A Flat By Any Other Name Still Stinks

Last year on the first Saturday in February I attempted my first brevet. A 200km ride in a nice flat part of the North Carolina coastal plain hosted by Bicycle For Life. I ended up with more flats than spares. I had some new wheels but not new tires or tubes. I made it past half-way and had to abandon.

Tomorrow I will be riding the same brevet again. I have much confidence in my fitness, nutrition, bike and preparation for flats so I am confident of making the full distance this time.

Here is what I am carry for fixing flats on both my road bike and commuting bike. I carry two spare tubes and a Slime Scabs patch kit. For inflation I carry a Crank Brothers Power Pump and a Genuine Innovations Ultraflate Plus with 3 CO2 cartridges.

Besides fixing flats I also like avoiding them. Besides doing my best to avoid road hazards I run 28mm Schwalbe Marathon tires inflated to about 80 PSI.

Tomorrow will tell, but again I am confident that my tires will not foil my ride.

When Does a Rain Jacket Make You Wet?

Currently i just have one cycling jacket, a Pearl Izumi Slice. But this morning I found myself kind of wet and kind of chilled wearing it. This is for two reasons. The first is while the jacket is breathable, you can still generate enough heat inside of it to sweat. Then the base layer shirt I wore this morning is too loose. It gets sweat on it but does not stay right against my skin. That lets it get cold and then contact the skin again making me cold.

All this on a day with no rain, so I really didn't need the rain jacket, but I don't have anything else to block the wind that was anymore breathable. I am keeping an eye out for a wind block jacket. The pants I wear in the cold weather have wind block on the front and much more breathable fabric on the back. This seems to work very well and the range of temperatures wearing just these (well I wear padded bike underwear with them) is great. They are warm enough if the temperature starts in the high 20s and still comfortable if it goes up into the 60s. I have worn them as low as 15 degrees with long underwear under them.

I don't expect a jacket to give that wide of temperature range, but if you know of a good jacket that works from around 30 to 45 degrees deepening on what you wear under it, I would love to hear about it. In the meantime I will check the end of season sales at the local shops.

A Winter? Weekend Ride

While much of the country is dealing with cold, snow and ice, this last weekend in North Carolina was very nice. On Sunday afternoon I went for a ride in clear weather with little wind and temperatures around 60 degrees.

I think it was the first ride in shorts since sometime in November. I rode with my church group, the Spiritual Spinners. For this time of year, we are hosting Sunday afternoon rides. We had an A (18+ mph) group of 4 or 5 riders, a B (16-18 mph) group of about 8 riders, a C (14-16 mph) group of 5 riders and 2 people doing an in town route. It was a good turnout for Fuquay-Varina (population around 9,000), I rode 10 miles to the ride, then co-led the C group and rode 10 miles home. My total was just a hair over 45 miles.

It was nice to ride with a group. We did a little chatting and a little pace lining. It was a very nice ride.

Being a religious group, the ride always starts with a prayer. I wanted to share some words that are almost always part of our pre-ride prayer and extend the prayer to all the riders out there.

God, let us loom large in the eyes of the drivers and help them and us make good decisions.

Spiritual Spinners jersey, from the NC Bike MS 2010 rides

How to Share the Road

We should all be aware of the phrase share the road. In North Carolina, you can even get a Share the Road license plate.

But I think the problem is that people don't know what that means. I think it would improve cyclist safety on the road if there was better education on the rights and responsibilities of cyclists.


For drivers, I would like to see the following.

• Make sure there is a section in the driver's handbook about cyclists
• Make sure each test for getting your driver license includes at least one random question about cyclists

Since cyclists don't get a license (and I am not advocating that they should), it is harder to enforce the same education. The best I can think of is giving a pamphlet with every new bike. Of course picking up a bike on Craig's list or dusting off a stored bike would by-pass this, at least it is a start

All this made me wonder what a person could find online if they were looking for information on safe cycling. I poked around a little and found some resources I want to share. The League of American Bicyclists has various resources for cyclists. They also train instructors. You can search for a Smart Cycling class or instructor in your area. The League of American Bicyclists has also worked with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to create a video available on YouTube.


I was also aware of the Peloton Project which has guidance to riders and drivers. It also talks about rules for group rides.If you host group rides definitely check it out.

But the best site I found was Bicycle Safe. It goes beyond general advice and gives concrete examples, complete with diagrams, of 10 ways cyclists have trouble with cars and gives tips on how to avoid them.

Does your state include cycling sections in the driver's manual or questions on the test?

Do you know of other good cycling safety sites?

Sobering Numbers

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Traffic Safety Facts 2009 divides traffic fatalities into three categories: occupants, motorcyclists, and non-occupants. For 2009 in the USA, 24,747 occupants were killed and over 2 million injured. For motorcyclists the number is 4,462 killed and 90,000 injured.

While the numbers show cars and motorcycles being much more of a danger to themselves and each other, there were also 4,872 non-occupants killed and 116,000 injured.

Cyclists made up 630 of the dead and 51,000 of the injured.

I don't know what to say about these numbers. Certainly 30,000 families morning their dead seems a high cost. I did find that around 60% of the cycling incidents involve riding at night without lights. So just that one simple change greatly decreases your chance of being a number in a future report.

Blinking versus steady lights

Lights on your bicycle perform two functions.

1. Making it easier for people to see you
2. Making it easier for you to see where you are going

Most people seem to use LED lights on flash for being seen. LED lights work well on flash. Some other technologies really shorten the bulb life when you run them on flash. LEDs do not have this problem and actually use less power while in flash mode. To help cars and others notice me on my commute I use a Planet Bike 1 Blaze Watt in flash mode on the front of my bike and a rear facing Planet Bike Superflash on my seat post. But I have read that a flashing light makes it hard to judge how close you are, so I also run a steady red light on the back of my rack, a Trek Flare 7. Along with various reflective clothing and reflective sidewall tires, this makes me stand out pretty well.

My route often requires enough light for me to see where I am going. I am using a MagicShine 900. It is not as bright as a car headlight but it is close. A charge lasts about 3 hours. At this time of year I need it about 2 hours a day, so I charge it every night. When the days are longer I can get by several days or even all week.

Speaking of batteries, I use rechargeable AA or AAA as appropriate in the Planet Bike lights. The Trek light puts out good light with rechargeable  AAAs but the electronics don't work right. So I am having to use alkalines in it. Still they last for months, so that is not too bad.

So I have two lights on the front and two on the back. That also gives me redundancy, so that if I have a battery issue, I at least have something to finish the ride.

What are your favorite lights and how do you use them?

Tweaking Your Commuting Route

I think one of the most important part of having a good bicycle commute is having a good route. I am always learning things and sometimes try some alternatives to see if there is a better way. For a long time in the middle part of my commute I thought I had a good route. I was on Park Street and turned on Ryan Rd. When I crossed Walnut Street, a fairly busy street, I continued on Tanglewood Drive, made a short way on Cornwall Road and turned on Ellynn Drive to continue my commute. This was not a bad stretch. While I was on Ryan there was usually a car or two that came by one direction or the other. Crossing Walnut was a mixed bag. I crossed just a 100 feet from a light, so you sometimes had to wait but then it was mostly clear.All this was before Google maps added the bicycle layer, but you might notice in the picture to the right that while on Park I was on a bike route. This is a Cary bike route named Park Central. It is a signed route but really I always thought they just wanted to wander around and make a loop in the central part of Cary. But I ignored the bike route sign and kept going on Park past the turn for the Park Central bike route and traveled down Ryan instead.

Then I decided to give it a try one day. So I checked Google and saw where I would end up if I followed the Park Central bike route until passed Ellynn which is also signed as a bike route, but an unnamed route in this case. This is now my regular route. I discovered that the people who designated particular streets as bike routes may have known what they were doing. I probably encountered 2 or 3 cars a week on this route instead of daily on Ryan. This change has allowed me to rack up many mornings with zero cars in the same lane as me on a 12.5 mile commute. Crossing Walnut much farther from any lights turns out to be easier. I often only need a rolling stop and then I can move on across Walnut. But it is good to have alternatives. I still take Ryan sometimes because it goes right by a shopping center that has the Cary Performance Bicycle shop. It makes an easy way to pick up some brake pads or other small parts. Once I even picked up a repair stand I had ordered. I strapped it to my rack and let it stick out behind me.