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Archives for November 2009

Garmin, Shmarmin

11.22.2009 by Ray Niekamp // 8 Comments

Guest poster Don Blount finds that sometimes, it’s better to just ride.

This was to be an early morning ride. And because of my schedule, I had to be back home no later than 7:30 a.m.

I don’t like these early wake up calls when it is dark and cold. According to Accuweather, the windchill was about 34 degrees.

But I was set to go. I was dressed, tires inflated and even had warm non-caffeinated tea in my water bottle. I pushed the button on my Garmin 305 to get it powered up as I hit the road.

I hopped on my saddle and looked at the screen of the Garmin, it was blank, showing none of the familiar settings. I pushed the button again. It beeped, the welcome screen flashed, and then it went out again.

I had charged the darn thing, or so I thought, two nights earlier. I tried two more times. Nothing.

So it was 6:30 a.m., my choice was to either go back inside and not ride or ride without a bike computer. I had my Blackberry in my jersey pocket, so if I stopped I could use that to view the time. However, I had nothing to track distance, cadence, speed, heart rate or any other of the data that I use while riding.

Left, what it's supposed to look like. Right, what it looked like on this ride.

I decided to set off on a familiar route of about eight miles out, focusing on the bottom part of my stroke. I felt as if I were riding blind since I had no idea how fast I was pedaling, or my speed or my heart rate.

But I was comfortable, warmed up quickly and my breathing was steady.

I arrived at my turnaround point and stopped to check my clock. If my calculations were correct, I had gotten there in about 25 minutes.

I doubled back, and arrived home – another eight miles – in about 25 minutes.

It was a short ride but a good ride for that time of the day. I felt I had worked but enjoyed the ride and really could’ve gone much farther.

And by not having my Garmin available to show me what I was doing, at least for this ride, I enjoyed myself in a different way than I usually do. Maybe because it was more of a self-regulating challenge and less of a “trying to do what the reading tells me to do because I want to get a workout challenge.”

I do all of my riding alone because of my work schedule and family obligations. But, I think I had gotten so wrapped up in the numbers of my Garmin that I was missing out on enjoying the ride just for the sake of riding. (It’s the Type A part of me.)

My Garmin is charged and ready but I’m going to find a way to do this type of riding more often.

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Categories // Accessories, Rides Tags // Accessories, Blount, Garmin, guest post, Rides

Minor crash statistics (Are there any?)

11.19.2009 by Ray Niekamp // 6 Comments

After recent posts about my crash in the rain and its resultant slow-healing road rash, one Bike Noob reader sent me this email:

There are few good statistics on simple-minor crashes. Crashes that involve a simple fall or losing control of your bicycle. The majority of bicycle crashes are in this catagory. I am a commuter.  I have had 11 simple minor crashes in the last 12,000 miles. One year I had only 1 crash in 3,000 miles but this year I have had 3 crashes. All of my crashes have been my fault. Usually going to fast for conditions. But, I am a commuter. I ride in the dark. I ride in the rain. I ride is some crazy traffic. Now, 11 crashes is more than I would like to have, but I have no idea if this is average. I would love to know how many simple-minor crashes other bicycle riders are experiencing.

Obviously, one of the problems in finding data like he suggests is that the kinds of injuries he’s talking about usually go unreported. We fall, we get road rash, we get back on the bike, and we don’t contact a doctor or hospital. So there’s no one around to compile data on simple minor crashes.

However, I poked around a bit, and did come up with some info:

The so-called “Moritz Study” of 1998 tallied all kinds of injuries, and concluded that 29% of cyclists reported having had some type of ‘accident’ in the study year (1996). Just over 9% reported having had a serious crash (resulting in at least $50 of property damage or medical expense) in 1996. Of these, 54% happened during on-road recreational cycling.

Only 28% of serious crashes were reported to the police.  Women have more serious crashes than men: 11% vs. 9%, and at a slightly higher rate: 29 vs. 22 per million kilometers biked.

As you might guess, the most common type of bike crash is a fall (59%). That’s followed by running into a fixed object (14%), a moving motor vehicle (11%), or another bicycle (9%).

A Consumer Products Safety Commission study in 1994 found 588,000 bike accidents requiring a trip to the emergency room.  Fewer than 3% required a hospital stay.

Streets with bike lanes, or signed as bike routes, have fewer bike crashes than major streets without bike lanes.

So, to answer our anonymous reader’s question, is 11 crashes per 12,000 miles high, low or average? The Moritz study says people reporting a “serious” crash have 1.2 of them per year. But there’s no similar stat for minor crashes.

I think I’ve been crashing at the same rate as our reader. I’ve gone down four times in the last year, over roughly 3,000 miles. All minor, all unreported.

How about the rest of you? Can you help us get a handle on whether our reader is better than average, average, or “needs to crash more”?

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Categories // crash Tags // crash

Road Rash

11.17.2009 by Ray Niekamp // 1 Comment

Road rash (not mine).

After my crash a week and a half ago, I noticed that the road rash on my hip was taking awhile to heal. The abrasion took off just the very surface of the skin, but it was slow in scabbing over. The fact that I treated it like a “guy” probably didn’t help, either. Oh, I washed it with soap right away, and applied NeoSporin — but because it covered a somewhat wide area, I decided not to cover the wound. I’d let it get some air. It would heal quicker that way, anyway.

Problem was, I didn’t think about nighttime. When I woke up in the morning, getting out of bed was a bit painful, because the road rash stuck to the bedsheet. And pulling my leg off the sheet opened the already weeping sore spot.

This went on for several days, until my wife snapped at me about the mess I’d left on the sheet. So I poked around the medicine cabinet, and came up with some stuff that makes a liquid bandage on the skin. I put it on, and it actually worked. The wound scabbed over, and the scab stayed.

It turns out that letting the wound scab over was the “old fashioned” way to treat it. Nowadays, they say I should have cleaned the wound, continued to put NeoSporin or something like it over the sore, and cover it with some kind of bandage, like a non-stick gauze pad. And repeat every day. Once a wound scabs over, it’s harder for oxygen to reach it, and the no-cover method could result in a longer healing time. That’s just what happened. The smaller abrasions around my knee scabbed with no trouble. But the scabs are quite thick, and they’ve become a bit painful.

I’m on track, though. Now that the weeping has stopped, the wound should heal in another week to 10 days. It’s still sore when I touch it (“Then don’t touch it!” — bah-dang!) but it’s smaller than it was.

Well, I’m a little smarter, anyway. Next time I go down (Oh, there will be a next time — I’m realistic about my riding ability) I’ll be more aggressive in treating the road rash. But as a friend of mine likes to say, “Bikers get the coolest scars.”

For more detailed info on road rash, download the free publication from cycling coach Arnie Baker:

Above photo used under Creative Commons license.


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Categories // Injury Tags // Injury, road rash

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