Ow, ow, ow - you bastard!

Had a little scrape tonight - all my own fault. A fast pack coagulated in Pyrmont at a set of lights, and I jumped on the back for a bit of action. As we hit the ramp onto the ANZAC bridge, a pedestrian stepped right out in front of me. The ramp has a big pole in the middle of it so that traffic keeps left - I had no option but to go the wrong way around the pole, and in doing so, I ended up leaning in all the wrong directions. Centripetal force did its thing, and I overbalanced and went sideways into the concrete barrier that lines the ramp.

Thank goodness it was a concrete barrier, rather than a fence with poles; and also that it was higher than my head at that point. I simply rubbed along it at a decent clip on my upper arm and the back of my hand until I regained my balance and took off again. I was going fast enough to take the back off the glove and to rip a nice hole in the sleeve of my jersey. They took most of the damage - I have a small abrasion on the back of one knuckle where the glove gave way and another on my arm. I look like I've been attacked by a small kitten with blunt claws.

I think I'll feel it in the morning though - I reckon I pulled a bunch of muscles as I fought to get off the wall. They'll stiffen up overnight, so getting out of bed could be nasty.

The whole thing was my fault - I was going too hard in order to try and maintain contact with the pack, so when the pedestrian stepped out, my options were severely limited. But it was also one of those days - I was riding quite shockingly before that little bit of rubbing (as they like to say in NASCAR). I was all over the place like a mad woman's breakfast. Riding hard when you're not riding well is not the smartest thing you can do on a Monday.

Monday photos

The heat is finally over - if anything, the drop in temperature was so great, it felt like I was freezing (even though it was a balmy 22 degrees). After a week of broken sleep and hard riding, I was so shattered, I slept for over an hour past my normal wake up time. That didn't matter - i didn't have to worry about getting up early to avoid frying this morning. I wish it would rain though - the lawns need a good drench.

I was waiting at a red light on Friday when this bloke in a motorised wheelchair zipped past me. The lights went green just then and off he went. I fumbled locking my cleat in, so by the time we got through the intersection, he was in front. I then had no hope of passing, as his wheelchair didn't keep a particularly straight line at speed. Every time it hit a small bump (and this newly laid bike lane is a mass of lumpy tar), the wheelchair kicked one way or the other. I really didn't want to end up in the paper as "mad cyclist takes out disabled bloke", so I hung back and relaxed for a few seconds. If only Sydney's impatient drivers would learn to do the same from time to time.

I don't know if it was the change in weather or my very late start, but the route in was covered in bikes this morning. When I hit Pyrmont, I had six in front of me at one set of lights and at least a dozen lined up behind. It was almost getting crowded. Every one of the bastards in this photo overtook me at one point or another - I don't think I was that slow; rather, I reckon none of them rode through the heatwave, so they were all fresh as daisies whilst I was totally wrung out and knackered. At least that's my excuse for being the hubbard today. If you don't know who the hubbard is, then it's you.

Your typical Cyclist Commuterasi (my Latin terminology) - complete with nifty little dual panniers and camelbak. I've never tried riding with a camelbak - it would have been bloody nifty last week in the heat.

A couple of vids

Blogger's video processing engine stalled on me a few days ago - it simply refused to process the video in this post - I think it has finally emerged and is ready for viewing.

Here's the first in a series of short-short vids. This first is called "death by taxi". I wrote about it a few days ago. I was annoyed at being held up by the slow moving taxi in front of me, but I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and decided against making any potentially suicidal overtaking moves. A cyclist coming up behind me thought he could safely overtake the taxi on the outside, but he was wrong. I know from experience that when cars go around this corner, they always go wide to the right. That's what this taxi did, and the cyclist almost got squished between it and a low concrete divider.

The second one shows a mum carrying a kid stepping out in front of me without so much as a glance in my direction. You can't see her head in the video - and I couldn't see it in real life either. Her kids head was blocking her view in this direction. Instead of looking around her kid, she just stepped off the tram platform. I've seen boneheads do this in the past when a tram has been coming along instead of a bike. Luckily for both of us, I saw what she was doing and guessed that she was about to step in front of me, so I stood on the brakes before she actually departed the platform. A more aggressive and less aware cyclist would have cleaned her up - along with the kid. Headlines would then blare "mother and child run down by insane cyclist", rather than "idiot steps in front of cyclist without bothering to look".