blog.mignault.net

Womens’ VeloNews

About WCM:

Womens Cycling Magazine… its about time! Coming this spring taking subscriptions now.

The header on the subscription page includes “Lifestyle + Commuting + Repair + City Spotlight”, but so far the blog at least has been nothing but all racer girl all the time. Admittedly, they only launched the blog on March 22, and I figured eventually they’d start talking about something other than asking women racers dumb questions and pasting in race results from spreadsheets. Nope. It’s Bicycling 10 years ago. I showed it to L, my bike commuting wife, who said “Yuck.” Disappointing.

Update: for contrast, see That’s How I Roll, from the BUST blog:

Best of all, there are more female riders than ever. If you’re like me, though, you’re not a spandex-wearing type of lady. Luckily, the cycle chic movement has finally hit the United States…The Europeans have known what’s up for a long time, but here in the U.S., cycling is finally developing a following– and some fashion sense– outside the realm of athletics. Cycle chic even has its own Wikipedia page, defining it as ‘the culture of cycling in fashionable clothes…cycling is an everyday transport choice and many cyclists choose to wear their regular clothes, as opposed to outfits generally associated with cycle sport, such as bicycle shorts, gloves and shoes.’

The spring project

is to put one of these on a bike:

Technorati Tags:
bikes

What I did on my summer vacation

People reading my Twitter presence may have noted that I exhibited a
slight obsession with pain and painkillers (characterized by one
person in particular as “whining”) from the end of August through most
of September. Someone finally asked me what precipitated my new-found
passion for Advil by the handful, and having come clean in the social
networking districts, I figure it’s about time I mentioned it on my
blogs too. This is my gruesome story.

To get right to it: On August 12, I got thrown off my bike on Martha’s
Vineyard and broke my left shoulder, specifically, my left humeral
bone.

We were headed back to our rental house in the late afternoon after a
ride out to Morning Glory Farm for some sweet corn and baked goods. MV
has a great network of bike paths, and we were riding through the
State Forest. Leslie recently got a new bike, and so she was up ahead
a bit seeing what it could do, while Daniel and I were moving along a
bit more slowly behind her. We had ridden about 16 miles total at this
point, and he was beginning to tire. I was hanging back with him,
encouraging him to keep up and telling him that we didn’t have too much
longer to go. We were probably about 4-5 miles from the house at this
point. I was looking forward to getting back to the house, taking a
long outdoor shower, and then drinking a beer in the hammock before we
went to dinner.

While I was thinking about this I had dropped back behind him a few
yards, and he slowed a bit. I think we were moving about 10mph or so
at the time. As he did, his back wheel brushed my front. I tried to
slow further and asked him to pick it up a bit. At the same time, I
started getting worried that he was going to go down, so I turned to
the left to get clear of his wheel. As I did so his bumped mine, and I
was thrown from the bike.

I tried to roll as I fell, and I landed right on top of my left
shoulder. When I hit, I felt a distinct “pop” in my shoulder and
immediately knew I was in trouble. I skidded about another 5 ft on the
tarmac, getting some pretty bad elbow road rash, and finally came to a
stop.

Fortunately, Daniel had not fallen and was unaware that I had, so both
he and Leslie were about 200 yards down the path. I could see some
pretty nasty rash on the side of my knee, so I tried to sit up to get
a better look at it. However there was intense pain every time I
attempted to move my left arm. I yelled to Leslie and Daniel to come
back and that I thought I had broken my arm.

As it eventually turned out, I had broken my shoulder and fortunately,
there was only a small displacement. The impact had actually impaled the “stick” of the bone on the spongy “ball,” stabilizing it and
making what I was later told would have been difficult, painful surgery unnecessary.

What was less fortunate was that this happened on the second day of
our annual 2 week vacation on the Vineyard. The doctor who treated me
in the ER was certain that the local orthopedist was going to send me
back to NY post haste to get some pins put in. Fortunately, the
orthopedist told me that it looked like I’d lucked out and wouldn’t
need surgery; he also recommended that I stay around another week so
that he could take a look at it again. As it was, we did end up going
home about half a week early.

I’m in the fourth week or so of physical therapy now, which is going
well, though quite painful. I have not really slept well since the
accident. Most nights I wake at about 3am or so, trying to find a
relatively comfortable position for my arm. This happens consistently
despite the wide range of various pharmaceuticals I have been
prescribed. My physical therapist told me this week that shoulder
injuries are some of the most painful and difficult to recover from,
and that I’m probably in for another month or so of pain and
discomfort before I really start to feel better. If I can get through
that time without completely collapsing of exhaustion, I’ll be a very
happy man.

UPDATE: I wanted to mention one other thing. The EMTs on Martha’s Vineyard were extraordinarily nice and helpful. They got the ambulance onto a bikepath in the middle of the forest. They kept me reasonably calm and very well-informed during the entire time on the bikepath, which was remarkable since they decided to collar me and strap me to the board for safety’s sake. Everyone was extremely professional and a credit to their professions.

Technorati Tags:
bicycling, cycling, mv, injuries, vacation

The commuting “market”

Bike Commute Tips Blog: Bike retailers warm to commuting market:

“Despite some signs of a shift, the bike industry as a whole remains very much in the business of selling recreational equipment. A quick leaf through Bicycling will tell you that. For two decades the bike industry has pursued performance enhancements that offer precisely no benefit to commuting bicyclists, offering high-tech toys to competitive or athletic bicyclists. You know, maybe .5 percent of the American population? Us bicycle commuters? Well, we just kind of ‘got by.’ We commuted by bicycle in spite of the bike industry, not because of it.

A ‘Commuting’ section at REI. Another sign of the bicycle industry’s growing interest in the bicycle commuting market? Maybe?!?”

It remains to be seen whether the industry sees commuting as just another fad to be exploited, or whether there’s really been change. Bicycling magazine, which actually got a little less Lycra-boy for a while, now is swinging back in the other direction, full of car ads and crap about “dropping your buds” on the club ride. I remain wary – we had to go way out of our way, when we were looking for a new commuter for L, to find a bike shop that would take a woman commuting seriously and not just put her on a comfort hybrid. My experience in Westchester has been that most bike shops here still cater to middle-aged captains of industry with TdF fantasies. But there are good shops out there, even if you need to travel a bit to get to them. After doing some research, we ended up going to Yorktown Cycles in Yorktown Heights, where we got excellent service. After a couple test rides, including a hill where she cackled quietly the whole way up, L decided on a Specialized TriCross and loves it.

Technorati Tags:
commuting, bikes, bicycling, bike commuting

Testing the conversation

From the shameless dept…

If anybody at Bike Friday wants to send me a Tikit in return for my aging SA 5-speed Brompton, I’d be more than happy to say really cool things about them here. We already use a Family Traveler for the school run every morning and we love it. We were zooming along singing “Gangsters” by the Specials at the top of our lungs this morning….

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cycling, tikit, bike+friday

Google Maps “Bike There” petition

When I was figuring out my route to work via bike, I used Google Maps. I ended up having to do a lot of blue-line dragging, though, because, even with Avoid Highways turned on, i still wasn’t easy to plot a bike-friendly route. There’s a online petition asking Google to add a “Bike There” button to Google Maps, and if you’re at all for sustainable transportation, I hope you’d take a minute to go sign it. It’s at:

http://googlemapsbikethere.org/

Thanks.

Technorati Tags:
cycling, bicycling, bike+commuting, sustainable+transport, google, google+maps

The original A-lister

Kent’s Bike Blog: One Watt Planet Bike Blaze (and some other lights) Reviewed:

“Back in the early days of personal computers, Byte magazine was the magazine for computer nerds. A guy named Jerry Pournelle (yeah the same Jerry Pournelle who writes science fiction novels) wrote this column that was supposed to represent the ‘normal’ user’s view of computers. But his column became popular, people sent him stuff and when he’d have a problem, he could make phone calls that ‘normal’ people couldn’t. I remember one instance where he had a problem with some Microsoft product and Jerry’s solution was something like ‘so I called up my buddy Bill Gates and he flew a couple of techs down from Redmond to look at my system…’ OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that extreme, but it was close.”

Pretty damn close. I can remember reading those Pournelle columns with a good deal of outrage. He was sort of the original A-list blogger, now that I think of it. Pournelle, though, did usually attempt to figure out problems with the Frankenputers he used to accrete, rather than the modern blogger waiting all of 5 seconds before throwing the problem onto the mercy of the LazyIntarWeb.

(Via novia.)

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blogging, geek

RIP Capt Bike

Sadly, Sheldon Brown has died from a massive heart attack at the age of 63. He had been diagnosed with MS recently, and it had greatly limited his biking. The words “encyclopedic” (though he was indeed the Encyclopedia Brown of bicycling) or “comprehensive” to describe the enormous amount of cycling wisdom Sheldon Brown put into his website are wholly inadequate. I never met the man nor corresponded with him, but I learned so much from his site and his presence on mailing lists. My deepest sympathies go out to his family, and the cycling/human-powered vehicles/whatever you want to call it community has suffered a truly enormous loss. I am very sad.

“Smugness and safety”

Bike Snob NYC: The BSNYC Holiday Gift Guide:

Commuters

Commuting by bicycle is all about two things: smugness and safety. And while your favorite bicycle commuter probably already has all the “One Less Car” stickers and t-shirts he needs, he can always be safer. Now he can burn with the brightness of a thousand suns–or at least three million candlepower units–with a hand-held spotlight! There won’t just be One Less Car–there’ll be like fifty less cars when he blinds oncoming drivers with an output equivalent to roughly thirty automotive headlights and runs them clear off the road. Why not help him take back the streets by taking away someone’s retinas this holiday season?

I do need some Cars R Coffins stickers, though.

Technorati Tags: bicycling, bike commuting, commuting

Yellow jerseys and everything else

Color Blindess and Cycling Visibility:

My preliminary conclusion is that yellow and royal blue work well, whereas red and some shades of bright green don’t work well at all. Royal blue has the additional advantage that it would also stand out against fall leaf colors; yellow would not. However, yellow is generally considered a more highly visible color, and one color-blind cyclist wrote to tell me that bright yellows work better for him than bright blues. Perhaps a contrasting combination of yellow and blue is best, but it would seem that one could be much more confident of yellow than of blue.

I have a yellow rain cape and a yellow helmet cover, so I guess I’m covered in the rain. Most of my other stuff tends to be dark with reflective piping, though.

Technorati Tags: bicycling, commuting, cycling