Bike Helmets

bsag over at But She’s a Girl reports on the current discussions about whether or not to make bicycle helmets compulsory.

In the United States, they are only compulsory for children. Most people wear them wrong (too far back) so they are ineffective. But all I know is when I was biking down our mountain in Santa Barbara, looked back, and the next thing I knew I was seeing stars and a whole, perfect, irretrievable novel flash before my eyes, what got broken was my helmet, not my head.

Milestone

The odometer on my bike computer hit 10,000 miles last night when I was coming home from my Spanish class. I’ve had this computer since 1997, when Pica and I moved up to the Trout Club some 1200 feet above Santa Barbara. Commuting half the time by bike, I wanted a bicycle computer with a built-in altimeter, so I got this one. Most of the time it has lived on my red hybrid, but several years ago I started swapping it onto my road bike whenever I would ride it. Living in a place as flat as Davis is, the altimeter function isn’t terribly useful here, but at least it gives some indication of the passage of weather fronts.

As for the mystery of what happens after the odometer turns over from 9999.9, it went to 10000, with no decimal points forevermore.

Birth of an Urban Legend?

There’s a story whizzing around the internet that it’s possible to break in to Kryptonite U-locks for bikes with a simple ballpoint pen. I was just at my mother’s and she announced this latest catastrophe to me, admonishing me for not keeping up to date with dangers OUT THERE, like shark attacks and sleeping-bag murders. (I lock my bike with a Kryptonite, which cost me $56 some time ago. I have no plans in the near future to swim in shark-infested waters OR sleep on the beach in a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t exactly placate her.)

I was hoping to be able to post a short film of me breaking into my own lock, but it seems we don’t have the right kind of ballpoints (Bic) in the house. A friend visiting from Edinburgh produced a Bic but it’s an English octagonal version, not round, in shape. So my feeble attempts at empiricism and the high-tech display thereof are foiled this time.

The local bike community remains skeptical, having attempted and failed to break into various locks.

So Martin’s recommendation on waking Sunday morning was to sell stock in Kryptonite, buy stock in Bic

Lila’s New Assignment

Long-time readers of Feathers of Hope will recall that this time last year I was hobbling about in a high-tech cast known as a camwalker, following the surgical reattachment of my Achilles tendon to itself, and that this hobbling was speeded up considerably by the appearance of Lila in my life.

Lila is a tricycle put together from recycled bits of other bicycles by the ingenious hands of Peter Wagner, of Whymcycles fame. I was able to bungee my crutches on the front and cycle the two miles to work and back, surrounded by pink and purple, ringing that outrageous bell when I needed to warn unsuspecting pedestrians that I was coming along and was much wider than the average bike.

Lila needs to get her parking break fixed and her front chain reattached (she’s technically a tandem, the person in front perched precariously on the edge of the universe, like Wave here at left), and then she’ll be off to help the next person whose ability to ride a normal bicycle is somewhat compromised. We bundled her over to West Davis today. I’ll miss seeing this cheerful contraption by our front door to welcome us home…

All Over Bar the Champs Elyses…

The final stage of this year’s Tour de France is tomorrow, the processional 165 km trip into Paris. Lance Armstrong has demonstrated once again his ferocious domination of this event, which is leaving lots of people wondering whether it will ever be interesting again. But time gets us all. He can quit while he’s ahead, or eventually lose. The only thing that can change tomorrow is the sprinters’ green jersey; Robbie McEwen of Australia currently holds it, but expect a huge mad rush at the end as Norwegian Thor Hushovd attempts to grab as many points as he can along the way.

The end of the Tour will alter my morning routine—definitely won’t be so much to look for online, which is just as well.

Into The Hills

It was a rest day today in the Tour de France, meaning that the riders only went on light training rides of 160 kilometers or so, and tomorrow the racing begins again, into the hills of the Massif Central. These mornings we’re following the live reports on VeloNews. The haikus submitted for Friday’s stage were especially good.

Tour Time Again

Mornings are back, for me, to going to the official Tour de France website and following the agonizingly slow feeds of the day’s stage, live. This is only televised on OLN, a cable channel, a channel we don’t get because we don’t have cable because we don’t have a TV. But just occasionally I wish we did.

Lance Armstrong is up for a record-breaking sixth Tour de France win, and also a record-breaking sixth consecutive win. He is neither as likable as Miguel Indurain, the quiet Basque who dominated the Tour in the early 90s, nor as brilliant (or crazy) a cyclist as Eddy Merckx (nicknamed “The Cannibal”), but he is OBSESSED with the Tour de France (detractors would say to the detriment of cycling in general). He is so obsessed that he’s turning it into a race that cannot be won without this level of obsession. The next two and a half weeks will be full of our contemplation of this obsession.

(You’ve been warned.)

Kerry The Cyclist

I have a newfound fondness for John Kerry. According to this report in the news section of the trade site Bicycle Business, John Kerry is a serious long-distance cyclist. The Senator from Massachusetts rides many charity events and last August came in 37th out of a field of 3000 in the 110-mile Pan-Massachusetts Challenge ride. The report also tells how Kerry finished an 80-mile ride to the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod in freezing weather that Greg LeMond, three-time Tour de France winner who was also riding in the event, called the worst conditions he’d seen.

A cyclist in the White House? Sounds fine to me. And Kerry will need all the stamina of a long-distance rider if he is to outpace the Repugs by November.

Floppy Timing Chain

Lila’s front chain, the one used by the front passenger when there is one, got pretty loose a few weeks ago. Since this is not a conventional rig I took her back to Peter the Whymcycle guru. He performed technical miracles (removed the shoe from his right foot and pushed the bar holding the wheel a bit further down, to be precise).

Chains do stretch over time, however, and we have simply removed the timing chain so I don’t have to stop every time I hit a bump in the road on the way to work and get bike grease all over my hands. Today I gave a coworker a ride to the local Indian restaurant for lunch. I did all the work instead of have a pedalling stoker. It was okay, but I wouldn’t want to try this on a hill!

The New Tandem

Pica’s lilac contraption is built to carry a passenger on the front. I don’t think it’s quite the long-distance machine our Burley Duet is, but it will be a while before we ride the Burley again, alas. But Lila does have independent front-rear pedalling, a feature only rarely found on regular tandems.