Commuting Season Begins in Earnest

Spring has truly sprung, after a trying few days of cold, rain and fog. Today was therefore the perfect day to begin my circuitous bike commute, followed by a longer after-school ride, which is what I did regularly last spring and in the fall.

The day started off on the chilly side, 38 degrees to be precise. You warm up quickly when you climb up Cascadilla Place and up through the Cornell campus to Warren Rd. The only bother with this ride is the campus traffic and poor road conditions in the Northeast.

After school was blissful, a jacket free day in the upper-50s with sunshine and a north wind. Today I took 34 to Lansing, then back via Gulf Rd., which has a very steep and short uphill connecting back to Conlon Rd., a nice little add-on ascent before the long downhill along East Shore (34B). Best avg. speed of the season thus far, 19.8 mph, so all of the cross-training and indoor cycling seems to be paying off.

Today on my morning route, I passed a fellow teacher and district colleague on her bike (with trailer in tow), heading in the other direction toward her school on the hill. I rarely get the chance to chat with her because she's always on the move! Then, on my way back up the hill for my afternoon ride, I passed her yet again on her way back down the hill. I loved the symmetry of our encounters. I so admire and respect this teacher for her great work in the classroom, and also for her incredible athleticism. She is both a very competitive nordic skier and super-strong cyclist and runner, and quite the inspiration.

Today I received the bad news that a friend and colleague was injured in a car accident yesterday in Lansing. He was driving at 55 when someone not very far ahead of him pulled out of an intersection or a driveway, giving him next to no time to react. He ended up in the ditch, beaten and battered, with a totalled car. My thoughts are with him and his family, and I'm so thankful that he wasn't hurt worse. While I have no information about what led the other driver to make their unsafe turn, I can't think about the shocking statistics about distracted driving and texting while driving. A study released by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that truck drivers who were texting were 23 times more at risk of a crash or near-crash event than non-distracted driving. Also, the average teen sends close to 3,000 text messages a month, and many of those messages have been sent or received while driving. These are particularly scary things to think about for us cyclists. No matter how safe we ride, we are at the mercy of drivers. I just hope that chronic cellphone users realize that no text is worth a human life.

Random photo time...it was bath night for the boys and for the bike!

My first ten speed, a crappy department store bike

It must have been 1976 when I bought my first ten speed. It was pretty crappy, but then again, I bought it with my newspaper money and was very proud. It was bright yellow and looked a bit like this machine. It was heavy and didn't shift that well, but it was my ticket to personal liberation. That bike allowed me to go on many long adventures with the Southern Tier Bicycle Club, which I will elaborate on in later posts, and I didn't buy a new bike until around '84.

I had a pretty big newspaper route with about 76 customers, and every day except for the snowiest of days, I biked to the garage where the newspapers were stored, stuffed my bags across both shoulders and pedaled off to the first house along my route. I perfected this really cool stunt where I ditched my bike on the yard and jumped off the bike. The poor bike endured all sorts of abuse, but I also taught myself rudimentary bike mechanics, thanks to a fantastic book called Anybody's Bike Book.

With this bike I started going on longer adventures, often with my friend Ted. My favorite destination was the Broome County Airport (now called Greater Binghamton Airport) and the Tri-Cities airport. Cars and airplanes were two of my biggest obsessions, and I loved to go to the airport and watch planes take off and land. I particularly liked hanging out at Tri-Cities, since there were exclusively small private propeller planes like Cessnas, and I could often get really close to the planes. The trip to Broome County Airport was longer, hillier and more challenging, and it was my introduction to hill climbing on a larger scale. The rolling hills in the Southern Tier and the Finger Lakes makes for some really challenging cycling and this is when I first started developing my cycling legs.

The most dramatic ride with Ted was a trip to the Broome County Airport happened on a day when my mother was scheduled for minor surgery. On the return trip from the airport, Ted was just ahead of me when he was suddenly chased by a dog. In his panic, he ended up kicking the dog, which resulted in the dog chasing after me instead and biting me in the ankle! I ended up in the same hospital as my mom with stitches and a tetanus shot. This was the second of my third (to date) cycling accidents, but it did little to dissuade me from biking. After that incident, I always carried a can of Halt with me and successfully used it to ward off dog challenges a number of times until I learned about the swinging bike pump technique.

Becoming aware of adult cycling

At a certain point in my early teen years I became aware that adults rode bikes competitively and for fitness and adventure, not just for a casual ride to the store. This was long before cycle racing was a known element in most parts of the U.S. This awareness came to me around 1974 or 1975, thanks to my neighbor John's dad. John's dad (also named John) had a Peugeot road bike which was one of the coolest things I ever saw. Hopefully the picture is an accurate representation of this bike...I'm sure the younger John can weigh in on this. Seeing John head out and return from his cycling adventures really made an impression on me, and made me want to do something similar. This was years before the movie Breaking Away was released (1979), a motion picture that really raised the profile of cycle racing in the U.S.

While most kids were content to ride around the neighborhood, I always wanted to explore beyond these artificial boundaries. When I lived in Kobe, Japan (1972-73 when I was between 10 and 11 years old), I adventured all over the city, exploring nooks and crannies without my folks worrying about me. They started worrying after one particularly wreckless adventure. I neglected to stop at a stop sign and rode right into traffic. It was a tiny car that hit me, and more damage was done to the car than to my bike. I went flying and sprained my ankle, while the poor driver had a big ol' dent in the front of his machine. I was overwhelmed with guilt for years to come after the man came to visit me with a giant fruit basket and many bows of apology.

That incident clearly made me more aware that I had to be responsible in traffic and follow rules of the road like everyone else. I honestly have no recollection if John's dad wore a helmet, but I was riding with a helmet by around '76, for sure.

John's dad make quite the impression. I must have peppered him with questions about his cycling adventures, but my childhood memories are unfortunately very spotty. See John's comments below about his dad.