How to ride a bike

Wow, gentle reader, it's been a while, hasn't it? I hope my other blogs have been keeping you entertained while this one has been on the bench. The truth is, there has been much travel in recent months- some of it very eventful but my thoughts have been elsewhere, and it was not until now that I have something pressing to write about.

And I'll get right to it.

I'm in New York. Have been for a while really. And while traveling out of New York is sometimes a pain, traveling within New York can be every bit as adventurous as a trek through the Sierras.

What I'm talking about here is biking. The life and death video game of NYC survival and recreation. I love my bike, and i love taking it around Manhattan and the boroughs almost as much as I love anything.

People often worry out loud about the dangers of biking in NYC- semis, cabbies, horse draw carriages, and regular old pedestrians are constant threats to your fun and safety. But perched a good foot above most car height, you are mostly safe from these wayward obstacles, provided you are paying attention. The real danger, as far as I can tell, is the semi-ubiquious pothole. Especially if you are tailing a vehicle or riding at night you may not see one of these road gashes until it's too late. Then boom. Even going slowly a pothole can dethrone you (I recently spilled while sliding up against an electrical wire going 0 miles an hour. Painful to both body and soul).

But there are potholes and there are potholes. The deep trenched that can throw you no matter what are actually somewhat rare, but the medium grade dips that can interrupt the inattentive are almost everywhere- 9th ave., the Village, and all over Brooklyn.

I ride a hybrid now, and there are no shocks. I've never ridden with shocks, really, so I can't say whether they would help with these. But in the past I have taken the approach to loosen my grip around the handle bars and let the bike slide around my hands as it bounces over the road pocks. But recently (after a spill) I found that there could be a better way to do this- and that would be to create your own shocks.

The Beta version of the technique went like this: grab the handlebars firmly. Firmly. Then relax your elbows, as much as possible, thus creating your own arm-shocks. Thus, if the bike was severely tossed by the turbulence, it would still not slip out of your hands. And you would get the shock absorption from the loose elbows.

This was a distinct improvement over the original loose grip technique which, in severe bumpage, could lose you the bike and much else with it, all the while reflecting why it is the girls' bikes with the low cross tube.

As I thought about teaching this new method, I realized that the real trick would be isolating the wrists from the elbows. After all, the arms like to work as a whole unit, and tightening the fingers while relaxing the elbows can be a bit of a mindfuck, even for yogis and drummers who are used to isolating their different muscle sets.

So today, a newer version dawned on me: forget the elbows. Relax the shoulders.

And this worked. You get the shock absorption you want from loose elbows, the tight grip on the handlebar, but somehow the isolation is less scratch-your-head-rub-your-tummy than the Beta version.

So go forth and experiment for yourself.

Run over some railroad tracks if you live in the sticks, or, better yet, go to the other side of them where the roads aren't maintained. If you've got an improvement on the shoulder technique, I'd love to hear it. But for now, I am set on my survival tactic for dealing with the mean streets and shallow craters that make New York City biking some of the most exciting in the world.