Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. When I started
this blog, I wrote, “I am sitting here on the eve of Thanksgiving.” That is the
way of life for the lovely Miss Beverly and I this fall. With a complicated
life, Thanksgiving blogs are published the 1st week of December.
This blog is a little bit a Thanksgiving but mostly it is
about biking. If you would like to read a very good Thanksgiving blog, look at
Turkey in the Straw. It was one of the very first blogs that I wrote. It is one
of my favorite all time blogs.
I am thankful for biking. To be precise, I am thankful for
the lessons that biking has taught me. Because of biking, I now know that I am
never as fast as when I have a tailwind, and I am not as slow as when I have a
headwind. That is a lesson that serves me well in other areas of my life. I now
know that if you are going to ride 5000 miles in one year, you are going to
have to be doggedly determined from January 1 through December 31. While coming
up a little short isn’t a big deal, if I don’t get 449 miles by in the next
month and a few days, it will take 365 days of pursuing those miles to get
there again.
I have learned that I can ride 160 miles across Indiana in
one day. The lessons learned riding 480 miles across Iowa still sink in a
little bit each day. I woke up last weekend hearing that the same roads that I
rode in 92 degree heat were under 10 inches of snow. The contrast still makes
me shiver. I have learned my friends are very generous in sponsoring a century
ride for the fight against MS and sponsoring a 360 mile ride for Habitat for Humanity.
I have learned that a 20 mile ride can become a warmup. That is hard to believe
when a 7 mile ride was a struggle when I began 4 and a half years ago.
I have learned that assassin deer are not the biggest hazard
on the road. While I have come upon the assassins staring at me from a distance
while I ride past the fields they inhabit, I have also had closer encounters as
I chased them down the side ditch along a corn field, watched them pass across
the road 50 yards in from of me. Some have been very close encounters, like the
8 point buck that was standing under a street lamp in front of the house two
weeks ago. Like I said assassin deer are not the biggest threat out on the
road. That dubious honor is split between teenage boys in pickups with equipped
with smoke boxes and, what I affectionately call the moth people. The moth
people are those unfortunate souls who tend to drift towards small lights on
dark roads. They continue to drift to my side of the road until the last second
when the mesmerizing pull of my bike lights is broken and they jerk back into
their lane.
Fortunately, I have also learned that the danger posed by
these losers is pretty small. Small enough that I continue to enjoy my rides in
spite of the occasional smoke attack or drifting car.
Three weeks ago, I learned a lesson that has had a profound
impact on me. I am a bike geek. Any new gizmo or gadget I like. Now clips
aren’t new. Competitive bikers and pretenders like me have been using them for
decades. The smart people in the world figured out that traditional shoes and
pedals only provided power to the bike on the down stroke. That left 50% of the
time when one of your legs was freeloading at the expense of the other leg. Not
only is the leg pushing down moving your bike forward, it is spending some
energy pushing the lazy leg to the top of the hill. Bike geeks originally
solved the problem by building cages over the top of the pedals. This allowed
the overly ambitious the opportunity to lift the ascending leg. The toe of your
shoe would bump against the top of the cage, lifting the pedal on the upswing,
making mere mortals more like Greg Lemond.
This worked for a while. It was a simple solution. A few
strips of nylon, a buckle, a little bit of aluminum; people were going faster.
Muscles used to lift our legs were getting stronger. However, it was a simple
solution. That was unacceptable because it was unattractive and cheap. Someone called the engineers and told them to
make lifting your leg more difficult, more attractive and profitable. So they
went the way of ski boot binders and found a way to keep your feet firmly
attached to the pedal through the full range of pedaling motion. Yet with the
slightest turn to the left or the right the cleat detaches and your foot comes
free and you can put your foot on the ground as you come to a stop. Claim that
you can go ½ mile an hour faster and charge $100 for the increase in speed and
you can sell millions of these gadgets to Lance Armstrong wannabes.
As soon as I learned about what I was missing, I put my
money on the barrel head and got a pair of cleats. I put them on my bike and
quickly learned about the dark side of riding with pedal cleats. While you can
detach with the “slightest turn of the heel”, that is not the most natural
action to perform. This plus there is a timing issue involved. If you are going
too fast, you are buzzing along with a foot dangling off like a participle;
useless and leaving people confused about your intent. If you are going too
slow, you are going to fall over with both feet firmly attached to your pedals.
As you are buying the cleats, you are warned of this possibility. You are
encouraged to get on your bike in a doorway, lean against the door jam and
practice getting clipped in and out of the pedals. Even with practice you are
warned that you are still going to fall, just be prepared for it and make it a “controlled
fall”. I have fallen 5 or 6 times since I have been riding usually because I
was not paying attention and did not unclip as a precaution and found myself in
a situation where I had to stop or get run over or run into something.
The last time was completely unexpected. Three weeks ago, I
was just finishing up my appointed 17 mile morning ride. I was coasting up the
walk to the front porch. I had just unclipped and was slowing down. I took one
more pedal to get me within 3 feet of my dismount. I felt my foot clip back in.
I was stuck, no place to pedal, no way to get my foot
disengaged, nothing to grab ahold of and keep vertical. My immediate future opened
up before my eyes. I was going down. I could have cursed. I could have shaken
my fist at the laws of gravity. But I didn’t. I was incredibly calm. I coasted
to a stop, felt the bike lean to the left. I crouched down, bent my knees and
let my shoulder hit the ground. I went down as gently as you could expect for
someone of my size and age. Laying on the ground, I took stock of my skeleton,
my head. It was good. No broken bones, or even muscle trauma announced itself
as I lay in the flower bed mere inches from my intended destination.
It is said that in instances of danger the world slows down
and the person under pressure suddenly sees thing in great detail. All of the
senses are recording events in intense detail. It appears that in this case at
least, the recording was made straight to long term memory. I can recall
everything; the click of the clip, the oh crap in my head, the loss of
momentum, the attempt to disengage the clip, complete stop, keep your hands on
the handlebars, no need for a broken wrist, the lean to the left, the crouching of the
shoulders, the ducking of the head, the look towards the ground, thankful that
I was not going to crash into the huge planter at the corner of the porch, (man
that would hurt), half way down, three-quarters down, knee engaging with
concrete, shoulder to concrete, all is quiet. Well crap. -- Just as clear now
as when it happened.
There was a residual clarity left from these events. A
clarity that I have been chewing on and mulling over during the intervening
time. My response to falling off my bike was unusual. Faced with any crisis no
matter its severity or its inevitability, I have always responded the same way.
I fight it until the bitter end. I try to twist my cleat out of its bindings.
Once an idiot driver turned into my lane. The crash looked unavoidable. Rather
than cringe and slam on the brakes, I mashed the accelerator of that stupid van
to the floor, turned the wheel towards the curb and cursed like a mad man as
she pass scant inches behind me. I thought that Windstar was ready for Daytona.
I run hundreds of what if scenarios when
encountering a work problem and continue to expend resources in an effort to
soften the landing. I spent 5 years of a 10 year organic farming career trying
to save a fatally flawed business plan. I fight that is what I do.
So seeing an impending fall, accepting it and going down in
a heap calm and serene, is an unusual response for me. It is not unpleasant,
just unusual. In fact, it is far from unpleasant. I found it very soothing. I
am not fooling anyone. At my age, one starts thinking from time to time that
the end is closer than it was in the 1960’s. As I have firmly crossed the 1/3
mark of my 150 years in this sack of bones, I have started to think that there
is a crash out there that will not be recoverable.
And after this little glimpse and parable of the future, I
hope that I can recognize the inevitability of the end. To tuck myself in and
watch my head but not fight the forces of gravity. Not because the fall is
good, it just is and gravity is going to win, but because, it is inevitable and
a little calm at that time could help me feel better.
Take care
Roger.