All things come in threes they say. Of course that's entirely bullshit but nobody said that the average person understands statistics.
Today I went out for a 2 hour ride that went a bit longer than expected because I have the memory of a sieve. Perhaps if Garmin would sponsor me this wouldn't happen, but until then I will flange about trying desperately to remember which roads Craig took when he lead me through town on the ride all the cool guys do.
All in all it was an ok ride. 58 km in 2:15ish ~25km/hr. My usual. For some reason I have this bizarre hope that it'll be faster each time I go out but it never is. Maybe I should stop measuring.
But for this ride the most notable occurrences were the 3 cars that tried to make my life a little more interesting. And they succeeded. I got to yell at 1 and smack two of them.
The first person simply backed up onto the street without looking. I swerved, "Hey!" "Hey!" "HEY!" was enough to get him to slam on the brakes once I had gone by. No birds were flipped. I remembered that Toronto cyclists are supposed to start being nice.
The second was an old lady in a Ford. I had stopped at a light, something drivers think cyclists never do I presume, and was along side another car waiting for green. All of a sudden I saw a bumper about half an inch from my leg, followed by a bang on my elbow as the right side mirror flipped back on it's hinge. I smacked the car, and the lady turned right and drove off without so much as a "I'll get you next time my pretty!"
The third was close to home, where drivers feel that the bike lane is an overflow parking lot when the street parking is full of cars that seem to be permanent fixtures. It was the classic, "I'm gonna pass you and then pull over and brake" I found a hole between him on my right and the next car passing me on the left.
Good times. I'm fully expecting to crash any day now. I understand that the probability of crashing while riding a bike is 1.
Hmm...stats like that aren't encouraging my desire to ride outside the park or beyond the confines of the back-streets of my neighbourhood.
Posted by: Sarah Sosiak | 10/25/2009 at 12:16 AM