OPTIONAL ACCESSORIES

CYCLE COMPUTER

A cycle computer helps you making the most of your time on the bike. Try to keep your average speed a bit higher or finish a familiar route in a new record time a cycle computer will give you the inspiration needed to push harder and get fitter. If you commute on the same route every day, a computer adds a new dimension. Cordless cycle computers are much easier to fit and look neater on the bike.

REAR VIEW MIRROR

It is important to know what is happening behind you and never assume passing motorists see you.

REAR RACK

Be sure to have a good quality bike rack installed and have a bungee cord or rack strap handy to carry items such as a briefcase, shopping bag or other unexpected items.

BIKE BAGS OR TOURING PACKS

These are good general cycling equipement choices for holding and protecting most of the things you may need to carry. Also available are suit bags, front or rear mounted packs, and briefcases which attach to the bike rack.

WATER BOTTLE & CAGE

Add a water bottle and cage to your cycling accessories. It is important to avoid dehydration by getting into the habit of sipping water throughout your trip, even if you are not thirsty.

FENDERS
You may occasionally be caught in sprinklers, afternoon showers or puddles, so be prepared. Fenders can save your clothes and relieve you from always carrying a rain suit. They also keep your bicycle cleaner. There are effective clip-on fenders which can be removed without the use of tools.

BELLS and HORNS

Law says you must give an audible signal when passing pedestrians on paths, sidewalks or other facilities. The best way to do this is with a bell or horn that has a friendly pleasant sound which will not anger pedestrians.

NIGHT RIDING EQUIPMENT
There is always a chance that you might have to ride after dark, so be prepared. When cycling from sundown to sunrise or when weather or other conditions cause poor visibility, your bicycle should be equipped with a rear red reflector and reflectors on both sides . Also have a white front headlight, battery operated headlights are available and some have rechargeable battery packs.

FLASHING RED REFLECTOR LIGHT
These LED lights are more visible than a reflector and can be attached to you or your bicycle. Furthermore, the AA batteries will last at least a year.

REFLECTIVE MATERIALS
Reflectors and reflective materials are important even with good lighting systems because bicyclists are hard to see. Therefore you cannot wear too much reflective material at night. Wear it on your helmet, shoes, arms, legs, pedals, wheels and torso.

If you have any additions to this cycling equipment and accessories list, please leave a comment.

Thanks Katie!

Cervellum may sound like some Latin term from a medical dictionary, but that would be entirely appropriate because as well as serving as a GPS system and digital rear-view display similar to those seen increasingly in cars, it’s also a heart-monitoring device. It isn’t attached to your arm or chest — in fact, it’s not affixed to the body at all, but the handlebars on a bike.

According to ProductDose, this all-in-one device has a 3.5-inch screen and 32MB of space to store your fitness data, as well as a 4-hour battery.

All this doesn’t come cheap at $299 ($152), but we suppose there’s some consolidation savings because you won’t have to buy three or four separate products for these various functions. Besides, we applaud anything that prevents the need for those nerdsome helmet mirrors and gets more people onto two wheels.

From the perspective of a cycling motorist two main factors contribute to the difficulty of watching out for cyclists:
1. Many nighttime cyclists are not properly lit. This ranges from cyclists who completely lack lights, to cyclists who are poorly lit, to those who are well lit, but the lighting arrangement is visually confusing.
2. The behavior of many cyclists (night time or not) is often unpredictable from the perspective of a motorist, even this motorist who cycles (or this cyclist who motors).

At any rate, here are some tidbits to consider if you cycle at night:

-Cyclist fatalities occurred more frequently in urban areas (66%), at nonintersection locations (67%), between the hours of 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. (30%), and during the months of June, July, and August (36%). (NHTSA, 2004)
In 1999, 39% of deaths on bicycles nationwide occurred between 6 p.m. and midnight.

-Nearly 60 per cent of all adult fatal bicycle accidents in Florida occur during twilight and night hours although less than three percent of bicycle use takes place at that time.
Many factors compound the danger of riding at night, such as:
-Motorists driving under the influence of drugs/alcohol.
-Motorist’s ability to see what is ahead is limited to the area illuminated by headlights. Visibility is further reduced by the glare from lights of oncoming vehicles.

-The number of bicyclists killed at night has increased from 304 to 372 per year. In 1975, the number of nighttime deaths accounted for 30% of the total number of bicyclists killed. By 1982 (the latest year for which complete data are available), nighttime deaths accounted for 42% of the total number of bicyclists killed. One factor contributing to fatal nighttime bicyclist accidents is that the bicycles and riders are not readily visible to motorists. Motorists involved in car/bicycle collisions report that they hit bicyclists because the bicycles and riders were not visible. Cyclists’ failure to wear protective helmets may have also contributed to the severity of head injuries suffered in car-bike collisions.

1. If you cycle after dark, you may be sharing the road with motorists who are inebriated. Sorry, this fact is not negated if you are an inebriated cyclist.

2. If you are a bicycle commuter this time of year, you are riding in conditions that are stacked against you: The volume of automobiles is larger during commute hours, and it’s more difficult for drivers to see you. Add the glare caused by wet conditions and it’s even worse.

Answer: Staying active in the winter is vital to your health and essential if you want to maintain your fitness level.

No matter what your outdoor sport is, it is important to find an indoor alternative for when the weather is bad or the darkness gives you safety concerns.

Riding an indoor cycle is much better than not continuing your riding at all.

Much of your fitness gains will depend on where you are beginning.

Are you a beginner or advanced cyclist?

If you have spent many springs, summers and falls cycling and are conditioned to long runs, you will definitely want to keep up your activity during the winter so that you are not far behind where you left off in the coming season.

However, riding indoors and outdoors are very different things.

When you ride outdoors, you have many factors that influence and challenge your body.

The varying terrain and elevations cause your body to use everything it has to stay on the bike.

Your core (abs, back, glutes, and hips) are challenged to balance your body when you are moving in and out of traffic, dodging that pot hole or moving up a long graded hill.

When you are indoors your body is not challenged to such a great degree.

Sure you can increase the resistance to mimic the intensity found when hill climbing, but it is often not as intense as that seen outdoors.

The caloric expenditure is different when comparing indoor and outdoor riding.

When you ride outdoors on the road you can burn up to 720 calories per hour if you weigh at least 150 pounds and are riding 12 to 14 mph.

Most spinning classes include about 40 minutes of all-out cycling and they can burn close to 500 calories.

So the caloric burn is fairly close.

The intensity at which you ride and the terrain on which you ride on is very important in determining caloric expenditure.

Cycling on a recumbent bicycle at a more leisurely pace will burn somewhere around 400 to 500 calories in an hour. Again, the amount is highly influenced by the intensity at which you ride.

The same goes for running and cross-country skiing when comparing them to their indoor comparisons, the treadmill and a cross country machine.

Any time you can exercise your body outdoors, you are benefiting from many more elements, including varying terrain, elevation and your body can benefit from fresh air and nature.

The right road: ‘It’s absolutely fantastic,’ said Nicole Cooke of the launch of an all-Britain women’s team

For the last few years the Welsh-born 24-year-old has been a dominant force in her sport, as the youngest-ever World Cup champion, as world No 1 and twice as the winner of the Grande Boucle, the women’s Tour de France. She won the gold medal in the road race at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and followed up with a bronze in Manchester in 2006, despite an injury-interrupted preparation.

But Olympic success has been elusive. In Athens in 2004, Cooke could finish only fifth in the road race and 19th in the time trial. At that time, though, her preparation was compromised by the demands of racing for foreign-based professional teams, with an agenda often set by sponsors without Cooke’s Olympic interests in mind.

There was no injustice in that - they were her employers, after all. But the new, all-British team, with sponsors to be announced shortly, will be built around Cooke and, for the next year or so, will be directed with her Olympic ambitions as the number one priority.

“It’s absolutely fantastic,” Cooke said yesterday on a flying visit to London from her base in Switzerland. “This will be the first-ever British professional women’s team, and it’s the biggest step forward in the women’s sport in this country since I don’t know when.” The team will be guided by David Brailsford, the performance director of British cycling, who has brought such success to previous Olympic squads.
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Up to a dozen riders will compete for the team, which will tackle a programme of stage races and one-day events, always with an eye on Beijing and the world championships.

There was more good news for Cooke in a positive outcome to the keyhole surgery that she recently underwent to cure a painful knee injury. “The surgeon is very pleased with the outcome,” she said. “It feels as good as new.” The specialist has given her a DVD of the procedure, which was performed under a general anaesthetic, but Cooke will not be watching it. “No way, it would make me want to throw up. All I need to know is that it has worked.”

Cooke is now back in training on the mountainous roads around her home in Lugano. Today she will be riding for four or five hours: “Nothing too painful, just hard enough to do me good.”

Another young British sports star, Lewis Hamilton, attracted considerable flak when he announced his plans to relocate to Switzerland recently. Cooke expects no such attacks. Besides, her motives are entirely pragmatic. “Last year, I was racing for a Swiss-based team,” she explained. “And where I live is absolutely central for all the most important cycling events in Europe over the next couple of years.

“Women’s cycling is getting a lot more attention in Europe these days. We have gone from 24 professional squads to 41 in the last year, a massive increase. We would never have been able to put together a British women’s team five years ago.”

Part of the increased attention that the women’s sport is getting is a corollary to the dreadful goings-on in male cycling, in which every week brings a fresh drug exposure or confession and the premier event, the Tour de France, has lost any pretence of credibility.

“A huge amount of work is being done to restore credibility to men’s cycling, because sponsors and fans are demanding clean racing,” Cooke said. “We’re already there, we’re just standing there saying: ‘Hi, have a look at our sport.’

“Men’s cycling goes back so far that you have team managers who doped when they were riders, so it’s in the culture. They also have huge financial inducements, and we don’t have that.”

But is her sport entirely clean? “Let’s just say that the few rivals I’ve had suspicions about have been caught,” she said. “It’s annoying if they serve their bans during the off-season, or if their federations let them off lightly, but at least they are being caught. That’s the good news.”

As Wallack puts it, cycling is a panacea that can help you “roll into the triple digits –miles and age — on a bike instead of in a wheelchair.”

The book, a manual of sorts organized in digestible articles, sidebars and lists, offers how-to exercises and riding advice. (Wallack writes on health for the Los Angeles Times; Katovsky founded Triathlete magazine.)

On the longevity front, there’s an “antiaging strength plan” to revive reaction time, methods for avoiding back cramping and injury while riding, and advice on cycling and its effects on osteoporosis.

Bonus: The book includes interviews with aging stars of the sport such as Mike Sinyard, founder of Specialized Bikes, mountain-bike pioneer Gary Fisher and adventure cyclist John Howard, who might just be proving the authors’ premise to be true.

Pick a place to ride a bike, like the route to school or a friend’s house. As you ride, use the checklist to describe problem areas and things to change. After the ride, answer all of the questions and you’ll see how your route rates on the bikeability scale. Take heart if you find problems, there are many ways you can make things better.

Or you can fill-out an online version of this checklist at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website. Click on the link below, and then click on ‘How bikeable is your community?’ in the bottom-right corner.

Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute (VTPI) an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative and practical solutions to transportation problems, released a study yesterday that compares people’s satisfaction with their daily commutes.

Litman found that people with short, human-powered commutes were happier than their transit or motor vehicle-using counterparts.

Litman’s chart shows the likes and dislikes of various commuting methods.

His findings were released in a 37-page report titled, Valuing Transit Service Quality Improvements: Considering Comfort and Convenience In Transport Project Evaluation .(view PDF here)

Litman found that length of commutes was a key indicator of satisfaction (shorter commutes = happier people) and that the traditional practice of increasing highway capacity to speed them up is not a cost effective solution. From the study,

Conventional analysis favors highway expansion to increase traffic speeds, while more comprehensive analysis favors alternative modes to improve comfort and convenience.

Here’s an analysis of the report from Clark Williams-Derry of the Sightline Institute:

The happiest of all commuters get to work under their own power. Bikers express the highest levels of satisfaction, and least dissatisfaction, with their morning and afternoon treks. Walkers are close behind. I’m not sure if that’s because walkers and bikers tend to have shorter commutes, or because they tend to have pleasant or stress-free routes (otherwise, they’d choose another way to get to work). Either way, it seems like a good way to make people happier with their commute is, if possible, to give them a safe and quick way to get to work under their own power.

So the answer is simple. Build safer and more efficient bikeways and we’ll have a city full of happy people.

Calories burned in 10 minutes of activity

Cycling, 9.5mph

123-lb. Woman 56 calories
170-lb. Man 74 calories

Walking, 3.5mph

123-lb. Woman 45 calories
170-lb. Man 59 calories

(1) Cyclists cover 2.7 times as much distance in the same period of time as walkers. (9.5 mph / 3.5 mph)6

(2) 45 walking calories x 2.7 = 121.5 walking calories to cover same distance.6

(3) 121.5 calories vs. 56 calories: (121.5-56)/56 = 117%

So cycling is 117% more efficient than walking. That’s because cyclists travel nearly three times faster than walkers, but use only about 25% more calories to do so.