bike-tastic weekend

Riding around on my new bike has been divine. I finally get why people get so excited about road bikes.

On Friday afternoon I went on a nice slow ride down the bike path with my spinning teacher, who's also a prof. for the intro bio class at Brown, and a bunch of other professors and T.A.s for the class. My roommate Kristen also came along. There were not one, but two former Bike and Builders on the ride and it was pretty cool to get advice from them.

We didn't go that fast but it was nice to get used to my bike, especially the shifting system, which still seems counter-intuitive to me. There are levers, kind of under the thumb, to switch the smaller gears up and the bigger gears down and pulling the brakes sideways switches the smaller gears down and the bigger gears up. Yeah, I know. For a while I'd just pull something whenever I wanted to change gears and see what happened, but now I think I've got it.

I also wiped out in a pretty spectacular fashion. Going way too fast plus trying to turn plus gravel is apparently a great recipe for having the bike fall out from under you, smacking you on the ground. While I lay dazed on the ground, my professor ran up to me asking "is your bike ok?" Luckily it was and I escaped with a few scratches on my arms and elbows and a fabulous purple bruise that's bigger than my fist from where my inner thigh hit the top tube. Once I was back on the road, one of the former Bike and Builder's told me about this day on his trip in Iowa where they had ten miles of straight gravel. Just great :)

We turned around at Riverside, about a 20 mile round trip.

Even though the ride wasn't so hard, my arms, shoulders, and butt were all pretty sore the next day. Since it's biking, the solution always seems to be, more gear! I went to Caster's bike shop in Warwick, which has the friendliest staff I've ever encountered at any store, and bought my first pair of bike shorts, padded biking gloves, and a seat bag. I also stopped by The Hub, a bike shop down the block from me, to get a spare tube and a pump in case I get a flat.

I of course needed to try out all the new gear, so on Sunday I tackled the bike path again with my friend Stuart, who biked from Providence to Seattle with Bike and Build a few years ago. We biked to Bristol and back, 30 miles total, and even though it threatened to rain the whole way, it didn't.