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How Well Do You Communicate?

02.25.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 9 Comments

Lately, I’ve been doing most of my riding alone. I haven’t planned it that way, it just happened because of a combination of my schedule and the weather. It’s been too chilly in the mornings to hit the club ride (tell that to the hardy souls who do show up!), and my work keeps me from getting in an evening ride. So I get out when I can.

But the days are getting longer, and I expect the group rides will resume soon. That reminds me to brush up on my communication skills. Over the weekend, riding with my wife, I made sure to point out road debris, broken glass and the like.

Signaling road debris.

In a group, it’s even more important to relay those signals. Trailing riders might not be able to see around bikes in front of them, and wouldn’t be aware of any upcoming hazards.

A couple of months ago, I was out riding with a friend. We were going single file on a narrow two-lane road. I was in the lead. I must have zoned out, because suddenly a jagged-edged pothole appeared right in front of me.

“Yipes!” I yelled, and yanked the handlebar over to miss it.

It caught my riding friend completely by surprise. “Whoa!” he yelled. He missed it too, but it was a near thing. I felt that I had been negligent by not pointing at the pothole as I skirted it. It was my responsibility, and I blew it.

Signals from the lead rider can help other riders get past the problem area more smoothly, too. All you have to do when someone in front points at a hazard is move your bike in the opposite direction. If there’s broken glass in the gutter, cyclists can get a little farther left to miss it.

While you’re passing along hand signals, verbal warnings are just as important. Riders at the back of the group should certainly call, “Car back!” when a car is approaching from behind, and in enough time to allow riders ahead to pull into single file and let the car pass.

But for me, verbal warnings can be problematic. Sometimes, the wind carries sounds away from you, or noise within the group makes it hard to understand. On my very first club ride more than two years ago, we were at an uncontrolled intersection, waiting for traffic to pass.  I heard what sounded like, “Clear right!” so I pulled out into the intersection. A car hit its brakes while I crossed in front of him. The rider who had shouted the warning quickly caught up to me. “I said ‘Car right!'” he told me. “In this group, there’s no such warning as ‘clear right.'”

In fact, when I reach an intersection now, “clear” is one warning I do not give. I prefer to determine for myself whether the road is clear enough for me to cross, and I hope other cyclists in the group feel the same way. I know they don’t — “clear!” is one of the more common verbal warnings on any group ride.

As a lot of us get ready to take part in large organized rides as part of our charity ride training, it’ll be interesting to see just how many novice cyclists are familiar with hand and verbal signals to communicate with the riders around them.

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Categories // Safety Tags // group rides, Safety

The Rear-view Mirror Question

02.23.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 25 Comments

I was riding laps around the Veloway a few days ago, when I closed on another cyclist. I was about to call, “On your left,” when he glanced up, and moved over on his own. As I drew even with him, I saw that he had a rear-view mirror mounted on his helmet. He obviously saw me coming, and knew when he would have to make way for me.

My friend Gilbert with a helmet mirror.

I’ve never used a mirror. On a typical group ride, I see only a few. Most appear to be helmet mirrors, but occasionally I see a mirror attached to a bar end.

I wonder — would a mirror make a difference?

I always try to be aware of my surroundings when I ride, and I scan behind me frequently. There’s no doubt in my mind that a mirror would make the scanning a little easier, since I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping the bike on a straight line while looking back. But it’s the looking back that I think keeps me aware and on my guard.

Besides, a helmet mirror looks a bit dorky, doesn’t it?

Bar-end mirror.

The bar end mirrors are less so.

Like most of us, I also drive a lot. I have a rear-view mirror and two side-view mirrors on my car. I use them constantly. I suppose I should consider doing the same when I ride my bike.

I guess the real question I’ve been considering lately is — are mirrors a biking necessity? Should we all be using them?  And if so, what arguments are there in favor of one type over another?

I’d like to hear about your experiences.

Get Some

Handlebar Mirrors

Helmet Mirrors

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Categories // Accessories, Safety Tags // Accessories, mirrors, Safety

The Chamois Cream Showdown

02.21.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 15 Comments

Guest poster Jeff Hemmel compares two major brands of butt lube.

I’m 40 miles into one of my usual rides and there’s a battle raging in my pants.

The combatants? Two chamois creams, each holding onto their own piece of territory. In this corner, weighing in at $19.99 for an 8 oz. jar is Paceline’s Chamois Butt’r, a pretty common cream found in many bike shops. In the opposite corner, weighing in at a daunting $24 for a 4 oz. tube, is dznuts (pronounced DEEZ-nuts), a premier high-end brand.

Which will take the title in the, uh, end? I’ll let you know as soon as my nether regions finish sorting it out.

Go ahead and laugh, but this is serious testing, from a bona fide professional journalist. Before my ride I had carefully measured out equal amounts of both creams (or just grabbed a two-fingered scoop), applied the creams to specific boundaries of my anatomy (or as specific as you can get when you’re messing with an area you can’t really see), and then got on the bike and rode a precisely measured course (I just go up to this sign, which is about 22.5 miles from home…and turn around).

Why? To find out once and for all if one glob of goo can actually be worth more than twice the price of the other. And yes, let’s face it, just to have the opportunity to say something about Dave Zabriskie’s nuts in print.

One difference between the two products is immediately obvious. Dznuts is a thicker viscosity cream with an almost whipped appearance, where Chamois Butt’r is somewhat lighter, with a shiny, almost watery look to the surface. Apply them and both provide a cooling sensation. On the road they maintained that feeling of coolness, but with subtle differences. Chamois Butter’s sensation was slightly more pronounced, dznuts a little less in your face. (No jokes about the butt-face jump in logic here.) Other than that, however, both seemed to do the job. Late in the ride I did feel like dznuts thickness helped it to stay on slightly better, where the less-thick Chamois Butt’r may have been losing a little of the battle to sweat. The cool sensation of the Chamois Butt’r, however, seemed to last slightly longer than the dznuts, perhaps distracting me a little more from how long I had spent in the saddle. At the end of the day both washed away, from me and my chamois, with soap and water.

The Euro Version of Chamois Butt’r contains menthol, witch hazel, and Brazilian peppertree, but contains mineral oil and a few other ingredients that give a natural ingredients proponent pause. Dznuts relies on tea-tree oil as an anti-bacterial and anti-fungal, Evodia, a Chinese herb, for wound-healing and anti-inflammatory purposes, and Masterwort for its wound-healing and calming properties. It claims a more organic approach, trying to stay as natural as possible.

Why avoid certain products? It’s up for debate. Mineral oil is petroleum-based, however, and has been blamed for doing everything from promoting acne to messing with cell development. It’s also, however, the basis of many baby oils. You’ll just have to make your own call on this issue.

So back to the original question — is one worth twice the price? Probably not. Both get the job done. A lot of dznuts premium probably goes into its fancier, high-end packaging. I do like that it’s a more natural product, however, and I prefer its texture and consistency.

[lasso type=”table” id=”1″ link_id=”2152″]

I said I’d let my nether regions sort things out, and truth be told, my butt has apparently been telling my brain to go for the dznuts, as it’s the cream that’s been seeing the most use since the initial showdown. Once it runs out, however, the butt and the brain will likely have to factor something else into the equation — the wallet — before the next purchase.

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Categories // guest post, Review Tags // chamois cream, guest post, Hemmel, Review

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