I’ve picked up some bad habits over the years on my bike.
Back when I was a kid, my parents would always have me bike on the bike trails or on the sidewalk. But it turns out, statistically speaking, that it’s a good way to get crunched… and it’s also illegal to ride on the sidewalk.
So I’ve pretty much taken the Critical Mass approach that “We’re just traffic” and follow the bike path. I give parked cars enough clearance to avoid a door prize, even if it means that I’m right along the edge of a bike path. And otherwise I just make like traffic and avoid main thoroughfares. At the part where Grant and Foothill Expressway run parallel, I end up taking Grant and riding in the street because there’s a lot fewer cars on Grant.
My first girlfriend broke her ribs going over the handlebar while going downhill. She blamed it on the use of the front brake. According to the advice I’ve heard, the real thing that sends you over the handlebar (excepting the case where you are on a fixed-gear bike and you stop pedaling and the accumulated kinetic energy in your biking system sends you flying) is not bracing against the handlebar… and on dry pavement, it’s best to use the front brake exclusively. So I am working on my feel for the brakes. I felt it the other day… I just laid on the front brake and realized that I really needed to be bracing hard or I’d be going flying.
In the right conditions, my bike will wheelie. I was fascinated because I’d never managed to get a bike to do a wheelie. I accidentally popped one in my morning commute and then I spent my entire evening commute popping them on the way home. My goal is not to be able to do a way-back stunt wheelie, because that’s just a fast road to a broken bone (and Vicster and Mrs. Wirehead and probably others will give me crap about doing too much stunt biking) but to be able to avoid stuff on the ground with wheelies and bunny hops. So I can pretty reliably pop a wheelie now. I’m just working on the control necessary to pop it at the exact right spot so as to not end up with the spokes on my front wheel all bent out of shape because I ran into a curb.
Apparently it’s most efficient to maintain a fairly fast cadence… which I cannot do at the moment. The advantage is that it gets your bum off the saddle and moves more support to the feet and you work better… but it requires some muscles that I don’t quite have developed enough yet because it starts to hurt after a bit. On the other hand, I can maintain a slower cadence pretty easily.
I also found out that I can use an old P&S camera case as a holder for one of my flashes. So I can now efficiently carry the G7 and one flash on my handlebars, for extra biking fun.