As many of you may know I have taken up cycling since arriving in Australia.  Everyone in my office cycles, Garreth and his wife have 8 bikes between them, Dave has more bikes and bike parts than I can count and Peter has 3 just for himself ( one of which he has loaned to me).  I invested in a new helmet and an awesome cycling shirt right away (for safety and style) but decided that I would just wear my jogging shorts and running shoes. What I discovered is that:

1. Maybe cycling shorts have those funny pads for a reason. The seat is hard, it chafes and my ass hurts.
2. It’s really hard to keep my feet on the pedals when I am on rough dirt trails

Giving these two discoveries I decided that I needed both a pair of cycling shorts and a pair of clip in cycling shoes. Fortunately they have “shy shorts” here which are nice loose shorts covering the tight spandex padded shorts so I got those. Then for the shoes, as I was trying them on Anthony and Peter gleefully discussed how much I was going to fall over and that I should wear gloves and don’t forget to loosen the clips on the pedals and so on and so forth until I began to have second thoughts. “Peter”, I said, ” can we go someplace nice and easy?” “Sure, he says. We’ll go to Lysterfield!”  Well now I know better.  Lysterfield is lovely, nice lake, beautiful plantation of eucalypts, hills, lots of trails, tree trunks, switch backs. In other words a mountain bikers paradise…. unless you were a complete duffer AND using  clipless pedals for the first time in which case it was a beautiful hell.  To be fair, in the beginning it wasn’t bad, well within my skills when not wearing my new deadly shoes. Sadly, Immediately I had a terrible and spectacular accident.  I was executing a brilliant jump over a tree trunk on a downhill………actually I had gone around a corner, quite slowly mind you, and then….I fell over, landing on my hit and shoulder, one foot still clipped in. I laid in pain, waiting for Peter to return and help me. I continued the ride, doing some trunk jumping, some technical switch backs, and some painful hills. Finally though I just couldn’t continue, going uphill required pulling back on the handle bars and that just killed my shoulder.

I went in for Xrays the next days and was relieved to discover that I didn’t break anything, though surprisingly I had previously cracked my collarbone and was unaware of it. It must have been when my shoulder got slammed by a steel storm door in Wyoming, who knew? The doctor feared then that I had torn my rotor cuff and referred my for ultrasound. However, it’s healing so quickly I have decided not to have it done unless a couple weeks from now it still hurts. In the mean time my hip has turned the most spectacular colours.

I went for another ride, just here in town, and my final results are:

1. Cycling shorts with the funny pads are wonderful. My poor sore ass feeling better and my shafed thighs are soothed. I did get a pair of padded 3/4 length tights that dont have the “shy” part…haven’t had the courage to wear them yet.
2. I *LOVE* my clip in shoes, more power and more control and they are comfy and cool. I wont ride without them and the while they feel a little scary still they are brilliant.