This is where the picture of me riding with no helmet would go if I had taken a picture.
Yesterday I packed up all my shit into the car before work, just in case I got a chance to leave early enough to hit my team's Tuesday night worlds, or maybe go to Wompatuck. In the interest of traveling light, I haven't been bothering with my race bag too often, because really, the way this summer has gone, am I ever going to need knee warmers? No. So I just throw the bare essentials into a reusable shopping bag and away I go. Lately I've been training on tubulars, because I have an old pair of GP4s with Tufos that I glued up for Battenkill back in 2006. I used them there three times, and at the Mt A TT (canceled this year BTW), and at some other races, but they aren't that light or that fast, so I don't race on them too often. Still, they've got some miles on them, but they're fine, so I may as well use them sometime. I've put together a separate set of seat bag goodies to take along when I ride them, with Pitstop instead of a tube, and of course I carry a spare. I made sure I had that.
I got involved in some real work later in the day, so first the TNW, and then Wompatuck became a pipe dream. Due to unpredictable traffic, 3:30 is the cutoff for the former, and 4:45 for the latter, if I want to warm up at all. No big deal, as I expected to be tired anyway. Around 6:15 I finished up and headed out to the parking garage. There was nobody around so I just got dressed next to my car rather than walk back in to the locker room. I got my bike ready, got kitted up, checked my bottles, and hmmmmm, what's wrong with this picture? No helmet. No gloves and no glasses either, as I usually place those in with the lid. Fuck. Really nice out, and I'm sort of jazzed to ride. It's already late-ish, and if I drive home it will be after 7 before I get rolling. What to do?
In the past 25 years, I think I've ridden without a helmet once, not counting when I'm adjusting my bike out in front of the house, or occasionally taking it off for a broiling hot MTB climb in a California canyon. At 115 degrees F, I've always felt the heat was more of a danger than falling over at 3 mph. The only time I can remember going sans headpiece for an entire ride was one time in the winter when I had just my helmet liner on for warmth, and never noticed the missing helmet until I was too far from home to bother turning back.
The helmet thing is purely a habit and something we're accustomed to. We don't really need them. Sure, I've broken three or four of them in crashes, but I also survived my entire childhood of riding without one, and that includes ramp jumps, wobbly wheeled homemade choppers with extension forks made from electrical conduit, construction site bmx, and all sorts of other two-wheeled hell raising. Car crashes are dangerous as shit, but nobody wears a helmet when driving. Even when I got my first bike as an adult, I rode for two years before buying one. But then I started racing. The "hardshell rule" was very new then. Most of the old-timers only wore them when racing. I was an oddity wearing my two pound Bell Windjammer on the Wednesday night training rides from the Blue Hill Hojos. But once I got it, I always wore it, figuring it you have to race in it, you may as well get used to the heat, and just wearing it in general.
In my second licensed race ever, at Brodie Mountain, aka Jiminy Peak, I crossed wheels with someone on Rt 7 and tumbled into a ditch, hitting my head and briefly losing consciousness. A few years later I had a close encounter with a tree at one of the Plymouth Cyclocross death pits, flat spotting the front of my crash hat. Another time at the Quabbin race, my solo breakaway got swept up by the sprint less than 100 meters from the line, and some clown sprinting for 25th cleaned my front wheel out from under me. I got burned to a crisp sliding on the hot pavement, but there wasn't much more left of my helmet but the straps after the initial impact with the ground. So I've always worn the things. Which is what made Tuesday night so weird.
I never ride without gloves either. And I usually have some sort of glasses too, at least at the start of a ride. But I was going to ride no matter what. And it was awesome. As luck would have it, I did remember to pack a Vermarc cycling cap, so I was rockin' the barehead in style. The first half mile felt strange, naked, but after that it was like where have you been all my life? You really can hear more. I felt -- younger is the best way to describe it. Lighter even. In just one ride, the whole thing made sense. Even though my legs were shit, I felt great on the bike. Yes, a bit more vulnerable, but great, and in control. Funny thing too, I headed over to Big Blue for some repeats, and some other guy there who I did not recognize was riding up and down on a brand new Cervelo R3 with Zipp carbon wheels -- and no helmet. Wasn't too talkative though. The first time going down I checked my speed, but by the third time I probably went down as fast as I ever have. Or at least it felt like it.
Having been to paradise, now what? I guess you don't miss what you never had. Poor kids today, their helicopter parents won't let them ride around the block without a helmet, if they let them ride a bike a all. And they'll never know the thrill of piling fifteen kids into the back of a pickup truck to bomb down "roller coaster road" to get an ice cream. Safety at all costs. Society changes. And so do I. Now tonight, I didn't want to wear my helmet. But I did. I spun over and rode around the neighborhood that I grew up in, in front of my old house, on the street where I first learned to ride a bike, with no helmet. It only sucked a little. Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment