Turtle on Wheels

“Bicycle riders must behave as if two things are true: they are invisible and all cars are out to kill them. Behaving in this manner helps one’s long term survival.”

“Folks, in this city, it’s not a matter IF you will be hit by a car, but WHEN. Wear a helmet and light up your bike like a Christmas tree.”

“All of us on the road - whether on feet, two wheels, or in something motorized - need to be as conscious as we can of our own safety and that of all those around us. Never assume that the people around you are going to do what is sensible. Never assume that they can see you - never assume that if they do, they actually care. Never assume that there is nobody approaching in your blindspot. Take time, look, and be able to react. This goes for EVERYONE, not just cyclists or motorists. There should be no assumptions on the road, because you’re really only given one mistaken assumption before your friends and family are forced to see writeups like this one in the trib.”

These are just some of the 350+ comments left in response to the Chicago Tribune article about the cyclist who died a couple days ago as a result of crashing into an open car door and being thrown into moving traffic. It appears that it was the driver’s fault: the cyclist was wearing a helmet and riding with traffic in broad daylight on the far right side of the lane—following the law in every way—and then a man suddenly opened his SUV door without any time for the biker to respond.

It’s interesting to read the comments: Some are pretty extreme—there are the idiots who declare that bikers are tree-hugging anarchists who should be banned from the roads and deserve to die, and on the other end of the spectrum, there are people who argue that bikers are free to do whatever they want to ride ahead and the air-polluting cars need to move out of the way. But the saner voices mostly prevail, pointing out that there are both reckless cyclists and bad drivers on the roads, and *everyone* needs to start being more law-abiding and vigilant while riding or driving.

Getting doored is one of my biggest fears: Although I’ve learned how to ride on the streets over the last couple months and have gained the courage and confidence to do so, I am NOT a fan of street riding. I’ve been lucky so far and mostly have encountered drivers who are paying attention and slow down. But given the crazy drivers in Chicago, if I keep on riding the roads, eventually I’ll get another battle scar.

On the other hand, riding the lake front path is getting pretty treacherous too with the advent of warm weather: For instance, I went on a bike ride last Sunday afternoon and nearly landed in Lake Shore Drive. It happened on one of the worst parts of the lakefront trail, between Monroe and Navy Pier. After you bike past Randolph Street, the brilliant city planners decided to temporarily merge the lake front bike path with the sidewalk that runs alongside the LSD expressway underpass to Navy Pier. So on a 500-foot stretch of a medium-width sidewalk, there are families walking up to Navy Pier *and* bikers trying to ride down the path. Bikers can’t ride on that expressway and as far as I can figure out, there’s no alternate route outside of going way west into downtown and then back out to the lake.

Now I normally wouldn’t have been riding on the path at a super-busy time like Sunday afternoon, except that I’d been out of town all weekend, a thunderstorm had hit the city a couple hours earlier, and I wanted to get some riding in before more rain came through. Everything went relatively well until I reached that sidewalk part and a large family was in front of me. I called out “On Your Left” at them as I approached, and most of them moved to the side except a little girl, who kept skipping ahead. While both her family and me were yelling at her to move, I ended up swerving to the edge of the sidewalk to avoid her, and somehow miraculously navigated around a pole and stayed on the sidewalk. Why I didn’t stop completely? In my panic, I was completely focused on steering my bike and I hadn’t clipped out of my pedals, and unfortunately, it still takes time and visible effort for me to clip out. So a sudden stop meant I’d crash either into the family or in traffic. I certainly wasn’t an entirely innocent party in the incident, but overall, it’s a crappy type of near crash that comes up far too often on the lake front path.

In any case, I’m trying to find alternative routes to avoid this as well as to break up the monotony: there are a couple bike trails on the far South Side that I want to try, but they require riding on the roads and in one case, I’d have to ride on the border of the notorious neighborhood of Englewood. So hmm . . . I think I’ll check them out this weekend, but I’ll be armed with a lot of caution.

CHICAGO (AP) - The vital sporting goods sector received a huge boost from Bush’s economic stimulus plan this week, as people used their checks to buy much needed athletic gear for the warm weather season. Says Chicago cyclist Harriett Green, “I can’t believe how far that check went toward buying a bike computer and a jacket. It truly restored my faith in the American economy.”
In other news, the unemployment rate hovers near 6 percent, crude oil reached a new high of $121 a barrel, and home foreclosures are up 57 percent from the year before.

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. . . .

My training schedule has been a little topsy-turvy the last couple weeks, but I think I’m still making progress. I was in Savannah, Georgia last week for a girls’ vacation with my mom and aunt, and I planned to take the passive-aggressive approach to working out–only do it when forced. And what do you know, it actually backfired for the best. My aunt was in the hotel gym nearly every morning and she made sure I was there too. So I think I burned off at least 5% of the Southern cooking I consumed throughout the week (thank you, Paula Dean).

After experiencing spring-like temperatures for the first time in eons, I’m more anxious than ever to take the bike out and I think I’m going to do just that: drag it out of the bike room and defy Mother Nature to snow again. I could’ve taken my bike out on Monday and Tuesday when the weather was within spitting range of the normal temps for this time of year. But my admittedly-lazy butt didn’t get around to doing it and then another snowstorm hit yesterday. The snow didn’t stick though and I think the 40-degree temps predicted for the weekend will be high enough to take out the bike. In the meantime, I’m plugging away at the stationary and I’ve been working on maintaining a higher RPM, or Rotations Per Minute.” According the MS150 training guide, the ideal average is 90-100 RPM. Thankfully the stationary bikes at Ratner measure the RPM for me, and it actually isn’t too hard, at least in short spurts–maintaining 95 RPM for 20-30 minutes gets my heart rate up to my 80% max. But it’ll be a whole different (and probably tougher) story when I start biking on the road, so I’m gradually increasing my high-intensity periods on the stationary until I simulate road conditions somewhat.

As for the MS150 itself, I’m a little behind on the fundraising: As in, my honor roll lists me, myself, and I. So I’m going to send out the mass emails today and hopefully can talk to a few people as well. To tell the truth, the $300 minimum is a little intimidating, especially if people are anything like me: In the past, when I’ve gotten fundraising appeals from friends and non-profits, I often declined them with the excuse that I barely had enough money to cover my own life. But I’ve realized that the $20 I spend on a sweater from New York & Company could just as easily go toward a cause, and I’m hoping that others feel the same. I’ve broken it down in my head several ways that make the goal slightly less daunting: 15 people at $20 apiece, 30 people at $10 apiece, etc. But there’s another stat that looms in my mind: From my last 4 years in book marketing, I’ve learned that direct mail and other marketing pitches usually get a 3-5% response rate. So hmm . . . . Anyway, que sera, sera: I’ll see what happens.

Before I embark on my latest mind-numbing update, I’d like to highlight the greatest thing to hit the Internet in the last 48 hours: Hulu. Admittedly, it’s a totally corporate NBC website, but it streams a bunch of movies and classic TV shows for free with hardly any commercials. And it just so happens that one of the TV shows on the site has been haunting my dreams: WKRP in Cincinnati.

A little background: For the few of us who aren’t paying blood money to Comcast, our sole solace is a station called MeTV. It’s basically a local version of the cable channel TVLand and it shows all these classic TV shows, from staples like I Love Lucy to lesser known fare like, um, The Flying Nun. MeTV just expanded to a second channel so that they can run even more shows, and I’ve been hoping that they’ll start showing WKRP in Cincinnati, a hilarious sitcom from the ’70s that’s a part of my childhood memories from Saturday afternoon reruns. Well, I read about Hulu on New York Magazine’s blog Vulture, checked out the site, and there it was: the first full season of WKRP. So right now, food + Hulu = happiness.

ANYWAY: I went to the gym back-to-back on Wednesday and Thursday, because I totally fell off the training wagon. According to my training schedule, I was supposed to go to the gym last Saturday and this past Tuesday. But I simply forgot to go on Saturday (I got caught up in mountains of laundry); on Sunday morning I had a hangover from Saturday night and then I had to spend the afternoon in Evanston with my sister; on Monday, I had an evening work event, and so I told myself that I didn’t want to make the day even longer by getting up early to go to the gym; and then on Tuesday, I just refused to get out of bed. But by Tuesday night, I knew I needed to get my act together.

So I went to tell my upstairs neighbor to turn his freaking stereo down to normal decibels, so that I could go to bed. My neighbor is this insane old hippie who doesn’t seem to realize he lives in an apartment building in which he shares walls and floors with other people. So he blasts his stereo so loud that I can hear every. single. note. And he likes doing this at late hours–one time my sister stayed over at my place and both of us woke up in the middle of the night to the booming sounds of an action movie. I’ve confronted him multiple times about it and we tentatively agreed that he’d turn down his stereo by 11. But he still forgets. . . .

In any case, I settled that and was able to get enough sleep to get up at 5:30 on Wednesday morning. And when I walked out the door, there was a big surprise: It was still pitch-black outside. Before Daylight Savings, the sun was up and shining–or rather, the sky was a light gray at 6am, and I’d see a number of people jogging or walking their dogs. But this time? Everything was in eerie darkness and the streets were more deserted. Same time of day, completely different atmosphere.

Call me paranoid, but I put my keychain of pepper spray in my coat pocket instead of my iPod, and walked faster than my usual sluggish tread. Another thing: Before I only saw U of C police cars when I cut through the police station parking lot across from Ratner. But this morning, I saw two patrol cars cruising down 56th street and up Woodlawn. I passed only two people during my walk and each encounter was similar: I’d slightly tense up and try to get a look at them, and I think they would do the same, because our eyes would meet just as we passed one another and we’d then exchange a brief hi as a sign of reassurance.

Drama aside, I made it to the gym in one piece. I’ve been focusing my workouts on the stationary bike, and I’m trying to maintain a high heart rate for extended periods of time. But hopefully now that 40- and 50-degree temps have finally arrived, I can drag my real bike out very soon. . . .