Still Alive

Today was a landmark in my post-bike-accident recovery.  For the first time since my accident, I rode the bike I wrecked.  It’s sporting a new rear wheel and new slightly-beefier tires (28 vs 23), but it’s the same bike, and it still rides largely the same as it used to before I fell off it 2 months ago.  Over the weekend, I re-mounted fenders on it and got it ready to ride.  Happily, I didn’t have much trouble re-adjusting to fixed gear after a 2-month lapse.  It probably helped that I waited a couple of weeks to regain some of my pre-crash conditioning before I hopped on it.  We’ll see how the ride home goes.  I was cautious to a fault riding the bike for the first time.  I’m 90% sure it was ice that caused my crash, but there’s still that little part of me paranoid that I’m going to get thrown off the bike without warning.  It’ll probably take several rides on the bike before I fully trust it again.

I’m happy to have this bike back in the rotation though, because it gives me a second bike with fenders that I can ride in bad weather.  I ended up taking the fenders off my other road bike because that bike just doesn’t work well with fenders (I’m thinking about keeping a set of clip-on fenders in my office for days when we have afternoon storms).  That left me with only 1 fender-equipped bike, my mountain bike, for the past month.  Not that I don’t enjoy riding the mountain bike after painstakingly rebuilding it last fall, but sometimes it is nice to have some options.