(Lexington TV weathermen treat snowstorms, high winds, patches of ice, rain, heat, cold and frost as mortal threats to the public well-being. If I governed my life by their forecasts I would spend most of September through March locked in my room, likely hiding under the bed.)

It wasn’t dangerous out there, or even particularly unpleasant — and this very possibly will have been one of the worst nights of the year to ride.

Toward the end of my 3-mile trip, the wind was in my face, there was a little ice in the wind and the going got a little tough. At such a time one might ask himself, “Self, why do this?”

“Self,” I would reply, “Here’s why: Freedom.”

The other day I was buying a toilet, of all things. The proprietor (Day’s Plumbing, the best plumbing store ever) mentioned water conservation as a reason for the purchase. He had noticed my bike and asked me: “You’re green, aren’t you?”

No, I’m not green.

I don’t ride a bike to work every day because I buy all that nonsense about carbon footprints. I don’t think global warming is man-made, and I think Al Gore is a glutenous gasbag.

Thanks to the green movement, there is a certain tight-lipped puritanism and a cloud of fake morality about bicycle commuting these days.

I ride a bike because it’s fun (more about that later) but mainly because it saves money. Lots of it.

Saving money means saving time. Time saved means freedom — freedom to spend more time with my family, to work on church stuff, to remodel the garage, to write on here a little.

If I weren’t riding my bike, my family would need a second car. That means either a car payment (we don’t have one now) or shelling out $5,000 or so for something dependable.

There would be, what, 50 bucks a month or so for insurance.

That second car would need gas, oil changes and tires. It would need to be washed and vacuumed now and then.

That’s a lot of money, which means a lot of time, because it takes time to earn the money.

There are less tangible savings as well.

Since our driveway runs through our back yard, there would be another car parked out there — less room for the kids to play.

Then there’s the fact that I don’t have a gym membership. Without bike riding,  I would need to get one, find time for another form of exercise (there’s that time angle again!), or go to seed (more than I am now).

You can get a fantastic commuting bike and all the gear you would need for $2,000 or less — much less, if you get a good used bike. That’s it for your costs, until you need a new tire ($20) or a tuneup once a year or so (around $50) — although I recommend you buy a few tools and learn how to do the tuneups yourself.

For less than $2,000 you could very well be getting freedom from a second car. That’s significant. You might also be gaining freedom from gaining weight. That’s significant also. It’s expensive to buy new clothes every 6 months to a year, as your waistline expands.

I consider the fun of cycling to be a bonus (since I would probably be doing it anyway). I love it, plain and simple. It’s a great stress-reliever. I like the self-sufficiency. I like the wind and sun on my face. I like having to pay attention to the weather and figuring out what to wear.

I realize not everyone lives within biking distance, and that biking might or might not be practical for most people.

That’s fine with me. Drive a Nissan Armada, if you want. Drive it two blocks each way. More power to you. (I’m not “green,” remember?)

If you ARE thinking about cycle commuting, or if you’re trying to remember why you are doing it, forget about the environmentalist noise. Fake morality keeps most people going for maybe a week.

From years of personal experience, I can tell you: Lasting motivation comes from remembering that cycling means freedom. And fun.

On this night, I remembered why. Thank God my leg was not broken, so I could kick myself.

About two weeks ago, I rode in through the rain (nothing unusual). The temperature dropped while I was at work.

On the way home, I took it pretty easy. Upon discovering that it wasn’t *that* slick, I started to pick up the pace a little. (I was riding the Raleigh Super Course with Wald bars on it — a nice setup — I like to push it a little, when I get the chance.)

Alongside Commonwealth Stadium, approaching Alumni Drive, there’s an asphalt walking path. It’s smooth, and it declines slightly — a perfect place to accelerate. Out of habit, that’s what I did.

I noticed, as I approached the intersection, that a car was coming and that I would not beat it across the street. I barely touched the front brakes. Then I realized about four things in the same two seconds:

– The tire was skidding.

– I was not slowing down.

– The front wheel was turning.

– I was about to make intimate contact with the pavement.

The wheel slid such that it was at about a 90 degree angle to the frame, and over the bars I went. Well, almost all the way over the bars — I sort of got hung up on the bars, and landed on my right side.

I got up and rode home none the worse for wear. Again, it could have been much worse. It’s easy to sprain or break a wrist, or break an arm, in this type of a wreck.

What did I do wrong? I didn’t follow my own advice — go slowly when there’s a chance of ice.

When I did figure out I was on ice (which was before I braked, by the way), I should have guided the bike onto the grass before stopping.

But no … someday I will learn …

The abbreviated version: While pulling my Burley D’Lite trailer behind my Bridgestone XO-1, I tried a sharp U-turn. Just before I fell, I thought: That’s gravel, and I’m going too fast. The front wheel skidded out from under me, and I went down on my left side.

Two things to note about this mishap:

1. There’s no reason on earth to attempt a sharp turn on gravel.

2. More significantly: While the XO-1 and I pancaked somewhat spectacularly on the pavement, the trailer was affected not a bit. This was possible because the trailer has a (very) flexible part on the shaft where the trailer connects to the bike. (My 3-year-old daughter was sitting in the trailer at the time of the crash.)

I wouldn’t want to replicate this field test, and I hope you don’t, either — but just know that the D’Lite
will stay upright even when you don’t. That’s one major advantage, in my view, that the trailer has over those child seats that attach to the bike’s rear rack. If your child is sitting in a seat behind you on the bike, he or she is going down with you.

Here is one of my favorites, courtesy of ollo_ollo:

One hot summer day, commuting home from work, I was riding uphill & coasting to stop at a red light. I forgot to unclip & did a slow motion fall sideways to land in the gutter at the feet of a couple homeless guys sitting on the curb with their cardboard sign. One guy says, “I hate it when that happens”. The light changed to green, so I got up & out of there as fast as I could. Don

Hey — another great argument for riding in regular shoes! And this from SDBluefish:

Riding home from the store with a bunch of groceries in a rear pannier. Got to the place where I leave the bike lane and cut over to my street. Doing my usual rolling dismount coming up to the curb, but totally forgot the very long loaf of French bread in the pannier. Leg hit the bread, and the bike and I hit the pavement. Someone driving past in a minivan pulled over, but when they saw I was getting up and cussing a blue streak they decided I was probably OK enough and drove away fast. Now if I’d had a loaf of nice, soft, American bread none of this would have happened! I blame the French.

“I blame the French,” that is classic. Thanks to all on that thread for the laughs. Many of us have been there (if you are a new rider, or just getting back to riding, beware lest YOU go there! ).

I have taught two boys to ride, one at age 4, the other at age 5. However, I don’t consider my method to be great.

It is merely simple.

Our driveway runs through our back yard. A 60-foot section of yard, fenced on two sides, slopes gently away from the driveway.

I wait for the child to express interest in learning. When he gets on the bike for the first time, I situate him on the bike on the driveway, hold onto the back of the seat, take a few steps with the rolling bike, and then let the bike go into the yard.

The kid crashes. At low speed, to be sure, but it’s a crash nonetheless.

Then we do it again. And again. And again, until he’s tired of it.

Maybe a few days later, he will ask to try again. And we will.

Pretty soon, he is turning at the fence and then falling down. Then he’s turning at the fence and making it halfway back.

Then he’s able to ride almost a complete circle around the yard.

Now it’s time to move to a stretch of sidewalk. I give the bike with the boy on it a gentle push, and jog alongside to make sure he doesn’t meander across the treelawn into the street.

After about 25 feet, he crashes (usually onto the grass). Then we do it again, and again, until he’s tired of it.

Pretty soon, he is riding all the way down to the neighbor’s driveway. By that time, he generally has the hang of it.

We are able to combine the methods at a store down the street. A driveway goes all the way around the store. There is a nice-sized lawn next to the driveway. If you can’t make the turn, you can ride out into the grass and fall down.

After a good crash, I would tell the boys how great a crash it was, and how there is a certain number of crashes you have to have before you finally learn to ride. That is one less crash for you, I tell them. You are one crash closer.

I see a lot of kids riding with training wheels, but eventually the training wheels are going to have to come off, with crashes to follow. Why prolong the agony? Why not get the crashes out of the way at the beginning?

Both of the boys learned pretty quickly. Now there is a girl to train, and I will see whether the method is gender-specific or whether it requires a few tweaks.

It was NOT a dark and stormy night, which meant I had no excuses when I rolled through the stop sign at a pretty good clip, smacked the car’s front fender, catapulted over the handlebars, rolled across the hood, and landed in the street …

*****************************************

I found the Fuji S-10-S at a yard sale. The owner wanted $20. I already had a couple of bikes, and it was just a bit small for me, so I left it there.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Later that Saturday, I returned to the sale. I think I got the bike for $12. It still had the original Primus frame pump. “I guess it was just waiting for someone who would appreciate it,” the former owner told me as I wheeled the Fuji to the minivan.

I did appreciate it. Later I would find out that this was a historically significant bike — one of the first mass-marketed by the Japanese in the United States during the bike boom of the 1970s. It had a six-speed freewheel. I e-mailed Internet bike guru Sheldon Brown to ask his opinion about whether it was worth fixing up. He thought it was.

I lovingly worked on the bike over the next couple of years, replacing the bottom bracket, trying out new tires, buying a high-rise stem to get the handlebars up to a comfortable height, finding some bar-end shifters in the old-parts bin at a local bike shop, adding a new freewheel and chain, adjusting some brand-new-yet-old-fashioned Dia Compe brake levers … I learned a lot by working on that bike. (The pictures are before the stem and bar-enders.)

After finding three shiny cable guides at a shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, during a fun outing with my dad, the S-10-S finally looked and rode like I wanted it to. And it was a sweet ride. The frame, light and flexible, seemed to work with me as I pedaled.

One Saturday not long after the Fuji was finally dialed in, I took off for work on it. It was a partly cloudy, cool day, a great day for a ride. Then again, they all are.

Since traffic is normally pretty light in my neighborhood in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, I didn’t bother to stop at the stop sign less than two blocks from my house. I picked up speed around a corner and started rolling through the sign to make a left turn. I looked left and looked right.

I looked left again … just in time to see a red sports car that might as well have risen straight up out of the pavement.

WHAM!

My front tire hit the fender. The driver had braked when she saw me, but I had no chance.

Over the bars, and over the car’s hood, I went. I rolled, landing on my left shoulder and smacking my helmet in the middle of the street.

Because traffic was light, I had time to get up and stumble out of the way.

The driver, a woman, was shaken. I tried to calm her down a little. I gave her my name and phone number, in case the car needed to be fixed. (Providentially, I barely scratched it, and she never called.)

Then, ugh, I examined the bike. The front wheel bent like a taco shell. The front fork ends pointed in divergent directions. (As you can see at right, they used to be so pretty!) The killer was, I could see the paint flaking off the top tube and downtube right behind the head tube.

The frame was done for.

I carried the bike home in dismay. The frame hung in the garage for more than a year before I could bear to part with it.

I was sorry to see that Fuji go, but I would have been more sorry if I had not been wearing a helmet.

The helmet cracked when it hit the pavement. That would have been my head.

I dinged my shoulder a little. That was it.

It could have been so much worse, in so many ways.

I’m glad it was the bike, and not me. But I did love that bike. Many of its parts now live on my Bridgestone XO-1.

What did I do wrong?

I rolled through the stop sign when I should have stopped, or at least slowed down.

I was not careful. It was just that simple. I am now.

And while I checked the street to either side of me, I did not check the driveway across the street. That’s where the car came from. I just completely missed it.

Sometimes looking both ways is not enough. I needed to look three ways, and then look again.

Now, I try to do that.

What did I do right? I wore a helmet. This wreck could have resulted in a serious head injury.

Also, I took responsibility for the crash. It was my fault, and I deserved to pay.

I am glad I didn’t have to.

*************************

It might seem strange to write about crashes on a site promoting bicycle commuting, but let’s face it, crashes can happen. We riders can do a lot to prevent them. We don’t always do all we can. Here’s how I see it: I have learned a couple of things the hard way. If I tell you about it, maybe you won’t have to. Read about my other crash.

No, really — it was.

I was riding my Specialized Milano home from checking out a gym (a dive — I didn’t buy a membership.) Since it was pitch black, and raining, and I had no lights, no reflective jacket, nothing but a couple of reflectors on the bike, I was riding on the sidewalk. In the interest of safety.

I was standing up on the pedals when my front tire plunged about a foot into a missing section of sidewalk, then hit the edge of the next section.

The bike stopped dead. I kept going — over the handlebars, somehow still holding onto the handgrips.

If you don’t already know, I hope you never find out that it’s sickening to see the pavement approaching your head at high speed.

I landed squarely on my left shoulder, lay there for a few minutes taking inventory, and hoped for the best.

THE AFTERMATH: The front tire went flat, and I had no patch kit or pump. Besides, since I had no flashlight, it might have been to dark to fix the flat anyway.

However, it wasn’t too dark for several guys in a pickup to see the accident. They pointed at me and laughed pretty hard as they went by.

I walked the bike home. Fortunately, it wasn’t too far.

THE DAMAGE DONE: Nothing but a bruised shoulder, as I recall. It could have been worse.

Much, much worse.

The bike got a couple of scratches.

ANALYSIS: What could I have done to prevent this, or: How can you avoid my fate?

1. Before riding in the dark, get (at least) a headlight and a blinking taillight, so you can ride in traffic with confidence that you will be seen.
2. Ride on the road. There are several excellent reasons to ride on the road rather than on the sidewalk, but for the purposes of this story, suffice it to say that there are a lot of badly paved roads out there, but there are a lot of worse sidewalks. (At least, that’s true here in Lexington, Ky.)
3. Above all: Stay seated while pedaling. When riding for transportation, there’s almost no reason to stand up on the pedals. If it’s too hard to pedal, downshift. When you stand, you are at greater risk of your foot slips off the pedal, and, as I so ably demonstrated, you might fly over the handlebars  after hitting an obstacle. Once you are up in the air, all kinds of bad things can happen — you can land on your head, or in front of oncoming traffic. You can jam or break a wrist, or break an arm. The list goes on.
4. Slow down (boy, do I wish I would have). Make sure you can see the ground far enough in front of you, soon enough, to see and avoid obstacles.
5. Carry a patch kit and a pump. In this case a flashlight would have helped as well. I could have been walking a lot further that night. Self-sufficiency is always best.

Sometimes crashes happen — biking is no different than driving in this regard. But a lot of crashes don’t have to happen. This one certainly didn’t.

This happened shortly before I started bike-commuting regularly — I was still a rookie at riding in the city.

Fortunately, it turned out to be a cheap lesson; the next one was a little more expensive.

“One lovely spring afternoon in May I was peacefully and happily cycling across the Hood Canal Bridge over Puget Sound, my mind on a hamburger and a malted milk at that noontime hour. The wind was gusting to around 3 knots from the side.”I was warned, before going over the bridge, by the toll-booth keeper, that many cyclists had cracked up in the middle of the bridge, where the openable span joins the fixed section of this structure.”I was barreling down an incline into the movable section of the bridge, marveling at the beauty of the Cascade Mountains on one side, the Olympic Mountains on the other, whose snow-capped peaks gleamed in the distance.”I did not watch carefully enough for cracks in the pavement, and suddenly found myself flying through the air, over the bars. I landed about 15 feet down the road on my right shoulder and suffered a rather painful separation. The bicycle simply broke in half at the top tube …

“My front wheel had slipped into the 2-inch-wide crack between the spans, right up to the axle, and the bike stopped dead, as I almost did. The accident was not entirely in vain, however, since I spent considerable time while in bed the next day complaining loudly to the Washington State Highway Commission about the need for protection for cyclists at the joints of this bridge …

“I would suggest you squeak loudly to the proper authorities any time you see a road hazard condition of any type, on behalf of future cyclists who will come that way.”

– Eugene A. Sloane, The New Complete Book of Bicycling, 1974