More fun with the new bike...
I did my first ride to work with the new bike this morning.
Public Bikes
So much to love about it. Everything just feels so much more comfortable. The handle bars are higher so I'm sitting up straight. It also feels like a lot less pressure on my hands. Not having pedal straps (I know there's a different name for them, but swiss-cheese brain and google are not forthcomign right now) means I'm not always struggling to get my feet in or out of them and risking twisting an ankle or falling down if I get it in at the wrong angle.
Also things feel much easier on my knees. Possibly because the bike is a better size or just because without the bar, I can come down with more ease for the stops and not be pounding my leg into the ground as much.
The gear changes feel much smoother and even though I only have seven gears, that seems to be doing the job for the hills I have to deal with. I'm never going to win the polka-dot jersey no matter what so have gears that don't kachunk and one less thing to worry about is a fair trade-off. Also, I can now use my left hand to ring my bell at people, instead of screaming "get out the way, you idiot" which until now was my main way of communicating with pedestrians.
There's a chain guard so I don't have to worry about the chains eating my pants and making me drop the bike by messing up the gears. Hubby keeps talking about how I can ride the bike with a skirt. Maybe, but I keep thinking he's seeing me in Victorian garb with a Gibson Girl hair-do riding some giant-wheeled contraption out of 1895.
I do like my thin tires, though. In the past I thought I needed fat tires to keep me upright. Not sure what the hell went into that line of thinking.
So with all this, I got to work feeling relatively comfortable and not freaked out or sweaty. (This in spite of having forgotten my helmet this morning because Hubby startled me in the garage when I was on my way out.)
The best part was that I rode 17.29. I know that sounds like quite a lot compared to what I was averaging which was 10 miles on a good day...because HAHAHAH it's not miles. My new bike computer, the only one sold by Public Bikes is from Australia and it only does Kilometers. So I 17.29 KM, which is about 10.74 miles. I kind of like it. From my "running" I know that 5K=3.1 miles, 10K=5.1 miles, and 12K is about 7. So I generally know how much I'm doing and when I get to work the good old interwebs can do the exact conversion. I still haven't figured out how to get the damn clock re-set, but I have an email into Australia, so hopfully they can help me out.
In a pinch, I know that if the trucks from One Big Man are starting to pull out in back of ATT Park, it's about 830A and I need to start heading toward downtown.
This is all incredibly positive stuff and I am really happy with the bike and hope to be doing a lot more ridign. The bad news is that this is still tied into the weight/body-image/food/exercise dynamic, and that is not making me happy right now. So I'll save it for another post.
Public Bikes
So much to love about it. Everything just feels so much more comfortable. The handle bars are higher so I'm sitting up straight. It also feels like a lot less pressure on my hands. Not having pedal straps (I know there's a different name for them, but swiss-cheese brain and google are not forthcomign right now) means I'm not always struggling to get my feet in or out of them and risking twisting an ankle or falling down if I get it in at the wrong angle.
Also things feel much easier on my knees. Possibly because the bike is a better size or just because without the bar, I can come down with more ease for the stops and not be pounding my leg into the ground as much.
The gear changes feel much smoother and even though I only have seven gears, that seems to be doing the job for the hills I have to deal with. I'm never going to win the polka-dot jersey no matter what so have gears that don't kachunk and one less thing to worry about is a fair trade-off. Also, I can now use my left hand to ring my bell at people, instead of screaming "get out the way, you idiot" which until now was my main way of communicating with pedestrians.
There's a chain guard so I don't have to worry about the chains eating my pants and making me drop the bike by messing up the gears. Hubby keeps talking about how I can ride the bike with a skirt. Maybe, but I keep thinking he's seeing me in Victorian garb with a Gibson Girl hair-do riding some giant-wheeled contraption out of 1895.
I do like my thin tires, though. In the past I thought I needed fat tires to keep me upright. Not sure what the hell went into that line of thinking.
So with all this, I got to work feeling relatively comfortable and not freaked out or sweaty. (This in spite of having forgotten my helmet this morning because Hubby startled me in the garage when I was on my way out.)
The best part was that I rode 17.29. I know that sounds like quite a lot compared to what I was averaging which was 10 miles on a good day...because HAHAHAH it's not miles. My new bike computer, the only one sold by Public Bikes is from Australia and it only does Kilometers. So I 17.29 KM, which is about 10.74 miles. I kind of like it. From my "running" I know that 5K=3.1 miles, 10K=5.1 miles, and 12K is about 7. So I generally know how much I'm doing and when I get to work the good old interwebs can do the exact conversion. I still haven't figured out how to get the damn clock re-set, but I have an email into Australia, so hopfully they can help me out.
In a pinch, I know that if the trucks from One Big Man are starting to pull out in back of ATT Park, it's about 830A and I need to start heading toward downtown.
This is all incredibly positive stuff and I am really happy with the bike and hope to be doing a lot more ridign. The bad news is that this is still tied into the weight/body-image/food/exercise dynamic, and that is not making me happy right now. So I'll save it for another post.