Coder Turned Courier (and I don't mean the font)

Here’s a great commentary piece about a coder who got out of cubeland and onto a bike as a courier. Long, but a great read.

Besides skiing, cycling is my absolute favorite sport. Unfortunately, I haven’t owned a bike in years…I had a fantastic Cannondale for a while; like an idiot I self-locked it one day and someone (I’m assuming) drove off with it. I actually used to race competitively many many moons ago when I was a young teenager…never won a race but was usually not too far back. It was more for the fun of it than anything else. The author is indeed correct though, it’s not if, it’s when you will wreck or be hit by a car (or as I’ve done on several occasions, peddle into the back of a parked car by not paying attention). I have some crazy stories about crashes I’ve survived, and it still amazes me that I’ve never broken a bone while riding (maybe I’m made out of tupperware, who knows). Actually, I’ve never broken a bone period, but that’s another post.

The funniest (if you can say that) crash I had was just after I had purchased a pair of Shimano clipless pedals for my bike. Anyone who has made the transition from regular pedals to clippies knows that the act of actually clipping in for the first time is somewhere between landing a plane on an aircraft carrier and trying to clip fingernails off your right hand (if you’re right handed); it ultimately becomes second nature, but it’s friggin’ hard the first few times and takes quite a bit of balance. Anyways, I was still pretty new to clippies…and clippies were (at that time) still pretty new to offroad riding so they manufacturers hadn’t ironed out all the design kinks yet. Offroad clipless pedals are completely different then their road going counterparts, mainly so they won’t lock up when completely caked with mud, but also to accomodate a different type of shoe (roadies don’t need any sort of tread on their shoes, offroadies have to port a lot, so their shoes need a good tread for traction). You also clip into them differently (think ski boot/binding type motion). To clip out (for most models), you rotate your foot 20 degrees or so outwards, and you pop right out (usually, but not always as is the case in this story). So there I was, doing a local circuit with my brand new shiny clippies with some friends…I had managed to get a bit ahead of them so I decided to stop and wait, drink some gatorade, catch my breat. I knew there was a small wooden bridge coming up so I decided that’s where I would take a break. I reached the bridge, came to a stop…and that’s where everything went wrong. I couldn’t get out of the damn pedals, and I had also neglected to downshift, so I couldn’t spin up either to regain some intertia. I sat there for what felt like forever trying to figure out what to do (knowing that I was indeed going to fall off of the bridge, albeit only about 4 feet down to the creek), and of course ultimately lost my balance and fell off of the right side of the bridge. What I didn’t see is that I had a lovely briar patch to help cushion my fall. So I toppled over (and made sure to not let go of the handlebars…that’s the number one rule if you fall sideways; resist the urge to try and break the fall by extending your arm…your collarbone will snap like a toothpick if you do) and landed flat on my back in the briars. And I still couldn’t unclip. I don’t know what hurt worse…the impact, or sitting there in a pile of really thorny things tearing at my skin. So I just had to sit there and wait for my buddies to catch up, and catch up they did though they almost peddled right by me…they couldn’t figure out where the shouts of “help” were coming from. “Down here! In the creek guys!”; the looks on their faces were priceless. In the end, it took two of them to fish me out (had to pick me up by the tires of my bike…I was still clipped in, and even had I been able to unclip there was no way I could have gotten myself out of the briars without some serious pain). I just held on to the bike as they pulled me out, it was quite a sight and we had garnered some onlookers by that point. They then had to wrench me out of my pedals, and finally I was able to get off of the singletrack and sit down. I was a bloody mess (superficial wounds only, but it’s the sweat getting into the cuts that really stung). I regained my composure, wiped myself off, had a good long laugh about it, and finished the circuit. It could have been a lot worse.

So what was the culprit? As is usually the case, it was a combination of things (not the least of them being my novicity to clipless pedals): I had adjusted the pedals prior to the ride to require more force to unclip (I kept popping out of them unexpectedly on previous rides), I had changed cleats on my shoes, and the pedals were completely caked in mud (pedals are a lot better with mud now from what I hear). I pretty much had a date with disaster. I would have loved to have seen how ridiculous I looked though as they fished me out still attached to my bike. Ahhh, fun times man. And that isn’t even close to the worst crash I had…another time though. Cheers.