I never learned to ride a bike as kid. At age 33, I realized I was about to move to a city where biking is close to mandatory (Melbourne), so I sucked it up and went for a couple of one-on-one adult bike lessons. Despite a first lesson that was so painfully fumbling and awkward I almost gave up, I showed up once more and figured out the key: when you start to fall over to the left, steer to the left, and you will suddenly no longer be falling. Rinse and repeat. We did a little cruise around the neighborhood, and hey, I was biking! Although I did have my ceremonial first fall when I crashed into a bollard at the end of a bridge (at very slow speed, fortunately).
Then I started commuting to my new workplace by bike. 15 minutes, a nice and easy ride, mostly on bike paths separated from road traffic -- but it was still scary as hell initially, and I walked the route a few times, trying to figure out exactly what I'd need to do to cross every road and turn every corner. The first morning was freaky, but I still remember the feeling of adrenaline rush when I arrived at the office the first time: Whoo! I survived! And then on the way back later that day, my shoelace gets caught up in the gears and I do a slow-motion crash onto the bike path. No real damage, but my nerves were sufficiently shot that I had to walk the bike home and skip the next day. Two days later I was at it again.
Next I attempted to learn curb hopping. My spectacularly mistimed 2nd attempt saw the wheel hit the curb full on, so I flew head over heels and shredded one knee to bits on gravel. Turns out you can keep biking just fine with a bloody knee, it only starts to hurt once the blood gets a chance to congeal.
And now I commute by bike every single day, rain or shine, 0 or 40 degrees. I wouldn't give it up for the world and am considering upgrading from my current trusty but heavy mountain bike into a zippier road model.
Push your laces into your shoe and put your sock (a long one!) over your pant leg on the chain side. That'll save you at some point in the future. You got pretty lucky, falls can be quite nasty. Another safety tip: on any turn that is a bit sharper stop pedalling and keep the inner pedal highest. That way you increase ground clearance (pedal strike on ground or kerb becomes next to impossible) where you need it most. And if you're going for a tenspeed style racing bike (or 27 speed these days ;) ) or something like that please don't use toeclips until you're a very confident rider.
I'm not sure if there's a way to avoid problems learning toeclips. I cycled since childhood but was terrified by stories of "death clips", and decided not to get them.
But at a race prep meetup for a long triathlon I was the only one without them, and got mollycoddled by the organisers. They gave strong advice to get them.
So I got them and took it easy - riding around a park, slow rides. I still had several bad falls when I got onto the roads though. And I need to go through busy roads to get to the country (no car).
I found that you need to be very deliberately transactional in the way you cycling when you have clips. For example - as you approach lights, once you get a certain distance out of it's still read then that's it - you just start start unclipping. You don't want to play the game of edging up to the lights, because a car might do something confusing and then you're screwed. You need to position yourself in traffic much more carefully, and hold off on some situations you wouldn't have thought twice about when you had pedals.
I agree. You can't learn to use death clips without a little pain. I'm all for them on road riding or mellow XC rides, but some of my buddies started using them on full down hill tracks like in whistler BC. They swear by them and yes a lot of world cup racers now use them, but I think it's few and far between because of the learning curve. I don't think I could ever do it, I'm not fully comfortable on a full suspension bike unless I can eject quickly. It's bad enough getting tied up in your handlebars, let alone not getting your feet out as you endo a cliff drop.
>put your sock (a long one!) over your pant leg on the chain side
Better to just buy a pair of light-reflecting velcro strips. They sell them for just this purpose. I always find that somehow my pant leg comes out of the sock and catches on something.
I concur about toeclips - not necessary at all for normal commuting in the first place.
Yeah, figured out the sock trick pretty fast, and also switched to shoes without loose laces -- haven't had a problem since. And trust me, even if I do switch to a road or (more likely) hybrid bike, I won't be adding clips to my repertoire any time soon!
I wear cycling shoes, and seemingly without fail, at least once a month or so, I forget I'm clipped in and topple over. Small price to pay for the extreme efficiency improvement. I've been lucky in that this happens to me when I cruise up to a stop, rather than in the middle of an actual emergency.
Give it some time. One not so good morning ages ago I was underway to an employer sponsored course in 'effective cobol' (whatever effective cobol is still eludes me to today, so I guess the course wasn't all that effective). A car cut me off on a green light for me straight ahead by turning right into my path going as fast as I could to try to catch my train in time (cycle to my dads house across the city, drop off the bike there, take the subway to the train station and then the train to Utrecht, miss the connection and be a half hour late). I braked, much too hard on the front trying to avoid becoming hamburger, the rear of the bike left the pavement and because of my clips was attached pretty good to the rest of me. I smacked to the pavement with the bike landing on top of me. I didn't really realize how badly I was hurt until the receptionist in the place where I was going came close to fainting when I walked in, my whole face covered in blood and scratches from the impact everywhere where skin was exposed. If not for the dumb toeclips I'd have been much more in control of the fall and it likely would not have ended as bad as it did. Since then no more toeclips for me.
I hope your emergency will continue to be in your future, unfortunately mine caught up with me. After I stopped using toeclips I went as fast as before, even did emergency stops a couple of times, including another front wheel flip (and with those new disc brakes that's even easier now than before) but nothing ever came close to the time when I was strapped to the bike.
The one good thing about the bike falling on me was that I was pretty poor at the time and the bike didn't have any damage ;)
Hey. Really nice story. I have a similar story; one time in high school I really got into curb-jumping and essentially had the same thing happen to me where I wasn't orthogonal enough and hurt myself badly.
Anyway, just wanted to say, definitely give a nice road-bike a try. They are really amazing, wonderful machines. I have a feeling you'll never want to ride anything on road ever again :)
If you do get a road bike, don't curb hob on it or you will destroy the wheels in no time!
If you are not totally confident in bike handling you might be better off with a hybrid model where you still have some of the comfort and control of a mountain bike but with slightly skinnier and slicker tyres.
Road bikes go faster and destabilise much more suddenly ,especially in the wet.
You can curb-hop without destroying the wheels but you'll likely mess up often enough that practising that is best done on a very old bike.
Obviously hopping 'down' is no problem at all, hopping up the front wheel is easy (just pull up on the handlebars as you approach the kerb, shift weight backwards and push on the top pedal, then drop the front wheel which should have come off the ground by now on the kerb so it never sees the step and make the drop gentle). You can practice that just fine without a kerb. The rear wheel part of the gentle kerb hop is the tricky bit, I can do it with my eyes closed but describing it is a lot harder. The basic idea is to move your cog forward quickly while at the same time squeezing on the pedals inward. That way you can lift the rear end of the bike onto the kerb. If you flex your knees a bit then you can do this even onto substantial kerb heights.
Once you've mastered that hopping down is mostly the reverse to spare the wheel from impacting too hard at the end of the drop. If you're really good you can do this at speed without any noticeable bounce. I'd hate to do this with my 120kg fully loaded 3 people bike ;)
Great description. This reminds me of the guy who (basically) won the world championship cyclocross by being able to hop over the barriers instead of carrying his bike over:
I never learned to ride a bike as kid. At age 33, I realized I was about to move to a city where biking is close to mandatory (Melbourne), so I sucked it up and went for a couple of one-on-one adult bike lessons. Despite a first lesson that was so painfully fumbling and awkward I almost gave up, I showed up once more and figured out the key: when you start to fall over to the left, steer to the left, and you will suddenly no longer be falling. Rinse and repeat. We did a little cruise around the neighborhood, and hey, I was biking! Although I did have my ceremonial first fall when I crashed into a bollard at the end of a bridge (at very slow speed, fortunately).
Then I started commuting to my new workplace by bike. 15 minutes, a nice and easy ride, mostly on bike paths separated from road traffic -- but it was still scary as hell initially, and I walked the route a few times, trying to figure out exactly what I'd need to do to cross every road and turn every corner. The first morning was freaky, but I still remember the feeling of adrenaline rush when I arrived at the office the first time: Whoo! I survived! And then on the way back later that day, my shoelace gets caught up in the gears and I do a slow-motion crash onto the bike path. No real damage, but my nerves were sufficiently shot that I had to walk the bike home and skip the next day. Two days later I was at it again.
Next I attempted to learn curb hopping. My spectacularly mistimed 2nd attempt saw the wheel hit the curb full on, so I flew head over heels and shredded one knee to bits on gravel. Turns out you can keep biking just fine with a bloody knee, it only starts to hurt once the blood gets a chance to congeal.
And now I commute by bike every single day, rain or shine, 0 or 40 degrees. I wouldn't give it up for the world and am considering upgrading from my current trusty but heavy mountain bike into a zippier road model.