On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

I'm improving a bit day-to-day. My walking is getting better, but I'm still hobbling. I feel a bit of pain at my hip, but the worst part remains the inner upper thigh. This is consistent with what I've read about iliopsoas pulls: the one motion where my progress has been slowest is the clamshell move, laying on my left side with knees bent @ 90 degrees, then pivoting my leg at the hip and foot, and raising my knee. The knee just won't rise. Sitting with an orange Theraband between my knees I can spread them, but the mass of my leg is too much for me right now. This is likely the weak link in my recovery. It's the part most likely to cause sharp pain. Two big sports events yesterday to distract me. One was the Tour de France. The big story on the stage, of course, was the Orica-Green Edge bus getting jammed under the finish arch. This was an error, of course: they said were sent through by finish line officials, but the officials claim they told the bus to...

There's a new pedal out called the TriRig Mercury , a continuation of a theme which began with the Aerolite in 1979 (and still available!), continued with the UltraLite Sports , essentially attach a cleat to a bare pedal spindle. You lose pedal float, but it's the lightest solution around: you spare the added mass of the pedal body. Here is it: Originally this was advertised as 71 grams, but now it's been upgraded to 93 grams. The cleats adds only 58 grams, so the total solution is very light. But not as light as they were when they were 71 grams... So what happened? What happened is they eliminated the "weight limit" of the original design. Of the 22 additional grams, 18 are due to a change from a hollow to a solid spindle, 4 due to a shift in the flange from the bearing sleeve (nylon)to the spindle and retaining screw (metal). As the web page describes: The additional material adds just 9 grams of weight to each spindle, but makes a world of differen...

You've got to walk before you can run, and you've got to be able to swing your leg over your bike before you can ride. At the crash + 2 week point, at least I can walk. Perhaps in theory I could ride, doing what I did to get from the bike path to the car in which I got a much-appreciated and very generous ride home (enormous thanks to the trail walker who drove me): lay the bike on the ground, step over it, then lift he bike. But that wouldn't be so smart on San Francisco streets, where an emergency stop could put me in a painful orientation, and I very much doubt I could climb any significant hill without clipping in my left foot (allowing that leg to do all the work). And I don't want to do that due to the emergency stop thing. So that suggests the trainer, but I can't lift my leg over that yet. Perhaps I should install a body harness with pulleys mounted on the ceiling. That would probably work. But walking is improving. I don't need the crutches any ...

Different picketers, same deal Long, long ago... October 2008 I'd just descended Eastmoor Road from Skyline in Daly City to Mission Blvd and stopped at the long traffic signal there. I was riding home from the peninsula and was taking the scenic route home: over San Bruno Mountain to squeeze an extra thousand feet of climbing out of this hilly ride. But at the intersection I was amused to see a large crowd of people, mostly hispanic and, to be blunt, mostly morbidly obese, marching around with signs that said "Yes on 8" along with various slogans indicating that the sanctity of their marriage unions was in peril. I was amused, I say, because I couldn't comprehend what so motivated them to spend their day walking around this crowded intersection supporting removing the rights from individuals on a matter which had absolutely no effect on the marchers' lives or their well-beings. Whether 8 passed or not, whether the right for same-sex marriage was removed or not...

The worst part of being injured is arguably sleeping. The drive for sleep is an interesting one. It's incredibly compelling: nothing is better than drifting off to sleep. But with my leg injury, a muscle pull of some sort although I've not specifically identified which muscles yet, as soon as I lay down my legs start to hurt. The past few nights I've been taking an ibuprofen to help me get past this pain. I avoid ibuprofen and other NSAIDs because of a personal and family history of stomach ulcers. But not being able to get to sleep is a greater fear. I take my only ibuprofen of the day. Eventually I settle down and sleep arrives. But I do so aware my waking sensation will be pain. One motion which is particularly painful is an abduction motion with bent knees, similar to the clamshell exercise . I simply cannot do the clamshell with my right leg: too painful, especially at my outer thigh. Today I tried some very mild resistance exercises sitting with the same ...

I've been hobbling around, discouraged that friends are doing all sorts of cycling adventures while I'm essentially confined to home. Progress has been steady but slow. Motions I previously couldn't do I can do now on a very limited basis. Some stuff which was painful is no longer so. Yet the pragmatic reality is I am still essentially immobile. Travel plans for 10 days from now are imperiled. But I'm only 8 days out from the crash, so I still have a lot of opportunity for progress before then. I was surprised yesterday when I got a copy of Peloton Magazine in the mail. I'd thought my subscription had expired. I subscribed initially because I was impressed by Heidi Swift's articles , specifically of the Reve Tour, in which she and other women rode all of the stages of the Tour de France last year. Her writing is really good. They also have Jared Gruber's photography. Jared brings a fresh look to cycling photography, even if he has a bit of a weakn...

It's six days since my crash, and I'm still a long way from recovered, X-rays showed no fracture, but bruising and muscle damage resulted in substantial disability. Only yesterday was I able to start walking again, and only barely and painfully. Today the pain is less, but I still prefer using crutches to get around. I can't lay on my preferred right side, the side on which I crashed, and laying on my left side becomes uncomfortable due to my right leg not being sufficiently stable in that position. I tried acupuncture on Tuesday, and will return on Friday, but while that was a nice sensation when it was being done, I'm not sure it had lasting benefit. Yet I continue to improve day-by-day, so it's likely a matter of patience. I continue to apply heat and ice to afflicted areas, and use tumeric for its anti-inflammatory effects (at the suggestion of the acupuncturist, although there's questions about the absorptivity of tumeric ). The thing about the crash...

Last Friday I was riding Ramesh's first SF2G after a spectacular 40 day run where he placed a remarkable 6th in the Strava May Massive , simultaneously winning the individual ranking of the Team Commute Challenge, then with just a single day off, rode AIDS LifeCycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles. After this amazing demonstration of unfettered excess he wisely took 4 days off before calling a Friendly Skyline ride for Friday. The Skyline route has two options between CA35 and Hillcrest Blvd southbound: either the shoulder of the 280 freeway (which is exceptionally open there to cyclists) or the San Andreas Bike Trail. For obvious reasons the trail is the most popular choice, although when I'm alone, unless I need to use the toilet available halfway down the trail, I choose the freeway. It's wide and, in my view, quite safe, with the exception of the exit ramp where I like to check behind me to make sure there's no cars overtaking me. But I don't have much ...

This past Wednesday was my first Wednesday Noon Ride up Old La Honda. The previous week was going to be my first, but I had some mechanical issues which prevented me from doing the climb after arriving to the base with the group. This time, however, I had everything under control and I reached Old La Honda with the surprisingly small noon-ride group. On the approach I chatted with Chris Evans who declared he was going to begin the climb hard. He'd done a sub-17 the week before, he said, and since he was more tired today, was shooting for 17:30. That was the goal I had set for myself on Strava, so it seemed like he was a good pacing match for me. But It was just my first time doing Old La Honda this year, and I'd been riding a relatively lot due to trying to prepare for the upcoming Alta Alpina 8-Pass Challenge so was a bit tired. These factors meant a really fast start didn't seem wise. Instead I decided to let Chris have his fun early and just try to pace myself. ...

Amsterdam is considered a cyclist paradise. It's well known that cycling is there the dominant form of local transportation. Yesterday I had a chat with a guy who'd spent the last five years there, just recently moving to San Francisco. The Dutch view on driving and parking is interesting. From 1992 to 2005 Amsterdam cut its ground-level car parking 3% per year to discourage driving. Taxes, according to Trey, are 150% the retail value of a car on purchase, or if you receive the car for work, 25% of the value of the car per year. Of course, taxes on fuel are well in excess of those in the United States, which are among the lowest in the world. These substantial taxes are invested in public transit, which is so good that there's little need for a car for city residents, in striking contrast to San Francisco where our bus system, inefficient and forced to compete for space on crowded streets with private automobiles, is virtually unusable for timely travel across the ci...

Sign the Baby Bullet petition here . Caltrain always seemed to need to be dragged kicking and screaming to do what's in its own best interest, assuming its best interest is more ridership at lower cost and better service for the majority of people. John Murphy, who previously petitioned Caltrain for weekend baby bullet survice (ie trains with substantially reduced stop schedules between San Francisco and San Jose), is now petititoning for a later baby bullet . Presently the last southbound AM baby bullet is at 8:57 AM from San Francisco, and the last northbound AM baby bullet is from 8:03 AM. From 9 am until around 4:30 pm it's essentially skeleton mid-day service, substantially reduced from its already inadequate peak around 2008, despite a higher budget and ridership growth since then. Electrified Caltrain rendering Caltrain has continuously underestimated latent demand for later baby bullets. When the trains were first introduced, southbound baby bullets left San F...