Bentonville Battlefield, which turned out to be closed on Memorial Day, go figure, hung out there for a bit and then pedaled twenty miles back home. The talk ranged from theology to cloning to turkey nutrition to dogs I have known to what it’s like to work in a prison to cows to home life to…well…pretty much everything really.

I can’t guarantee that everyone had a great time, but I think they did. Even the rider with the (fortunately painless) wasp in the helmet, allergy rash, bug bites and, to top it all off, a bloody knee from a classic clip related slow motion fall in a parking lot. Hey, most of us have done it, and you guys who haven’t, there’s still time. Just wait.

It was great to do a group ride again. I was urged to do another one before next memorial day, and I think that’s good advice.

At the end of the ride, Jörg asked, “How are the legs?” The legs are fine. I’m ready to go again.

See you on the road.

No Harm, No Foul

This is the design on my favorite T-shirt. I found it at threadless which may possibly have the coolest T-shirts on the planet. I thought of this T-shirt because:

A) I was wearing it yesterday

B) I went on a ride this morning

C) Someone I know came perilously close to running out of gas this morning.

(I would like to point out that I was sympathetic and not at all smug about this.)


The wind must have stayed up late last night, perhaps watching The Weather Channel or reading a book by Margaret Mitchell. Anyway, the wind surely slept last this morning. I can just see it all snuggled up under the covers while I quietly climbed out of bed and hit the road for an easy ride bright and early. At some point out on the road I must have made a noise or something, and the wind rolled over, opened it's eyes, blinked a bit at the alarm clock (which apparently hadn't gone off) and the leaped out of bed with a yell and a realization of being late.
Well, it made up for lost time, flying out with a rush and joining me out on the road.

I should have guessed that, having been a faithful companion on so many rides of late, the wind would not abandon me this morning.

I also apparently left the house in a rush this morning. I had a vague idea that I was forgetting something, and that something turned out to be my phone. I don't really like being out on the road alone without a phone, and a parade of past problems danced in my head.

For some reason my brain was especially fixated on times when I had been dropped on a ride. The most spectacular one involved a whole group of us, twenty miles in and going hard. We came to a lovely long downhill and then everybody opened up - big gears and high cadence. We flew down the hill, then we rounded a corner and the road flattened out and nobody slowed down.

Well, almost nobody.

I watched the group streak away over the horizon while I pedaled as hard as my little feet would go. Then I just settled in to ride the fifteen miles back alone.

Now, why I should be worried about getting dropped this morning, given that I was all alone, I don't know. I have never dropped myself on a ride. In fact, I always wait for myself if I'm having problems.

I got chased by a single dog, but this dog had a rough sounding voice and no wind. Perhaps this dog smokes too much. In any case, knowing it's own limitations, it waited until I was quite close before it leaped out of hiding, barking and darting toward me (like a poor imitation of the stealth dog), but all it took was a slight increase in speed to leave it behind.

Other than that, the ride was nice and calm. I did pick a very bumpy road to travel down, so there was a long period during which I had to listen to my water bottle rattling in the cage as if I were riding my own Paris-Roubaix. I got passed by a school bus and had the slightly surreal experience of having to stop for a stopped bus while on my bike. Hey, the law is the law, right?

All in all it was a pleasant ride, and I didn't need the phone I didn't have. I wasn't motivated to get up early, but I did it anyway, and now I'm glad I did.

Another day, another ride.

That's the life.

See you on the road.

And I'll bring my phone.

Just in case.

I Got Passed by a What?

Ahead of me was a curve. Fortunately for me, it was still some distance ahead of me, because I watched a bright yellow sports car streak around the curve, crossing the yellow line to occupy the space where I would be in a few minutes. This did not comfort me. I was even less comforted when I watched a pickup truck do the same thing on another curve. This sort of thing gives me that little prickly feeling in the small of my back.

I also watched a man drive a port-a-potty around. It was a school bus, one of the short ones, with most of the sides removed to turn it into a mutant flat bed vehicle, and, strapped to the back, was port-a-potty and something mysterious under a tarp. (Given that they had no problem showing everyone the port-a-potty, I was curious to know what was under the tarp.) I was headed on way and the port-a-potty was headed the other, just two ships that pass in the night, or so I thought, but, about fifteen miles later, we passed again. (I’ll grant you, I can’t guarantee that it was the same vehicle with the same port-a-potty, but I’m willing to bet that it was.) I don’t know where the port-a-potty was going, but I do hope that no one was waiting impatiently for it to arrive.

Later on, while in the belly of the 2000 pound beast, I was passed by the port-a-potty man again. I was struck with the idea that he was driving his port-a-potty all around the county. I imagined crews of construction workers getting excited because, at last, the port-a-potty man had arrived. Perhaps he should have had music like the ice cream man does. Well, maybe not.

I dressed in layers this morning because it was fifty degrees out when I hit the road. Thanks to the majesty of the wind, it wasn’t long before I was working up a sweat. Off came the vest. Down went the arm warmers. The lovely cap with the ear flaps was replaced with a lighter weight cap. (By the time I got to that point, I didn’t have anything else I could safely take off, so I left it at that. You’re welcome.)

I had another good ride, and I’m hoping to hit the road bright and early tomorrow morning for another one.

This is the way to spend your time off.

See you on the road.

Oh My Goodness

I believe that the wind was blowing approximately 527 miles per hours (848.124 kilometers per hour) this morning. I grant you that I didn’t actually measure the wind speed, having carelessly left my anemometer at home, but I estimated the wind speed based on how hard the ride was.

I decided to go exploring this morning and to find a particular school. (There was no reason for this decision other than to give my ride a turnaround point.) I had only been to this school once, and that was in the 2000 pound beast and by a different route, but I was confident of my ability to find my way there on my own.

My confidence was entirely misplaced.

I never did find the school, but I did find the airport, and I had long wondered where that was, so I suppose that counts for something. (I shall claim it as a victory.) My first clue that I was on my way to the airport was when I found myself on Airport Road. This was eventually followed by a sign pointing the way to the airport, and that was followed by the realization that the airport isn’t actually on Airport Road. Silly me to have expected such a thing.

I discovered a variety of interesting signs, though. I saw a sign that was about two stories tall and had a very nice spiral staircase leading up to it. It turned out to be a sign for a metal fabrication company. This same company had three driveways, each one labeled by a very stylish sign decorated with the company’s logo and name. Two of them then had the words “no entrance” while the third said “entrance.” What struck me about these lovely signs is that the three driveways were only about five feet apart and all led to the same tiny parking lot. It seemed like a bit of overkill. I also saw lots and lots of signs for people who didn’t want other people trespassing on their property. These signs seem to be quite popular.

I saw a sign for a subdivision where there was nothing but trees and grass. (Near my home is a sign for a subdivision, and they actually had laid out roads and put in streetlights. There are no houses there, but the roads and the sign have been there for five years. It's a bit ghostly, somehow.) The sign I saw today was apparently not even for a phantom subdivision, because there was nothing there but wilderness, and the sign is quite weathered. Perhaps it's a sign of sheer optimism.

At one point two dogs came out into the road after me while I was riding uphill into a headwind. (It really felt like most of the ride was into a headwind.) Nice, eh? Fortunately for me, these were tiny little dogs with tiny little legs whose top speed was apparently about five miles per hour, and I even I can beat that.

On the whole, the ride was dominated by two things: the smell of manure (I was riding past a lot of farmland – always a plus when you’re pushing yourself hard and trying to suck down a lot of air) and the wind. By the time I was done, my legs were toast, but it was a nice long ride, and I’m ready for more. Well, I'm not ready for more just yet, but I will be soon.

How about tomorrow?

See you on the road.

Walk and Ride

In honor of bike to work week, I ended up walking to work. I suppose that’s a bit messed up, but that’s how it is. Work, by the way, is about six miles away from home, so it’s a bit of a hike. The problem was that circumstances beyond my control (or at least beyond my awareness) meant that I had to leave my bike at work a while bike, and a good opportunity for getting it back home again was slow in coming. Today turned out to be the day.

The six miles are practically all on the same road – two lanes, with the speed limit ranging from 45 to 55 mph and no shoulder. It actually isn’t a bad ride (assuming the traffic is right) but it’s a bit difficult to walk. This is largely due to one two mile section during which the road is bordered by corn fields and wheat fields and then a bunch of trees.

There is a ditch that runs along the road maybe 18 inches away. It is generally filled with black water and a variety of plants. The ground between the road and the ditch slopes downward toward the ditch, so the footing is a bit uncertain, and the thought that, if you stumble one way you get smacked by a car and if you stumble the other way you end up standing in the black water is a bit disconcerting.

The most beautiful section, where woods border the road on both sides, is the worst for walking, since it’s unmowed and the grass before the trees is lush, thick and very high. At one point, I was standing there as a truck towing a very large farm vehicle (large, in fact, than the lane it was occupying) came toward me. I wanted to move farther away from the road, but something that seemed quite large was scuttling around under the plants just there. Nice.

I finally got to work where a few little details had to be taken care of, then I climbed in the saddle and headed back home. Unfortunately, my bike had been here for rather longer than I realized, so the tires were a bit soft. Well, it was only six miles. I could live with that.

(My first group ride was also my first 20 miles ride. It was hard, but I enjoyed it. My bike was still so new that it was due for a free servicing the next day. I went in an told Steve about the ride, and he said, “You might have enjoyed it more if you have more than 20 pounds of pressure in your tires.” That was how I learned you have to check the air in your tires a lot more often than I thought you did.)

The ride home was more fun than the walk to work, but, as you can imagine, I didn’t push the pace at all. I just cruised gently along on my soft tires. I don’t know what kind of picture I present all kitted out and riding my road bike. I probably look like nothing on this earth, but I was struck at that moment with how I must have looked just then sitting up on the hybrid and wafting my way along in comparison to how I look pushing the pace into a headwind. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ride bicycles.

I was also a bit concerned, as I rode back along the route I had just walked, to notice how many dead snakes there were right at the edge of the road. Hmm. So how many live snakes were there hidden in the grass I had walked through earlier? Best not to think about that.

Steve says, “Any walk over a quarter mile sucks. That’s why I always carry a spare tube.” Well, all I can say is that riding back over that road was sweet. My legs were tired and my feet were tired and I was glad to be pedaling instead of walking.

I’m ready for a real ride now, though, and the weather and my work schedule may combine to allow me to get it. I hope so.

See you on the road.