Turtle on Wheels

Pleasant surprise this morning:

We’re having sales conference at work this week, which means that I have to drag out my business suit from the back of the closet. I put on the skirt this morning and guess what? For the first time in  I-hate-to-think-how-long, I didn’t have to suck in my stomach to zip it up! And there’s a little extra room in the waist!  Maybe my desperate optimism will be fulfilled and I’ll be able wear the shorts and summer skirts that I’ve been hanging onto all these years. . . .

Well . . . 1 near bike death, 1 bloody knee, 3 rain showers, and I-don’t-want-to-think-about-how-much-money later, Ollivander (my bike) and I are slightly traumatized, but we finally have clipless pedals. Work ended early today and since my weekend is busier than I anticipated, I decided to go up to the bike shop this afternoon. Now I mentioned that I had taken Ollie to Blackstone Bike Works for a tune-up, but they’re a pretty low-key community organization that doesn’t carry clipless pedals, so I had to go downtown to Chicago’s major chain bike store, Kozy’s Cyclery.

The store nearest to me is in the South Loop and requires 2 buses to get there from Hyde Park. I considered biking up to the Loop, but given the looming storm clouds, I ultimately decided it would be best to just take the bus. But there was one problem: I had never put Ollie on the bus bike rack.

The bus bike racks always had looked a little rickety for my taste and I was nervous about Ollie falling off. Moreover, the CTA just settled with the family of a woman who was crushed by a bus last December while trying to take her bike off the rack. But I knew I had to learn sooner or later, so I read and re-read the rack loading directions on the CTA website all day. Then at around 4 o’clock, I flagged down a #6 bus at 60th and was able to load Ollie without too much hassle. The bus driver was really nice and reassured me that my bike wouldn’t fall off.

Five blocks later, however, I saw Ollie suddenly lean dangerously over the front of the rack and I leapt up to the front of the bus. The bus driver said that I could fix it at the next stop, but a few seconds later, he fell off the rack and under the bus. The bus driver thankfully skidded to a halt, and I ran out the door to retrieve Ollie’s remains. I dragged him out from under the bus’s front bumper–he was scraped up but otherwise looked okay, but that was it. “This is hopeless,” I thought and I tried to wave the driver on.
But the driver wouldn’t leave: she asked where I was going and I replied Roosevelt. She then parked the bus, got out of her seat, and helped me put Ollie back on. This time, we secured the bike correctly–it turned out I hadn’t put the front wheel handle on the wheel all the way. I got back on the bus–embarrassed that I had held up the bus, especially since I’ve been annoyed before by inept bikers like me–and then I nervously watched Ollie like a hawk for the rest of the ride.

Miracle of miracles, he didn’t fall off again on LSD and when I got off at the museum campus, I reconsidered whether I should try getting on the Roosevelt bus after all. But I didn’t feel like hiking up that big hill between State and Clark, and moreover, I discovered that the stinging pain under my pants leg was a nasty knee cut I must have gotten when I picked up Ollie off of the street. Fortunately, I again got an extremely nice and patient driver, and this time I made sure that Ollie was secure. He survived the short ride over to Jefferson and I then rode/walked the 3 blocks north to Kozy’s.

The rest of the night went much more smoothly: I bought the Shimano PD-M324 pedals, which I had picked out from Kozy’s website earlier. They definitely were on the pricier side, but I liked them because they’re dual pedals–clipless on one side and flat on the other. They’re a little heavier than most other clipless pedals, but I don’t mind because I don’t plan to do serious racing–I’ll need the clipless for long rides, but will use the flat regular side for everyday commuting and short rides. I also bought Specialized’s Body Geometry Riata Sport MTB shoes: I had my eye on another pair of Shimano shoes that were cheaper than this pair, but this branch of Kozy’s didn’t have them and at that point, I was in no mood to run around the city to look for the best deal on shoes. So yes, I bought the shoes pretty much based on convenience: I decided that I’d rather do the entire thing right then and there–have the store mechanic install the pedals and the shoe cleats, and then learn how to use the pedals and shoes on my bike in the store’s trainer–than lose more training time (which is decreasing quickly in general) in the clipless pedals by extended comparison shopping. But all the same, I feel pretty good about this pair of shoes, because they felt good on my feet and the sales guy said that style was one of their best-sellers and highly rated.
Anyway, that’s that and aside from perhaps buying another jersey or two, I think I’m pretty much good to go. So the training starts in earnest now. . . .

Not much going on, and I’m still trying to train: The recent spate of warm days have allowed me to start regularly biking on the lakefront path in the mornings as I mentioned before, and I’ve been going to the gym when I can’t get up in time to bike. As a consequence, my body has definitely done some painful adjusting in the last couple weeks: I think I have Charlie horses, shin splints, or whatever it is that makes your leg muscles feel that they’re being stretched on a rack, and it turns out that my body is not quite as inured to the bike saddle as I thought. But no pain, no gain, right?

In any case, I think my training will become more efficient when I get clipless pedals this weekend: I don’t even use toe clips (they kept falling off when I tried to screw them on my 1970s metal pedals), and there has been one too many times when my foot has slipped off the pedal, though fortunately while I was coasting down the sparsely populated lake path. It will take me a little while to learn how to use the clipless pedals, but I might as well continue to condense the most painful part of training over the next couple of weeks.

In happier news, I’m $55 away from reaching my fundraising goal! There’s tons of time left to contribute, so I’m hoping that 5 friends will contribute $11 or 10 friends will give $5.50–any amount is most welcome!

One more thing: I just read a great humor essay by Mark Twain called “The Taming of the Bicycle.” This is my favorite part that describes my bike rides to a T:

I was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary for me to round to. This is not a pleasant thing, when you undertake it for the first time on your own responsibility, and neither is it likely to succeed. Your confidence oozes away, you fill steadily up with nameless apprehensions, every fiber of you is tense with a watchful strain, you start a cautious and gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full of electric anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a jerky and perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind — your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight on you go, and there are but a couple of feet between you and the curb now. And now is the desperate moment, the last chance to save yourself; of course all your instructions fly out of your head, and you whirl your wheel away from the curb instead of toward it, and so you go sprawling on that granite-bound inhospitable shore. That was my luck; that was my experience.

After weeks of spinning my wheels to nowhere, I hit 3 personal milestones in the last 48 hours:

1) Made my first fundraising goal of $300: There are still some checks to be processed and whatnot, but it appears that I’ve finally reached the $300 minimum and will officially be able to hit the road in June. But that is NOT the end: I still have to reach my ultimate fundraising goal of $500, so any and all support is much needed and appreciated!

2) Biked 10 miles nonstop: I dragged myself out of bed at the crack of dawn this morning and biked 10 miles nonstop–to Soldier Field and back–on the lakefront path. Usually, my rides are marked by frequent stops (ergo, the name of my blog): stopping for water breaks, readjusting my bike gear, re-pumping tires, skidding to a stop/fall so that I don’t crash into a tree. . . . Rare are the times when I’ve just ridden in a flat out stretch. But no more:

The MS Bike Tour is divided into 10- to 15-mile segments, and I have to start training in the format of the ride. This first ride went surprisingly well: the lakefront path was gloriously uncrowded at 6 a.m. and although I slowed down toward the end, I was barely tired overall. But my pace was horrifically slow, so I still have a ton of work to do. I’m planning to do this 10-mile ride at least every other morning, and work on increasing my speed and endurance. Increasing the distance might be a little tricker: The path is shut down from Shedd Aquarium to Solitary Drive (??), so I’ll have to figure out exactly where the detour is (the arrows were pointing toward the Soldier Field parking lot) and/or create new bike routes that head westward.

3) Survived biking in bad weather: I am the most fair-weather of bikers, but I figured that I need to start getting used to bad weather in case the MS Bike Tour is a rainy event. But of course, April showers in Chicago are not balmy springtime rains, but rather icy miserable drizzles. I did learn one thing on my shortened Saturday ride: if I biked fast, the raindrops felt like bullets; but when I slowed down, the blowing wind numbed my fingers, cold water seeped through my windbreaker hood, and I started involuntarily whimpering. But I think I found a happy medium where I only feel like I’m being pricked by needles and the wind numbs everything else.

And on Sunday, I managed to avoid being blown into the Jackson Park lake–both the official lake and the pothole lakes that riddle the park–but the slicing wind meant my ride was again pathetically short.

These are all small mileposts in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a relief to feel like I’m finally making some type of progress. The next big challenge? Clipless pedals. . . .

THIS, my dear readership of two, is why it was worth it for me to take a midnight train ride straight out of a Stephen King novel (a less-than-packed train running across deserted Illinois prairie with an insane girl on board? If things had gotten violent, it merely would’ve been the logical degeneration of an already bad night):

Okay, this picture was taken last summer on the north side lakefront but it makes my point: I finally took out my bike on this sunny morning for a short but incredibly invigorating ride down Chicago’s south shore of Lake Michigan. Since this was my first time on a real bike in four months, I just did a warm-up ride–four miles round-trip from my place down to the South Shore Cultural Center Nature Sanctuary at 71st and South Shore. It was perfect weather, sunny with a moderate breeze and temps in the 50s, and the lakefront path wasn’t crowded at all.

Now before I embarked on this ride, I did a little bike maintenance–treating my bike chain with degreaser and lube and pumping back up the tires–just to get it working again after a long winter storage. But after I returned, I knew that I needed to take it in for a full check-up. So I went down to Blackstone Bicycle Works, a local bicycle shop in my neighborhood of Hyde Park (and perhaps the only one, given that overpriced Art’s Cycles thankfully appears to be out of business). I particularly like Blackstone because bike repair and retail is only a small part of its mission: Blackstone Bicycle Works is also a non-profit community initiative with youth and after-school programs on bike riding and maintenance, and it also runs an active recyclery program that refurbishes discarded bikes. The shop’s one major drawback is that it’s only open in the afternoons, so I imagine mostly local folk frequent it.

Using Blackstone works out great for me, because it’s located directly behind my office and I can pick up my bike right after work. The guy who helped me said that my bike was in pretty good condition overall, with just a few things to adjust or straighten. But I ordered the more expensive tune-up anyway to cover all of my bases.

So after a brief reunion, my bike and I have parted ways for another week. But in the meantime, I plan to be at the gym every day this week, because spring has finally arrived and D-Day is approaching ever closer. . . .

I just spent more money than I care to think about at REI.com on more biking gear: who knew that just bike shorts, a jersey, and bike gloves could cost almost as much as a month’s groceries? Of course, the purchase of quality clothing and equipment is necessary when embarking on a long athletic event like the MS Bike Tour, and there are actually pretty good sale deals at REI, Team Estrogen (guess who their target demographic is), and EMS, among others.

I’ll also be taking my bike to the nearest (good) bike shop this weekend–either Kozy’s in the South Loop or Irv’s in Pilsen–for some tune-up work and adjustment. And while there, I’m hoping that they can fit my bike and me for clipless petals and shoes (flies buzz out of the wallet . . .). But it’s all worth it: It’s important that I fulfill my commitment to the MS Bike Tour to the best of my ability and moreover, I anticipate that my biking adventures are only just beginning.

Also, I just want to give a huge thank you to my contributors so far! Call me corny, but you guys and everyone else who might donate are my motivating teammates in this effort for the MS Society, and I can’t get it done without you. And now back to figuring practice bike routes that involve the least risk of getting hit by crazy Chicago drivers. . . .