Today’s morning ride was a race against an oncoming mass of rain, and I didn’t quite make it.  I rode around 14 miles, and the first 10 or so were dry, but then the rain caught up with me.  When I set out, it was an exceptionally muggy 65° out, and by the time it started raining, I was starting to get hot.  I had the same problem yesterday afternoon, when it was in the 80s and muggy.  I could feel myself starting to overheat coming up the final hill before home.  The humidity becomes second nature by June or July, but this time of year, my body isn’t acclimated to it yet.  I’m sure hydration is a big part of it; in the summer, I get used to drinking a lot more water, but again, in April I’m not quite in that habit yet.  So to make a long story short, when the rain started during this morning’s ride, it actually felt great.  It probably won’t be quite as refreshing this afternoon when it’s 10° cooler out.

I finally feel like I’m starting to get back into biking shape after my accident 8 weeks ago.  Today figures to be rain-free, so I trotted out my road bike.  That makes it the third bike I’ve ridden to work in as many days, which I believe is a first for me.  It won’t happen too often, because switching bikes is a pain, so I like to limit the number of times I do it.  Looks like I’ll be doing it at least one more time this week, as the weather forecast for Friday is looking wet.

Today I hit Oella and Catonsville for the first time since the accident.  I rode out River Rd., went left on Frederick out to Ellicott City, then up Oella Ave and Westchester Ave, and through Catonsville.  The weather was nice for once, and it was a great ride.

I’m trying to think of ways to make it less of a pain to switch bikes.  The big issue is that I only have one set of panniers, and a single rack that I share across all my bikes.  Each bike also uses different sized tire tubes, and I have different frame pumps for each bike, etc.  Some of this could be simplified by getting separate racks and panniers for each bike, but good panniers aren’t exactly cheap.  Another nice thing would be to have somewhere on each bike to store tubes, etc. that are specific to that bike, so I don’t have to remember to pack the correct spare tubes each time I change bikes.  One product that looks like it might work well for this is called the Cage Rocket.  It’s a storage pod that fits in a spare water bottle cage.  An alternative would be to just get a separate seat pack for each bike.  Still trying to sort it all out, but once I find a system that works, I’ll be sure to write about it here.

Today was one of those mornings when nothing went according to plan.  I was getting ready to ride to work, and I went to check on my bike, and the back tire was flat as a pancake.  The tire is brand spanking new, and I had taken a grand total of 1 ride on it, yesterday.  Turns out the problem wasn’t the tire.  I took it off the rim and found that the tube was punctured on the rim side.  I couldn’t find any sharp spots on the rim in the general area of the puncture, so I’m wondering if a metal shaving got caught between the tube and the rim or something (the rim is also brand new).  I’m going to replace the rim tape, remount the tire, shrug my shoulders, and hope it doesn’t happen again.

The other big story this morning was the weather.  Rain was in the forecast this morning, so I did my customary check of the radar before I set out (on my other bike).  All clear.  But as the saying goes in Maryland, if you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes.  After about 10 minutes of riding, it started pouring and the winds kicked up to seemingly near-monsoon speeds.  The rain died down to a light drizzle, but the winds kept up for the duration of my ride.  I’d swear that there were a couple spots where I was pedaling into 50 or 60mph gusts.  Must have been a frontal passage, but it certainly made for an exciting ride.

Last weekend I put SPD pedals on my mountain bike, to replace the “Power Grips” I had on it over the winter.  I was planning on giving this bike a break this week, but the flat tire on my other bike pressed it back into service.  So today was also my first ride on the SPDs, and given the weather, it was a “trial by fire” of sorts.  The pedals worked great, with no problems at all.  We’ll see how they do over the long hall.  These are Shimano’s lower-end SPD pedals, model PD-M520.  Having no experience at all with mountain bike pedals, I went with these over similarly-priced pedals from Crank Bros. based on the online reviews.  No one really had anything bad to say about the PD-M520s.  They seem to be solid and well-made, and I’m willing to bet that other than the weight, there’s likely not much difference between these and the pricier models.  These aren’t the lightest pedals in the world, and you won’t see many racers using them, but I think they’ll be perfect for commuting.

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.

So, It’s been almost 8 weeks since I took a spill off my bike on black ice and broke 4 ribs.  I’d say I’m almost back to normal.  Ribs take a long time to fully heal up, and I still have a tiny bit of discomfort on occasion (mainly in bed and getting up out of bed).  All in all though, it’s not too bad, and it’s probably been a month since I took any kind of painkiller.

I first got back on a bike exactly 3 weeks after the accident, and the first couple of weeks on the bike were a mixed bag.  On one hand, it was great to be riding again.  On the other hand, riding was not always comfortable.  My typical bike commute involves a roughly 1-hour ride to work in the morning, followed by a standard 8-hour work day, and then a ½-hour ride home.  During those first couple of weeks, there was a distinct pattern: I’d be fine on my morning ride, but on the ride home, I would have pain when I tried to breathe in deeply.  The pain was worse on my road bike, which has drop bars.  I have to climb a steep hill at the end of my commute home, and on my second day of riding, I couldn’t make it up the hill without stopping a few times, because it hurt too much to breathe in and I couldn’t get enough Oxygen.  While still uncomfortable, the pain was a lot more manageable on my mountain bike, which is set up for a more relaxed, upright riding position.  After that revelation, I rode the mountain bike pretty much exclusively over the next few weeks.

Thankfully, I’ve healed up now to the point where riding is no longer uncomfortable.  I can ride my road bike again with only minor discomfort in the “dropped” position, and no breathing issues.  Now I just need to avoid falling down again.  At least the weather is getting warmer now, so I shouldn’ t have to worry about ice for awhile.

Many people who know me know that I regularly commute to work via bicycle.  I also keep a blog, where I occasionally chronicle my experiences riding a bike to work (among other topics).  In writing about bike commuting, I’ve always focused on positive things.  That’s because bike commuting is, almost overwhelmingly, a positive experience.  Sure, there are occasional mishaps like flat tires, impatient drivers, etc., but that all comes with the territory.  The bottom line is that on a typical day when I commute by bike, the positives outweigh the negatives, and my blog entries tend to follow suit.

All that being said, about a month ago I had one of those rare rides where the negatives outweigh the positives.  On Tuesday, Feb. 8, I was about 10 minutes into my morning commute when I lost control of my bike and went down fast and hard.  I’m still not sure what caused the crash, because everything after the crash was a blur.  I remember hitting the ground hard, standing up, gasping for breath.  Someone stopped and asked if I was OK.  I think an ambulance may have been called, but I was not taken to the hospital (likely because I was able to stand and walk, and must have been talking at least somewhat coherently, though I don’t remember any of it).  Vague recollections of a guy with a pickup dropping me (and the bike) off at home (to whomever you were, in the unlikely event you’re reading this, thanks).  My wife took me to the hospital, where I spent a woozy day getting every kind of imaging scan known to mankind (4 or 5 X-rays; 2 CAT scans; 1 MRI).  Initially I was told I had a lung puncture that would require surgery; later I was told that my head CAT scan showed a midline shift which could mean a hematoma (hemorrhage) or other mass.  But in the end, the test results revealed that I just had a garden-variety concussion and 4 broken ribs.  To quote someone or other, “it could have been worse.”  I was kept overnight for observation and sent home the following afternoon with lots of painkillers.  And for the next several days, I needed ’em, as anyone who’s ever had a rib injury can likely attest.  Broken ribs make all sorts of everyday activities painful, among which are breathing, coughing, laughing, lying in bed, getting out of bed, reaching up, reaching down, lifting anything over 5lbs, etc.  You get the idea.  Not pleasant, but beats being in a body cast.

The only explanation I can think of for the crash was that I hit black ice while coming around a bend.  It’s a little unsettling not knowing for sure (before you ask, I am certain that I was not hit by a car), but black ice does seem likely.  Most bike tires are pretty much worthless on ice, and that includes knobby mountain bike tires.  In general, though, you can ride over icy patches as long as you don’t try to brake or steer.  The key is to keep the front wheel straight.  If the front wheel starts to skid, you’re going down and there’s not much you can do about it.  After going back and looking at the area where the crash happened, it seems plausible that this is what happened.

When I got home from the hospital, I assessed the damage to my bike and equipment.  My helmet had cracks running all through the right side (the side I hit), and likely saved me from a much worse head injury.  My jacket and both clothes layers underneath were torn in the shoulder area.  As for the bike, the back wheel was bent into a shape vaguely resembling a potato chip (in cycling jargon, the term is “tacoed”).  My theory for this is that the panniers (saddle bags) I was riding with got pushed into the wheel when the bike hit the ground. The bike needed a new rear wheel and new tires, but other than that, it was not seriously damaged.

A couple of people have asked me if I was going to stop riding after this, but the thought never crossed my mind (and thankfully, I don’t think any of my family expected me to stop either).  The benefits of riding far outweigh the risks.  I’ve been riding for over 30 years, and I’ve had my share of falls, this one being the worst.  Every activity has its risks, and one really bad crash in 30 years of riding is not that bad, statistically.  I figure I’m just as likely, if not more likely, to be involved in a serious accident while driving a car.  And as an analogy, you don’t see too many people stop driving after they’re involved in car accidents.

So anyhow, as soon as the doctor cleared me to ride, I was back on my bike, exactly 3 weeks after the accident.  Since then I’ve logged 6 round-trips to work and back, around 100 miles.  The ribs are still sore at times, and in particular, it’s sometimes uncomfortable to lean forward and breathe in deeply.  So lately I’ve been avoiding my road bikes and riding my mountain bike, which lets me sit more upright.  To be honest, I’m just happy to be riding again, and that winter is ending.  Next winter, I won’t be going out the door without studded tires.

…is that it’s only 28 days long.  February is historically my least-prolific bike commuting month, as I haven’t been able to top 7 rides in February in my entire 2-year winter bike commuting history.  This month I’ll be thrilled if I can reach 8 rides, and ecstatic if I can hit 10 rides.  It all depends on the weather.

One constant of February is that Patapsco State Park is always snowed over.  This year is no exception.  They plowed and salted River Road in December, but now that it’s February, they’ve given up and just closed off the gate just past the Avalon parking area.  Not that that’s a bad thing..  the last thing we need is more salt on the roads, and I can still get through on my bike.  But I do wish they’d plow the River Rd access on the Howard County side.

I was amazed that schools weren’t delayed this morning.  Yesterday we had a huge thaw, and then everything re-froze overnight, and the back roads were probably as bad as I’ve ever seen them.  There was ice all over the place.  A lot of intersections were particularly treacherous.  When you’re riding over ice on a bike without studded tires, you need to maintain momentum and avoid steering or braking.  The best thing to do is coast over in as straight a line as possible.  If you lose momentum, you typically can’t get going again because the rear wheel won’t be able to get traction.  If you stop and put your foot down, you’re more likely to fall, because the shift in your weight will make the bike slide away from you sideways.  If you try to steer, the front wheel will lose traction and you’ll be on the ground before you realize what happened.  It’s just a barrel of fun.

This weekend, I’ll be counting the days until March as I rinse salt off my bike.  Yay February.

First ride today following Tuesday night’s snow, which dumped around 8 inches of stuff roughly the texture, consistency and weight of liquid cement.  I took the Rockhopper, which is looking like it’s going to become my go-to snow bike.  Just need to pick up a set of studded tires, which I’ll do next winter.  In snow, I’ll ride it with regular pedals and power grips, and the rest of the year I’ll ride SPD pedals with the Kenda tires that are on the bike now.  I seem to have solved my seat post slippage problem, by wiping some of the grease off the seat post and tightening the quick-release clamp a bit.  The problem may have been that I was pushing the QR lever in too far, causing it to overshoot the point of maximum tightness and start loosening up again.  It’s a 1993-vintage clamp, and the lever doesn’t conform to the seat post curvature like newer clamps.  It may make sense to replace it with a standard bolt-on clamp.  But in any case, I’ve ridden twice now with no slippage.

I had to hike the park access road today.  The consistency of this snow is really nasty.  It’s wet and heavy and the top had iced over to a crusty, crunchy glaze.  My 2″ tires weren’t having any part of it.  The wider tires made this bike easier to walk through snow than either of my road bikes, though.  I wore rain pants, and was glad I did.  Without them, snow would have gotten into my boots, and my feet would have been wet and unhappy.  Rain pants need to be standard issue with more than around 3-4″ of snow on the ground.

New record low temperature for my morning commute today:  11°F.  That tops my previous record of 14, set on February 5, 2009.  However, we had no wind to speak of this morning, vs. a brutal 20-plus mph headwind for most of the 2009 ride.  That made today’s ride quite a bit more enjoyable.  For posterity, here’s what I wore today:  heavy wool socks, hiking boots, jogging tights (base layer), cycling shorts with leg warmers (outer layer), short sleeve athletic shirt with arm warmers (base), “Under Armour” long sleeve athletic shirt, PolarTec top, wind breaker, thermal head band, lightweight balaclava, 2 layers of gloves (heavy gloves over light glove liners), Uvex glasses.  I was out for around an hour, and this was pretty comfortable.  My toes got cold towards the end of the ride, and my torso was starting to sweat underneath the layers.  Unzipping the wind breaker helped with that, and I think the hiking boots kept my toes warmer than they would have been with cleats and shoe covers.  There was room left in the boots for an additional layer of socks, and/or a set of chemical toe warmers, which I may try if I have more rides under these kinds of conditions.

This morning was also my third commute on the Rockhopper.  I switched to a Forté Classic saddle and installed a head tube extender over the weekend, to bring the bars up a couple of inches.  This seems more comfortable; however, the jury is still out, because my seat post isn’t staying put — it slid down about an inch and a half on this morning’s ride.  When I got in, I wiped some of the grease off it and tightened the clamp, so we’ll see how that goes.  I rode through the park in about an inch of snow, and the Kenda Pathfinder tires went through it great.  I wouldn’t even think about trying that with either of my road bikes.  Ice, of course, is another story.  Next winter I’ll be looking to get some studded tires to help with traction on ice.  But the Kendas figure to be great Spring/Summer/Autumn tires.

At long last, I took my rebuilt ’93 Specialized Rockhopper out for its first commute this morning.  I took it for a brief off-road excursion a couple of months ago, so this technically wasn’t its maiden voyage, but it was my first time commuting on it, and I was able to get a good “feel” for it on roads.  A bunch of observations..   first off, the Kenda Pathfinder tires are leaps and bounds better on pavement than the old Onzas they replaced.  It’s not even a comparison.  I’m sure they won’t do as well in mud, but that’s not what I got them for.  We’ll see how they wear, but they ride very well on pavement and I’m sure they’ll do fine on gravel and hard-packed trails.  At under $20 per tire, the price is right too.

The bike feels solid and well-balanced.  The ride is noticeably slower than either of my road bikes, which is understandable given that it’s a mountain bike with 26″ wheels vs 700c.  I rode the tires at 60psi, and as expected, the ride was smoother than on the road bikes as well.  The Planet Bike Hardcore fenders worked as expected and didn’t give me any problems.  Seat height was good, thanks to the longer seat post I put on it.  The stock “air gel” saddle is just as awful as it always was.  I’ll be replacing it shortly with a Forté Classic saddle.  Just waiting for the next 15% off sale at Performance Bike.

I rode with the same Topeak seat post rack and panniers that I use on my road bikes.  It worked fine, but I had to raise the rack up higher than I would like, to allow the pannier frames to clear the fender struts.  I’m not sure I’d want to ride single track with this setup.  It may make sense to switch back to a standard rack with trunk, and use a messenger bag to carry anything extra I need.

The only big issue with the bike was the reach to the handlebars.  With the longer seat post, it’s a bit more of a stretch than I’d like.  I have a head tube extender that I had originally gotten for my fixed-gear bike, but I think I may try it on this bike instead.  I think if I can get a new saddle and raise the bars up a couple inches, the bike will be nice and comfortable.  In any case, it’s great to have this bike up and running again.