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Archives for July 2010

That Pesky Wobble

07.15.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 4 Comments

Mrs. Noob has been complaining about her bike lately. She says it feels like she’s wobbling, especially when going downhill. This phenomenon first surfaced last month, when she was having trouble on a Saturday morning group ride. It turned out her rear hub was shot.

That was fixed by getting a new wheel. Everything should be fine now, right?

“I still feel a wobble,” she said, as we were taking an easy morning ride through the neighborhood.

“Let me ride behind you and see if I can see anything,” I said. But that rear wheel and tire looked solid to me.

She went out by herself the next day. “It’s still there,” she said, when she got back.

“Are you sure it’s the rear again?” I asked.

“No, it could be the front. But there’s definitely something there.”

I rode her bike around the block a time or two.

“The only thing wrong with this bike is that it needs new tires,” I said. She’s had the tires for three years.  They’re a bit chewed up, and the rubber has gotten soft.

I picked up new tires at the LBS two days later. After getting them mounted, I took the bike around the block again.

“It’s smooooth now,” I told her.

Last weekend, we were out on another group ride. She insisted on doing the 28-mile option, because she wants to build up her mileage. She asked me to stay with her. That meant I would be riding at the back of the group all day, even though there were sweeps from a local bike club to watch out for slower riders.

Even going slow, I found myself way out in front of her. On one section of moderate hills, the sweep and I both waited at the top for Pat to catch up.

“I don’t know why she’s that far behind,” said the sweep, an experienced rider. “With her heavy bike [a steel hybrid] she should be passing me on the downhills. But she’s actually slowing down. It turned out that she was braking on the downhills.”

Now, Pat doesn’t bomb downhills, but she’s no chicken. When she caught up to us, we asked if she was okay, and she urged us to push on.

But two or three miles later, I found myself waiting at the bottom of another long, easy downhill. This time when she caught up to me, she had a concerned look.

“This front end is wobbling like crazy,” she said. “I’m really uncomfortable going downhill. It’s not safe.”

Luckily, the ride provided sag, and we opted to stop and sag in.

The ride started and ended at Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop in downtown Austin. We took the bike right inside. The mechanic grabbed the handlebars and yanked on them a bit.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We’ve got trouble.”

Headsets should be checked once a year. Pat's 1992 bike had never been checked.

A half hour later, everything was hunky-dory. The next day, Pat took the bike out for a ride again.

“How is it?” I asked.

“Fantastic!” she replied. “It’s like a whole new bike.”

She rolled the bike to its spot in the garage, put her helmet and shoes away, and headed for the door.

“But it’s not shifting smoothly in the middle gears,” she tossed back over her shoulder.

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Categories // Maintenance Tags // bearings, headset, Maintenance

“The Bicyclist Was Not Wearing a Helmet”

07.13.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 17 Comments

It’s a little story.

A short item in the police blotter section of the Austin American-Statesman newspaper tells of a collision between an SUV and a bicycle.

After reporting that the northbound cyclist was in the righthand lane, and was hit by the SUV, the reporter included the line, “The bicyclist was not wearing a helmet.”

So what?

That line implies that the cyclist was at fault. But the information about the crash said the SUV was coming from the opposite direction, and turning into a business. So it should have yielded to oncoming traffic, including the cyclist. The item did not point out that the SUV failed to yield to the cyclist. Instead, we learn that the cyclist was not wearing a helmet. There is no mandatory helmet law for adults in the state of Texas or the city of Austin. The information is irrelevant.

What would be relevant is whether the police ticketed the CRV driver for failure to yield. After all, the cyclist had to be taken to a nearby hospital with minor injuries.

This is the kind of little thing that can have negative repercussions. Bike-hating drivers who see the item will shake their heads and cluck their tongues, and mutter about those no-good cyclists.

Why didn’t the paper include a line about the driver being at fault in this case?

“We do not assign blame in straight news stories unless quoting/citing a police report or spokesman,” tweeted the Statesman’s social media editor, in reply to an outraged cyclist’s inquiry.

The Bike Noob worked in the news media for 16 years before becoming a journalism professor. I can explain a little about how this sort of thing happens, although I don’t defend it.

Newsrooms, like all organizations, operate on a set of routines. Collecting items from the police blotter is a matter of routine, handled by one of several reporters assigned to the police beat. Most blotter stories are short, because by newsroom standards, they don’t affect many people. That’s the situation here.

Once the reporter gets the information from the police, she writes it up, and moves on to the next story. Since only minor injuries were involved, it isn’t worth the reporter’s time and effort to get more details from the police. So she misses the chance to dig deeper and find out if the police are blaming the driver for the collision.

But the helmet info was probably included in the incident report filed by the police, so she dutifully made note of that.

I once worked in a TV newsroom with a policy of stating whether a cyclist wore a helmet whenever we reported on a cycling crash. Most of us weren’t cyclists. It seemed reasonable to include that information. We didn’t consider that we were making the cyclist appear to be at fault for not wearing a helmet.

But that’s just what happened here. While the paper did not “assign” blame to the cyclist, by reporting that she wasn’t wearing a helmet, and not reporting any action against the motorist, only the cyclist was put in a bad light.

What will it take to correct this prevailing attitude? Keep calling it to the attention of editors. Things aren’t really going to change, though, until more reporters and editors join the ranks of cyclists, and are alert to implications that such a seemingly innocuous line could have.

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Categories // Safety Tags // helmets, news media

Hemmel’s Ride (In Real Life)

07.11.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 1 Comment

Today’s ride was nothing to brag about in terms of my performance, but it was one that I will remember for a long time because of the company.

Jeff Hemmel

Guest poster Jeff Hemmel was in Austin this weekend, and joined me for 33 miles in the Texas Hill Country.  Jeff posts here under the label, “Hemmel’s Ride.” Product reviews are his forte. He’s evaluated saddles, water bottles, and chamois cream, among other things. He also wrote about a ride he took with Bob Roll last year, and the unease he experienced when riding in an all-white kit.

In his non-blogging life, Jeff is a magazine writer, and was in town to cover “Aquapalooza” for Boating magazine. But while here, he made arrangements to rent a bike from Mellow Johnny’s, and I met him there Sunday morning.

We headed out for my favorite riding area — Dripping Springs. I thought that a Florida guy like Jeff would enjoy some hill riding. What I forgot was that Jeff’s family has a summer place in the Adirondacks, so he probably rides hills — big ones — a lot more than I do. On the route’s most challenging hill, Jeff kept it in the big ring and rolled easily up the grade.

Jeff smiles before pulling away.

Meanwhile, the summer sun was taking its toll on me. We started the ride at 11 a.m. — much later than I like to get going during the hot summer months — and I was glad to take the occasional break, like stopping to photograph Jeff with some Texas longhorn cattle.

The obligatory longhorn shot.

He didn’t push me too hard, though. His unfamiliarity with the roads kept him from leaving me too far back. After two-and-a-half hours in the saddle, we were glad to head back to Austin with the air conditioning at full blast, and put down massive quantities of Mountain Dew and glasses of water at a local deli.

Then back to Mellow Johnny’s (if you don’t already know it, it’s the bike store partly owned by Lance Armstrong) to buy some souvenirs for family members back home, catch a few minutes of the Tour de France on TV (Ooh! Bad day for Lance) and pose for pictures.

It’s funny how easily online friendships convert to face-to-face friendships. From our first greeting, I had the sense that we were simply continuing a conversation that started through email over a year ago. We talked about our writing endeavors — Jeff writes his own blog, “Ride Liquid,” on personal watercraft — and swapped ideas for posts. Bike Noob readers can expect some good stuff from him in the future. And as for me, I’m glad to have in Jeff a contributor who adds to the value we offer here.

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Categories // People Tags // Hemmel

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