Jens Voigt Imitation

Gravel. 

Most of my crashes have been gravel crashes.  All of them hurt.  Not only do you suffer the indignity of succuming to gravity, the fear of being mooshed by a following car and the aggrivation of spoiling your paint, but you also have a weeping mess where good looking leg used to be.  I always land on a leg, as I did recently.

All was going well on a quick test ride after being fitted on a new bike.  The bike, a Felt F75, is the best bike I have ridden so far, and, most importantly it fits.  My girlfriend, Lilly, gave me a gift certificate at Christmas for a free fitting at Life Cycles here in Eugene, so I took my Frankenstein ride in to be fitted.

Gilad at Life Cycles took one look at it and said, "I can already tell you what's wrong, but put it up on the stand and I will show you".  Gilad doesn't simply tell you what you need, he takes you through the process of discovering why you need it, explaining how the body works and how best to fit a bike to it.  Gilad showed me how the frame on Frankie, a Scattante frame with a conglomeration of parts from many other bikes, was too small for me.  We could get a fit that was close to being optimal, bit would still cause me problems.  The solution was a larger frame, so, just for demonstration purposes, I tried out a new bike straight off of the showroom floor.  A little, quick wrench twiddling by Gilad and I hopped onto the saddle.  The effect was immediate.  I felt so much better on the new bike that I anounced, "This is it", and we finished the fit on my new bike.

I took the bike out for a quick spin and felt better than I have ever felt on any bike.  It is stiffer than  anything else that I have ridden and it carves turns so nicely that I was soon traveling faster than ever through the bendy stuff.  I ran it through the recomended 20 hours of riding before taking it back to be adjusted and tuned.  Gilad took me through that last parts of my fitting be selcting bars, "Drop your arms to your sides and look in the mirror.  See the natural angle of your elbows?  That's 9.5 degrees pronate.  It should be the same when your hands are on the hoods.  If the bar is too wide or too narrow that angle will change."  We made some minor adjustments and I took the bike home.

I had time for a quick ride before Lilly got home so I changed, grabbed my iPod and took off.  I followed the very popular Fern Ridge path, weaving past runners, walkers and other bikers.  I reached the far end of the path and then turned onto Green Hill Road which parallels part of the path the trip back. My intent was to ride the road until it met up with the path again, thus avoiding a clot of people that I had to weave through before.  Green Hill Road is a bowling alley with no shoulder to ride on, which makes me a tad nervous and makes me ride faster, so I was traveling at a good clip when the turn back onto the path came up.  I braked hard and threw the bike into a tight turn.  Such a sweet turner!  I didn't notice the narrow strip of gravel at the edge of the road.

I fell in typical gravel-crash fashion, fast and hard.

Jens Voigt 'fact':  "Jens Voigt doesn't get road rash, the road gets Jens Rash."