bike « failing like never before

19Jan/090

Weekly Biking

Another week, another set of biking stats.

Distance Traveled:12.772 Miles

Max Speed: 28.8 MPH

Average Speed: 12.4 MPH

Time Traveled: 1 hour and two minutes

So I didn't bike nearly as much this week, as twice this past week I walked to class. My average speed for this week was just slightly higher then last week, which is nice to see.

The unfortunate thing about my campus, is that its all hills. The road leading out of campus has a very slight downgrade and so I can average about 26 MPH on it for about ten minutes without a problem, whereas coming back to campus I average only about 18 MPH. The short sprint down to class from my room is all downhill, and so I can coast most of the way down at around 25 MPH, once I hit the main part of campus I have to slow down substantially so that I don't hit people or cars.

Coming back to my room from class is always a trial for me however. When I'm carrying a few books and my laptop, I'm lucky to average eight miles an hour trudging uphill.

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30Dec/080

Writhing in Agony

I finally used a Target giftcard that I got for Christmas last year. I bought myself a Schwinn twelve-function bicycle computer, that can (amongst other things) tell me my current speed, average speed, maximum speed, distance traveled, and time traveled. So its quite the useful little device. I also bought myself some Franklin batting gloves, not for basebell mind you, (I don't play baseball) but for riding, because I've found that my hands tend to get amazinlgy cold when I'm riding and I couldn't find any riding gloves that covered a person's entire hand.

But back to the writhing in agony part, I took a longer ride today, just to see test my physical condition and to give my new Schwinn bike computer a test. As I was crusing along on my mountain bike at a solid 17 MPH, a bee hit me dead center in the forehead (or rather, I hit the bee). I stopped pedaling immediately, started to probe my forehead with my gloved fingers and discovered that the bee was still stuck to my forehead. Ow...

But since there was no way for me to safely remove the bee from my forehead with gloved hands, I grabbed my brake levers and slammed to a halt, intending to remove my gloves so that I could get rid of my new insect friend. I was perhaps a little too enthusiastic with the brakes and and the front wheel locked up, so that I was thrown foward. It would have almost been better for me to have flipped right over the handlebars, but instead I slammed my crotch into the solid metal headset. Sheer brilliance.

At this point, I stumbled out of my toe clips and collapsed on the side of the road writhing in agony, and it took a few seconds before I was able to extricate the bee from my forehead. Pretty sure people were staring at me, and I can't really blame them. Its not often you see a man laying on the side of a bike path, trying to clutch at both his forehead and pelvis region at the same time, all the while muttering incoherent curses.

Once the pain started to fade (which took a long time), I turned my mountain bike around and headed for home at a much slower pace. My stats for this ride where:

Distance traveled: 38.372 miles

Max speed: 33.5 MPH (I was going downhill of course.)

Average speed: 14.6 MPH

Elapsed time: 2 hours and 38 minutes

Tagged as: agony, bicycle, bike No Comments

4Nov/080

Making Good Time

I thought I was pretty cool, riding my bike to and forth from class. Instead of the normal fifteen to twenty minutes that it would take me to walk from my room to class, I can now bike to class in about five minutes, even less if I don't have to slow down when people cross the street. It takes a little bit longer to get to my room since its all up hill going back, but I can still make good time. The only down side is that I get pretty sweaty, especially coming back to my room. (I don't have a road bike, or even a lightweight hybrid: I've got an old chromoly Trek 820 mountain bike with 1.95 inch tires, so its a lot harder for me to reach the same speeds as a racing bike.)

The fact of the matter is, I always thought I was pretty cool, racing cars (and sometimes beating them!) to class. But I saw the most amazing thing as I was picking up my bike to head back to my room last week: a segway locked up at the bike rack. So I took a picture, for my blog.

I actually saw the guy, riding his scooter up the hill a few days ago. I was sweating up the hill and he was crusing along, cool as a cucumber, talking on his cell phone the whole time.

Tagged as: bike, class, segway No Comments

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