Scenic Route

I confess that I’m ready for spring. Winter has worn out its welcome.

That 65°F day early in March spoiled it for me. Since then, I’ve found increasingly lame excuses to stay indoors. As of today, I’m 200 miles behind my March goal of 350 miles. The only hope of reaching it is to ride 22¼ miles a day, every day for the rest of the month.

It’s not going to happen.

Especially since I’m already formulating excuses to blow off tomorrow’s “Spin Around the Bay” ride with the bike club. I have several excuses to choose from:

• It’s too cold.
• It’s too windy.
• It’s too damp.
• It’s Easter and I have family obligations.
• I don’t have any clean bike clothes.
• I crashed yesterday.

Eh?

Yeah, I took a tumble on the way to work this morning. So much for 2008 goal number four: No crashes.

Another aspect of my I’m-so-done-with-winter outlook is that I’m riding around on my three-season tires. I’ve grown so tired of pushing the damned studs, of the emotionally-flat ride and handling with them, of just the noise, that what little riding I’ve done lately, has been without them. Even when the conditions indicate them.

Like today.

The overnight low was 21°F. Although it’s been dry and sunny, it’s still warm enough to melt during the day, and freeze at night.

So this morning, I dragged my lazy ass out of bed before dawn, showered, geared up and set out at first light on the long loop to work.

I encountered patches of ice along the Riverway and the Canalway—drippage from bridges, and little surface flows of meltwater across the pavement. I’d already traversed dozens of them, and I’d already walked the bike across two large patches of refrozen snow.

But this patch tripped a little advance warning in my head, which I ignored. The others had been on fairly flat pavement. This one was on a little incline that also had some pitch down from left to right.

I was tight to the left edge of the pavement when the rear end slid out, downhill to the right. I stopped pedaling and it stopped slipping. But then the front slid.

I’m going down, I thought. But I had relaxed and was riding it through. Cool, I thought. That works!

Then I ran out of ice—with the wheel cocked at roughly 45° to my line of travel. The tire bit asphalt, sent the bike off to the left from beneath me and flipped me over the bars.

As I sailed up, I remembered how to crash: Let go of the bike, tuck and roll.

I hit with my right elbow first, rolled on to my shoulder, banged the back of my head on the frozen ground, and rolled, and rolled some more. I finished several steps further up the path from my bike.

Miraculously, the bike suffered only a slight tear to the bar tape, a little scuffing on right lever hood, and a little scrape on the rack legs. They’re bare stainless-steel anyway, so you can hardly tell.

Me? Since I rolled this time, rather than doing my usual slam-down-and-skid-along-the-pavement routine, there’s only a little smudge of dirt on my jacket and I have only one very faint bruise.

Crashing without road rash is infinitely preferable to crashing with it. I’ll have to remember this for the next time.

My helmet came out the worst. There’s one little hairline crack in the Styrofoam on the inside. Not even a scratch to the outside. I know you’re supposed to destroy a helmet after a crash. I’m not sure I can bring myself to do it. The crack is so tiny, and it has an internal carbon-fiber cage buried within the Styrofoam. Plus, it was a $200 helmet.

So I’m not sure what I’ll do. I stopped in to Towner’s to see if Specialized has a discounted crash-replacement policy, like some other helmet companies do. They weren’t sure and asked me to drop by during business hours this week so we can call them and check.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 9:44 pm EDT and is filed under Bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.