Back in Action

Sorry once again for the lack of updates, my three or four regular readers. I'm still riding to work every single day, and still riding most other places too. Still as committed as ever. Just... not talking about it. I think that maybe it's because cycling has moved to being such a normal, everyday part of my life that I don't talk about it, any more than, say, a blog on eating food. Although, wait, those do exist. Damn hipsters.

BUT ANYWAY, I am pleased to report that my vintage Raleigh Sports is back in service! A few months ago, I came out of my last day of work at my former job to find that my rear wheel was flat. This is the wheel that is really hard to remove due to the internal hub, and I had a new job to get to, and the hybrid was sitting right there, looking pretty unsexy but oh-so-practical. And then even once I changed the tube, I couldn't get the rear wheel back on correctly. The Sports isn't practical for winter anyway, because it doesn't yet have lights (though I hope it will soon... hint, hint).

But now that it's light for my entire commute home, I knew I'd want to ride it every damn day. So I took it down to Baltimore Bicycle Works and gave it a full treatment: tune-up, cog change so it's easier to climb hills (was 17 teeth, now 20), and new brakes. Before, I had to partially use my feet to skid to a stop, like a fixie rider. Although it was even dumber because this bike weighs like 35 pounds and was hard to stop. It's working probably as well as it did when it first rolled off an English assembly line in 1973, and I actually think it's a better hill-climber than my hybrid now. The steel frame definitely makes it a smoother ride on Baltimore's interestingly-textured streets. Still not sure if I'm going to put a rack on it, since I have the hybrid for my epic weekly 50-pound grocery hauls. But it will be my daily commuter until it gets dark out again at least.

Here's the Sports at one of the stops on last Friday's Baltimore Bike Party (formerly Critical Mass) ride:

Holy crap, that's blue.

That's Northern Parkway in the background, and I feel I should report that I rode on it for a whole minute almost, and it was kind of a surreal experience. Certainly not anything I'd do without fifty other cyclists around me, but if they're there, then it can be fun, and a good preview of the kind of riding we'll all be doing post-peak oil. I've done four group rides now, and each time I come away feeling so much positive energy (to sound like a damn hippie) and hope for the future of transportation cycling. Although, the fact that our ride also has sweet tunes is all for the better:

In the dark he put on lights that made it look like a disco ball, and as a side benefit, made it easier to find the group if you fell behind. Which I did a lot, because I'm not used to cycling fifteen miles at a stretch. One thing that I love about the group rides I've done is that they're incredibly low-pressure. You don't need to be a racer to join and sometimes even I was able to get closer to the front. I do wish the Baltimore rides had more diversity (both age-wise and race-wise), but there were a lot of other lady riders. I'd guess maybe a third of the riders this time were women, and while I don't know how that compares to other group rides in other cities, nationwide the gender split for transportation cycling is like 80%/20% men/women. I feel like I've seen a higher percentage of women cyclists in Baltimore, although it could just be that I notice them more.

So to get back to the main point of this post, my vintage bike is working again, and I'm pretty excited about that. Now, off to ride!

My First Group Ride

Yesterday night I participated in my first ever group bike ride, the yearly Holiday Lights Ride in Baltimore City. I've been wanting to participate in group rides ever since starting to ride a bike again a year ago, but getting from Towson to the city is already a mighty journey by itself. And once I moved to the city, I kept finding excuses: my brakes were shot (although they are fixed now, yay!), I probably couldn't keep up, and especially, "I'm not cool/not political enough for this." (That last reason is why I have yet to ride in a Critical Mass.) But eventually, I had to just psych myself up for it, and what with this ride starting less than a mile from my new-as-of-two-days-ago workplace, I had no excuse for not doing it. I'm so glad I did.

Gearing up for the ride. Not intended to be a pun. Also, my camera phone sucks, sorry about that.

I had no problems keeping up. In fact, I was near to the front several times, and often found myself deliberately slowing down. I rode the hybrid, due to the fact that the 3-speed is pretty terrible at climbing hills, plus I had to change a flat on it a few days ago and want to do some neighborhood riding with it first before using it to commute. The route was fairly similar to my route home from the Inner Harbor, except that it detoured from Charles to Howard (I think? Hard to tell where I was sometimes because it was dark and I was focused on staying with the group). After hitting the Miracle on 34th Street, the group went back downtown to a bar somewhere, but I decided to go back home instead. I would estimate around 30 people were there, pretty good for a fairly cold evening in December.

We ran a lot of red lights and there was a fair amount of corking going on, which sort of makes me nervous. I am definitely in the "cyclists should obey all traffic laws at all times" camp and when I'm riding alone, I stop for all lights and generally try to act like a little car. I do this not necessarily because it's the "right thing to do" or "the law" but because if there is an incident or an accident I want to be damn sure I'm in the right of things. (Also, it freaks drivers out when you obey the law, and pisses them off too! It's so much fun to stop at a late-stage yellow and hear a car squealing behind you, the driver cussing you out because they just naturally assumed that a cyclist would run that yellow. My non-cyclist husband gets flummoxed when he sees law-abiding cyclists.) But there were no honked horns or revved motors in our direction that I could tell, so I think drivers were tolerant of the group. The fact that many of us wore lights and the leader dressed like Santa Claus probably helped with the goodwill.

Yeah, this picture came out a little better but still pretty much sucks. But look at all the cyclists!

The best thing about riding in a group is how safe it felt. We took up an entire lane of traffic, and even when I was on the outside of the pack, I felt completely protected. It wasn't a physical protection, but more of a psychological one, the feeling that for the first time in my cycling life, I was part of the transportation majority. (There was very little traffic on the road at 7-8 pm that day.) And it struck me that if people wanted it to, every day could feel like this. Every day could end with a healthy dose of physical activity, pleasant conversation among strangers, really seeing the city you live in. When I take public transportation, I'm never aware of my surroundings, I always have my head in a book or my phone. I honestly don't know why anyone who can physically ride a bike and lives within a bikeable distance of their workplace would not ride to work at least some of the time. But that is smugness for another day!

34th Street light show! Pretty, but I don't envy their electric bills.

Now that I've done one group ride, I want more, more, more! My cycling has fallen into a bit of a rut, as commuting tends to do, and I rarely go out just to explore anymore. I think participating in more group rides would make cycling more of an adventure again, as well as help me meet more people who share my interest. I can't do the next Critical Mass (I'll be in Pittsburgh for the New Year's Weekend Gift-O-Rama), but the one after that I'll definitely do, plus any other rides I might hear about.