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.

Whether it was the trauma of getting the clipless pedals in the first place or just plain fear, I spent the subsequent week and a half still riding with the flat side of my pedals. But last weekend, I actually put on my bike shoes and started riding clipless. After a day of just practicing clipping in and out of the pedals, I went back to doing my 10 mile rides and then started doing 15 miles today.

The first 15 mile ride was confusing more than anything: Rank amateur that I am, I’ve never biked much farther north than the South Loop. To complicate matters, construction work is being done around the Shedd Aquarium, so the lakefront path has been temporarily re-routed to go past the Field Museum. Now it turns out that there’s a hill in front of the Field that’s about as bad as the sharp drop-off by the Shedd. One moment I’m cruising along, and the next minute I’m flying down this deceptively steep hill at 40 miles an hour, alternately braking and shouting sorrys to the joggers I nearly run over. I careened through the Roosevelt underpass, which is where I usually turn to head for Target, and soon realized that I was in the city instead of on the lakefront path.

So I rode up the sidewalk on Columbus Drive instead and got plenty of unclipping practice as I had to stop at every intersection. But I finally got back on the path at Monroe and decided to ride a few more blocks north before turning around. Well, I was lulled into following the path around the harbor and before I knew it, I was standing in front of the smoky-glassed Lake Pointe Tower high rise where Oprah supposedly lives in the penthouse. I was so surprised to find out that I’d reached 1500 north that I braked without unclipping and promptly crashed. Harriett, meet concrete. Charmed.

With two new scrapes tattooing my increasingly black-and-blue legs (at this rate, I’ll have to soak my legs in cocoa butter to get them looking halfway normal again), I clambered back on Ollie and made it home just before the thunderstorm broke.

In any case, 15 miles will be the daily norm now, and I hope to get up to 60+ miles per week. Also, I’ve found a training event of sorts: I’ve signed up for the American Cancer Society’s Walk and Roll Chicago 15-mile bike ride. It’s a week and a half away, but I’m already doing 15 miles (almost) without stopping and I just need to increase my speed. So here goes nothing. . . .

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. . . .

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. . . .

Despite my increasing suspicions that I live on the ice planet Hoth and will never have a chance to take my bike out, I’m still plowing through my indoor training. Not that I haven’t considered slacking off: it’s been incredibly busy at work, and I’ve been buried in copywriting for the last week. I was using this work as an excuse for skipping the gym three days in a row, but after my lethargy and vague headache just wouldn’t go away, I decided that maybe some cardio would do me some good.

And what do you know? It worked. I went to Ratner on Wednesday and Thursday–dragging myself out of bed at 5:45am, walking 15 minutes to the gym, and getting an hour in before running back home to get ready for work–and just working up a sweat on the elliptical was invigorating. I considered riding my bike to the gym–the recent mid-30s temperatures were enough to melt most of the ice and snow off the streets–but I figured I wouldn’t save any time. It’d take me a good 15 minutes just to re-inflate my tires, degrease and lube the chain, and make sure everything else is working correctly after a long winter storage. And when I take my bike out, it will be for good. But with 4 inches of snow forecast for this weekend, I doubt the streets will be amenable to hosting my road bike in the near future. . . .

I finally dragged myself to the gym yesterday, after some subtle prodding. I rolled out of bed at 6:15, threw workout stuff and my credit card in my gym bag, and walked across Hyde Park in the refreshing 16-degree morning air to the University of Chicago’s Ratner Athletic Center.

I bought the 3-month membership because A) it was cheapest, B) I only need to work out just long enough to build up my fitness and endurance to a moderate level , and C) by May, all of my focus will be on biking and I won’t need to be in the gym as much. It’s a nice and fairly new place–plenty of aerobic equipment, a big weight room, Olympic-sized (or close to it) swimming pool, and so on. It’s just a 15-minute walk from my apartment building and once the snow melts (if it ever does), I can cut that time in half with my bike.

I worked out for 45 minutes on the elliptical and weights, and I came out of the gym feeling surprisingly refreshed. In fact, I walked into work a couple hours later with a bit of a George Jefferson-swagger: “Aw yeah, I’m so hardcore that I went to the gym this morning in this Arctic weather.” Overall, the workout went far better than I thought it would and I seriously considered scrapping the gradual build-up in my training schedule–why not go full steam ahead and work out every day or so?

But then I woke up this morning and my shoulders were singing hymns of pain. So yeah, no gym today. Baby steps. . . .

So amend what I said earlier: it may be icy and cold outside, but given that my fitness level is just a step above “sloth,” my training starts Monday. This (admittedly basic) epiphanic decision was the result of the MS Bike Tour Expo that my friend Laura and I attended yesterday afternoon at St. Ignatius Prep. (Laura will be biking the MS 150 Bike Tour with me–in fact, she’s the one who got me to do it in the first place.) Surprisingly enough, Laura and I were the only ones there, so we were able to talk for awhile with the MS 150 volunteers on hand.

They were nice and incredibly informative about training and equipment, and afterwards, I felt much more confident about doing the ride. They said all levels of cyclists participate and it turns out that we still have plenty of time to train according to the 10-week training schedule they gave us.

But even though their 10-week training program doesn’t officially start until early April, I’ll need to be at a good aerobic fitness level by then. And aside from walking to my work office, the most activity I’ve done this winter is walking from the kitchen to the armchair. So on Monday, I’m heading over the Ratner Athletic Center to sign up for a 3-month membership and start getting into shape. In other words, the majority of my posts from here on out will probably be litanies of pain and soreness. Onward!