Category Archives: Gear

Cycling gear

Absolutely Nothing

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When the alarm went off at six this morning, that is exactly how much enthusiasm, desire and willingness I had to crawl out from under the warm covers for this morning’s ride.  It was not helped when I pulled my phone under the covers and pried my bleary eyes open enough to check the weather.  “Current conditions -2, feels like -6, wind from the SE at 15”.  Urgh.

Not only must I rouse myself from a too-short sleep in a perfectly warm bed in a silent house, I must do it in the knowledge that the house is cold, it’s cold outside and I get to fight a headwind all the way to work.  I’m unprepared mentally and want nothing more than to crawl back under the covers for another hour.  So I do.  Or rather, I try.  For the next 30 minutes my ego successfully forces me awake by reminding me that Adam will have ridden this morning despite the wind and chill.  I’m pretty sure Adam would have ridden with one foot chewed off by a cougar this morning, furiously pumping along with one cleated foot – and making good time of it too.  Such is the nature of my esteemed co-worker and co-rider.

Ego won.  I dragged my sorry self out of bed, cursing everything and everyone and my ego for good measure.  I crawled into the shower and fought back against Ego telling myself I might be up, I might be in the shower, I may have all the stretchy-gear in the bathroom with me, but I haven’t said I’m going to ride.  I rode.  Ego won again.

I was just over a click (a kilometer for those not versed in Canadian slang) into my ride when I tried to adjust my Fredly mirror and realized it wasn’t there, nor was my helmet.  Safety said go back and get the helmet but Lazy ignored it and pushed on.   It was a poorly played move on Lazy’s part as I’m certain that upon arriving at the homestead, Prudence and Lazy would have teamed up, pointing out the late hour and the certainty of being late for work and I would have driven.  Lazily.  As it turned out, too lazy to turn around  meant riding into a headwind for the next 35-ish minutes, getting passed and watching others drift further and further from my reach.

Gone is the rabbit-hunting Cat-6 predator of last summer.  In its place sits a doughnut-fattened gelatinous blob masquerading as a rider.  With each rotation of the pedals I cursed the doughnuts, the chocolates, the cake, the jelly belly beans, the second and third helpings.  I cursed my slothfulness and my remarkable ability to find an excuse to avoid the fluid trainer all winter.  I cursed the cigars I’d so anxiously saved to smoke in my new heated garage.  I cursed  the wind, the cold, my frozen head.  Then I ran out of things to complain about. Not that I’d let that stop me.

The constant awareness that this moment, this unpleasantness (for we can’t really call it suffering in the broader scheme of things), the burning legs, the lungs that feel four sizes too small – that working through and around and over, this is what creates success.  It’s a metaphor for life.  Taking the car and driving to work gets me to the same destination in less time, but at what price?

I arrived at work a mixture of sweating and freezing, out of breath and out of steam.  I felt ill.  I had a headache.  I wanted a nap.  Actually I always want a nap, that’s not new.  I want a nap right now in fact.

Calgary’s wind has a rather nasty habit of switching directions late in the afternoon.  A headwind in the morning often spins into a headwind for the ride home – I find this unfair.  The wind it turns out, is entirely indifferent to my judgement of it’s fairness or lack thereof.  Occasionally however it works in your favour – a tailwind in the morning and another at night.  Or, like today, you have a headwind in the morning and tailwind at night.  And oh, what a tailwind it was!  30km/h push from the south.  That’s what I’m talking about!

It struck me on my flight home this afternoon that when we have a headwind and we’re working exceptionally hard to maintain a pace, it is a grinder wearing at the psyche, a bully pushing you around.  Turn it around and throw the same effort level into your cycling and suddenly you are FLYING!  You pedal furiously, you’re sweating like mad and your air speed is the same.  But the sensation is not the same at all.  This is rewarding.  This is exhilarating.  We are hard-wired for ground-speed ladies and gentlemen.

So it was in this glorious wind-assisted cycling daydream that I was rudely awakened by the arrival of what is now known as the Sherpa climb.  Playtime was over and it was time to pay.  Up, up, up we go getting slower by the meter.  My legs are burning, my lungs are burning and I’m a little dizzy at the end of the first rise.  I pedal on, now with a crosswind towards the next section.  I roll up to the stop sign, clip out with my left foot, fail to get my right foot unclipped and immediately begin falling to the right.

There is a flurry of activity in my brain as pain centers begin to register the incoming signals.  We’ve got early reports of gravel damage to the right hand but nothing in the region of the previous break.  Confirmed surface damage to the right knee, extent unknown.  Hold up!  Incoming from the right sit-bone vicinity…sounds like there’s going to be some swelling there.  Pride reports major damage!

I watched my little black bell, or rather pieces of the little black bell bounce out beside me before I finished the roll onto my back.  I laid there for a moment, an embarrassed smile on my face as if to tell the cars whizzing by on Centre Street that while my pride had gone into hiding, I was in fact fine.  In reality, I was laying there thinking Damn!  They got me.  That’s what I get for thinking I beat the clips without paying my dues.  Pride goeth before a fall.  Literally.

I must give props again to the rather amazing ability of my MEC stretchy pants to withstand the abuse I dish out.  In the fall fall that broke my wrist and bruised up my right side, the pants came out with nary a scrape.  I am pleased to report that while my flesh suffered a reasonable scrape and exposed some of the tender stuff lurking beneath the skin, my stretchy pants are no worse for wear after today’s spring fall.

I think I’m going to go have that nap.

Donut. A Hurtz Donut.

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A week later and nary a peep from me here.  It’s become somewhat difficult to write about riding when I’m not riding.  I’d feared this point when I started writing back in the summer, knowing that winter would arrive one of these days, putting an end to my daily dose of the bike.   It wasn’t winter that stopped me admittedly, but the timing couldn’t have been much better as the past week our weather has been miserable to say the least.

My visit to the hand surgeon on Wednesday was fairly uneventful.  I have a bone “flake” – thereby giving credence to the notion that I’m flaky.  This is not any old flake however – it’s a flake from the pisiform bone, complete with tendons still attached.  Or something like that.  The terminology used by the doctor escaped me to be fair, right up until this: “it will take a long time for the pain to go away”.

He poked and prodded my wrist, confirming the conclusion he’d already drawn looking at the X-ray.  He was kind enough to run through things a couple of time though – No pain here?  No.  No pain here?  No.  No pain here?  No.  Some pain here correct?  Yes.  And highest pain here.  The last one was more of a statement than a question.  This was good as the bolt of lightning shooting through my wrist, arm and brain at that moment obscured any more eloquent answer than “mmpphaarrrrgh”.  He seemed to take that as agreement though.

“A cast for 6 weeks is what we normally do” he proclaimed, “but if you’ll promise to be faithful and wear it all the time, we’ll put you in a splint instead”.  I nodded in agreement as he still had his thumb dangerously close to my flaky pisiform.  He ushered me off to the splint lab, spoke briefly with the tech, promised to come back with a card so I could make an appointment for a follow-up in two weeks.  He left and never returned with his promised card which left me a little disappointed.  Not to mention that after showing me how painful my wrist was and telling me I’d be suffering pain long into the future, there was no discussion about pain management.  Thankfully I had several  percs left from my trip to the emergency room.

The splint process was quick and painless but not fully covered under Alberta Health.  Half way through the process she remembers “oh yeah, the splint isn’t covered – you’ll have to pay for it”.  At $21 it didn’t exactly break the bank but it still caught me by surprise.  At any rate, the emergency room splint  was in fact more comfortable and more rigid but lacked the ability to be removed and re-installed.  It was also large enough to make typing a single-hand + single finger affair.  My new plastic splint makes my hand and arm sweat and is woefully uncomfortable but it has two advantages – I can remove it to wash it (and me) and it allows the use of most of my typing fingers.  There’s a catch though – because it’s all plastic and removable, it doesn’t really prevent me from doing the dishes any longer.  Ah well – was a nice break while I had it.

The Plastic Splint

In truth it feels pretty good these days.  I spent a couple of hours cleaning the kitchen and mopping the floor and that left me hurting a little, but not nearly as bad as earlier this week.  I’m no longer driven to distraction most of the time which means I can be at work and actually do something productive.  At least in theory.

I snuck out to the garage last night to grab some tools while hacking a KVM switch and took a moment to gaze wistfully at the Rescue Bike.  Of course I thought immediately about going for a ride.  I swung my leg over and grabbed hold of the bars, checking the fit of the splint to the grip.  Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) the absolutely freezing, miserable wind and snow made that  a wholly uncomfortable proposition and I quickly returned to the warmth of my basement.  Not without a firmly planted seed.  Must get some studded tires first.  And I bet I could ameliorate any of the more serious fitment issues with an application of my heat-gun and some patience…

This picture makes me imagine I have a neck brace too for some reason. Weird.

WWTS*?

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It starts out innocently enough, a favour for others, a gesture of appreciation if you will.  Today being Thursday it is of course Doughnut Day.  Day of Sugary Carbohydrate Invasion.  The Thin End of the Sugary Wedge.

They look innocent...

Most days I shuffle these evil things off my desk and out of my office but today I was invincible – no need to move anything.  I subsequently paid the price for my arrogance.

It started with a Tim Bit – a doughnut hole marketing scheme and as it turns out, an even thinner wedge end.  It is food from the devil.  Evil.  The bite-sized bit lures you into thinking you can have just one but it is truly the gateway drug.  By the time the dust had settled, there was spittle and drool splattered about the place, my desk littered in doughnut-remnants, evidence of the carnage that had just ensued.  The look on my co-workers faces was a mixture of horror and disgust with a trace of admiration.  I won’t add to you, my dear reader’s discomfort by putting an exact number on the victims, it is enough to know it was sufficient to feed a house of aspiring runway models for a week.

Having not ridden for a week I was already enjoying an overwhelming sense of self-loathing before my hubris had been thoroughly vanquished by the devil’s food.  Full of easily-accessible sugary fuel and disdain for my activity level, I took advantage of today’s Chinook – the wind, not my bike – to get out for a ride before the sun went down.  I headed north along the canal path, a section I don’t often get to ride.  It’s been under construction most of the summer and eventually fell off my ride list which is funny because I don’t have a ride list.  From 32nd I headed for Nose Creek Park and its short, steep hills to try to erase some of the day’s earlier carnage that was settling into my waist.

I made it to McKnight before the universe reminded me I know naught about riding in general and less about riding in faux winter.  As I came out from under McKnight, in a gentle right-hand corner, I realized the shadow across the path was in fact a thin layer of wet mud.  Immediately after that realization I learned that it was in fact a thin layer of very slick mud.  The front end washed out and two things went through my head in quick succession:  WWTS and; oh man – these stretchy pants are almost new!  Luckily for me, the slick mud gave way to a skiff of gravel providing a relatively low-friction surface on which to smash my hip without the added insult of melting the lycra to my thigh.

Enter here but beware the trolls

Fall down here (the trolls did it)

Remarkably there was no damage to the stretchy pants and no damage to the bike save for more character on the previously-characterized bar end.  My pride was bruised but otherwise I seemed to have escaped unscathed.  My right hand hurt a bit as one might expect when it’s called into duty to save the elbow.  I straightened my bars and brushed some of the dirt off before I hopped back on to continue my ride.  Get-off or not I was going on a ride.

As I rode out to Nose Creek Park, I couldn’t help noticing that my wrist was in fact much more tender than having just suffered a slap-fest with the pavement.  Putting any weight on it was excruciating but I could pull, break and shift without any drama.  I pushed on determined to get a few kilometres in before the sun disappeared and made things more treacherous than I’d just discovered they were.  I didn’t get far before my wrist, the rapidly setting sun and an unexpected head-rush that affected my hearing <?!> made the decision to turn around a prudent one.

I cycled home nursing an increasingly tender wrist, wary of anything that looked like it might be shadow, mud, water, gravel…I’d lost some confidence in the stiction of my front tire.  As a made my back along the path I’d just travelled, my hearing returned to normal but my wrist did not.  I stopped to take a picture of the offending mud before I made the climb back up to Centre.  I passed another cyclist headed for the mud and tried to warn him as he went by “it’s slippery under McKnight!” though it probably sounded more like nonsensical gibberish.  I imagine him skipping across the same gravel thinking to himself “oh…that’s what that guy was yelling about”.

Upon arriving home nurse Tracey tended to my wrist with a combination of homeopathic  treatments.  I’m starting to think it may be in worse shape than first thought as it’s rather swollen and stiff.  We’ll see how bad it feels in the morning and if it’s worse I’ll get it looked at after the Remembrance Day service.  In the meantime I’m extremely pleased with the performance of my MEC Roubaix stretchy pants – no holes, no damage of any kind.

One skid, no flesh damage, no holes - perfect.

I also have a new appreciation for roadies who turn and flee at the slightest indication of imperfect road conditions.  It’s time to – at the very least – put on the knobbies.  Studded tires – you’re in my future.

 

 

 

 

*What Will Thomas Say?

It's just a flesh wound...isn't it?