Early in this blog's history, I documented using, at the suggestion of my gynecologist, Terry "donut" saddles. I found that I didn't like them: They reminded me of the Avocet saddles with the "groove" in the middle, which I tried not long after they came out. Both saddles had the same effect: They created pressure points, and discomfort, around my genitals--even though my genitals were not the same when I rode the Terry as they were when I rode the Avocet.
After the Terry experiment, I went back to Brooks saddles and have had no problems. That may have something to with my post-surgery genitals healing and developing: Although the area around them is more tender than it was in my days as a male, it's not quite as delicate as it was in the days just after my surgery.
Brooks has been making stretched leather saddles for nearly a century and a half. Over the past decade or so, other companies have begun to make similar saddles. At least even the most casual cyclist knows that those companies are appropriating and,in some cases, tweaking an old technology.
The same was not true when Avocet first came out with its "grooved" or "double hump" saddles in 1977 or when Terry came out with its "donut" seats in 1994--or, for that matter, when AnAtomica started cutting out the middle sections of Brooks saddles in 2005 (or when Brooks began to sell its "Imperial" saddles in 2008. Every one of those ideas had been tried before. Those companies marketed those saddles--and the public believed they were--innovations.
Take a look at this Garford ladies' padded saddle from 1895:
Or this one, introduced five years earlier:
Yes, that is the original "Imperial" saddle, in the Brooks 1890 catalogue.
I got a kick out of this photo.
Do you think Bell or Giro will use it in their ad campaigns? What about Bern?
I went on a deep woods bike adventure today.
All right...I took a little spin after work to this place:
I wished I'd had my regular camera. I did the best I could with my cell phone to capture the line of color on the rock ridge and its reflection in the water.
So where did I go?
My little jaunt took me to a virgin...OK, a virgin forest. Where?
Would you believe Manhattan? (You probably didn't believe there was a virgin anything there.) Yes, at the very northern tip of the island, there's a wooded area in Inwood Hill Park where trees have never been cut or planted. Take away the Henry Hudson Parkway bridge and the nearby buildings, and it's more or less the way it was when Peter Stuyvesant landed there.
I think it's one of those places best seen at this time of year.
In my next life, I'm going to look like this when I ride to work (or the farmer's market) at this time of year:
Sigh. Well, at least in this life, I can do a fall ride like this. In fact, I just might do such a ride soon.
In the ideal cycling world, I could ride through such colors and have the long hours of daylight we enjoy in May and June. And, oh yeah, it would all be located near a large body of water.
I don't ask for much, do I?
I live in Astoria, which is about as close as you can get to Manhattan without being in it. Here, there are people who own private houses but not cars. That arrangement may be unique, at least in New York City (if not the United States) to Astoria and, perhaps, parts of neighboring Long Island City and Sunnyside.
Some of those homeowners rent their driveways to Manhattanites. Some condo and co-op owners do likewise with their parking spaces. Some Manhattan drivers pay more per month for those parking spots than I paid for my first apartment in New York!
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised: After all, real estate of any sort is in short supply, and therefore expensive, in the Big Apple. And New York drivers have long complained about the difficulty of finding parking spots: Indeed, I've heard some claim that in Hell or Purgatory, one is resigned to wander the streets of this city in pursuit of unavailable places to leave one's vehicle.
As a cyclist, I used to feel so fortunate to be spared from such ordeals. Note that I said "used to." These days, I sometimes have as much difficulty finding space on a parking meter, signpost or other immobile object--never mind a bike rack--to lock up my ride as any benighted motorist has in finding a place to leave his or her wheels.
I admit that, as someone who's had bikes stolen and damaged, I am fairly picky about where I park and lock. If I attach my bike to a meter or post, I prefer not to use the side closer to the curb: On more than one occasion, I've returned to my locked-up bike only to find that a motorist backed his or her rear wheels on the sidewalk and left me with a "New York Pretzel"--and I'm not talking about those snacks you can buy from a sidewalk cart!
I know that some parking lots allow bikes to park for a fee: In fact, I've used a couple of them. But could the day come when homeowners in my neighborhood rent out their spaces to Manhattan cyclists? And will such spaces cost more than I now pay for my dwelling?
If you were going to turn your bike into a tribute to someone who is/was not a professional cyclist, who would he or she be?
When I rode my Colnago and Mondonico, I thought about inscribing the chainstay with "Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita". But I decided against it when I realized it might have been too long for the short chainstays of those racing bikes. Besides, saying that you're in the middle of the journey of our lives is kind of an odd thing to write--especially for a young person--on a racing bike.
Then again, while I was racing and training I probably didn't encounter very many people who could read medieval Florentine Italian. And, if I do say so myself, I would have been riding too fast for them to read it anyway.
I don't think I encountered very many people who were familiar with the works of Bertolt Brecht, either. Such a consideration seems not to have deterred someone in California who turned a '70's Atala into a rolling monument to the German writer.
After painting the frame gray, its owner inscribed it with lines from Brecht's poems, plays and essays.
This section of the right (drive-side) seat stay is adorned with this gem, "When crimes begin to pile up, they become invisible."
The bike is for sale, minus its wheels, handlebars and stem, on eBay. "Will make a great fixie, single speed and art school punk chick magnet", according to the listing.
A brief article on Yahoo Finance outlines the growth of the Citibike bike share program in New York City.
What's particularly striking is that the data shows a steady, consistent growth in the number of trips taken and number of miles ridden. I haven't taken a math or a statistics class in a long time, so if there's a term (which, I believe, there is) for the sort of curve plotted in those charts, I've forgotten it. But, even to a decidedly un-numeric person like me, the graph and figures are remarkable.
The writer of the article did a pretty good job until the last two paragraphs. "Wondering how all of this extra biking has impacted New York's emergency rooms?" he asks. He attempts to answer it by the city's Department of Transportation studies that show the average risk of serious injury to a cyclist plummeted 73 percent between 2000 and 2011.
Now, perhaps I'm reading something into his article that isn't there, but I had the impression that he was implicitly relating the decrease to the Citibike program. If he is, then there's a problem: the bike share didn't start until May of this year.
Then he goes on to promulgate a fallacy: that the decrease in the number of injuries and fatalities is, in part, a result of the construction of bike lanes.
As I've said in earlier posts, bike lanes don't necessarily make cycling safer, especially if they are poorly-designed or constructed. In fact, they can put cyclists in more peril when they have to turn or exit the lane--or if it ends--and they are thrust into a traffic lane with motorists and pedestrians who do not anticipate them.
I maintain (again, as in earlier posts) that nothing does more to make cycling safer on urban streets and byways than what I call the human infrastructure of cycling. Even more important than the best-conceived and -constructed bike lanes is cyclists',motorists' and pedestrians' cognizance of each other. That is achieved, I think, over a generation or two of cyclists and motorists sharing the streets on more-or-less equal terms and of not thinking of each other as, essentially, different races of people. Such a state of affairs--which I have found in much of Europe--comes about from not only sheer numbers of everyday cyclists (commuters and people who use ride their bikes to shop, go to the movies and such) but also from large numbers of motorists who are (or recently were) regular cyclists themselves.
That is the reason why I always felt safer riding even in those European cities like Paris, where there are relatively few bike lanes, than in almost any American city in which I cycled. And, by the way, the City of Light and other European capitals didn't have bike share programs until recently.
So far, this has been quite a mild Fall, at least here in New York. While the weather has been great for riding, there's one thing I'm not crazy about: The days are getting shorter.
Here is a view from the RFK-Triborough Bridge, looking toward Manhattan, just before seven this morning:
I enjoy the mist, especially the way it's pulled across the pillars and posts of steel and and slabs of concrete, as some are trying to get a few more moments of sleep.
But, of course, if you're trying to get a few more moments of sleep, you won't. So it is morning for you, even if the light hasn't caught up, and won't for a few more months.l
If bicycles and bicyclists were to achieve public stature equal to that of cars and drivers, how would we know?
Well, I think I may have seen a sign that we're on our way:
While Vera was parked near Baker Field, at the very upper end of Manhattan, someone left a menu for a restaurant in my rack.
Menus and flyers are left on car winshields all the time. I've even seen them rolled onto motorcycle handlebars. But this is the first time I've seen one on any bike, let alone one of my own.
In at least one way, Columbus Day is a terrible holiday. Depending on how you look at it, on this day the United States celebrates a guy who got lost or the beginning of Native American genocide.
Italy has given the world Petrarch, Dante, Bocaccio, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Puccini, Verdi and Gino Bartali. But we celebrate "Columbus Day" as a festival of Italian pride. Mamma mia!
One nice thing about it, though, is that most people have the day off from work or school, so there isn't much traffic on the roads. If the weather is nice, as it was today, people will be out and about--but not as many as, say, on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July or Labor Day.
There was no denying that it was a great day to ride. I took Tosca on a ramble through the Brooklyn waterfronts, the Hasidic neighborhoods and Coney Island.
At Sheepshead Bay, I saw the Three Musketeers:
