Making use of the bike
In the spirit of “making use of my new bike”, I decided to take it out for a spin on Tuesday night after work. It was a bit eventful and definitely a learning experience! I brought along Jodi’s Garmin Forerunner 305 so I could get some stats on my ride, along with a map. The experience proved that I desperately need an “Edge 305” bike computer to do the same thing, but allowing me to see the details as I bike (hard to twist your wrist and read the forerunner while you’re biking)!
Here’s the map that resulted from my approximately 8 mile ride:
Important events or things learned, marked with the green numbers:
- Cars will turn right in front of you without seeing you, such that you will have to skid to a stop to avoid being hit. This was about 10–15 minutes into my first ride on my new bike. I can only imagine how many times I will nearly be hit while riding over the next few years if I start doing it regularly. Scary. Especially in a supposedly bike-friendly city like Seattle!
- Here my left foot cleat didn’t disengage when I tried to declip at a stop. I fell over and looked like an idiot to all present. Lesson learned here is that if your cleats aren’t bolted in tight enough, they will rapidly loosen to the point where you can’t get enough torsion to get them to disengage if you need to do so suddenly. I also learned that even for a fun-ride the first day with your new bike, you should bring along a basic set of tools so you can re-tighten your cleats (or whatever else) if you need to. Your finger will do a lousy job of re-tightening the bolt for the rest of the ride home.
- I figured I’d avoid the terrible “Massachusetts St Hill” and come up something less steep further up the lakeshore. So after my loose-cleat incident, I was already on fragile ground with one loosely-cleated shoe to be wary about. And it turns out, going up this other hill (that leads to Yesler) is 4 times as long and probably nearly as steep as Mass St. Whoops. I ended up walking my bike up the hill since I was nervous about losing my left cleat under the strain of biking up a steep hill — plus, I was still a little jittery about falling off again. Lesson learned here was two parts: first, this hill is terrible too… next time I go up all the way to Madison or something and try that. Second, even walking with a loose cleat is likely to make it fall out and get lost… fortunately only a bolt was lost, not the cleat itself.
Whew, so good, clean fun for sure. I ratcheted down the cleats super tight for my next ride (thankfully there were several extra bolts included with my cleats). And I need to get a saddle-bag with some tools and tire repair stuff to make sure I’m more prepared for problems like this next time.
