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WHO: Open to all female student riders and female coaches and team volunteers registered for the 2013 Spring League Program.

WHEN:
Saturday, April 20, 2013
10am to Noon

COST: Free

WHERE:
St. Edwards State Park*
14445 Juanita Drive NE
Kenmore, WA 98028

* Please note that a Discover Pass is needed.

BikePT teaches the complementary relationship between musculoskeletal knowledge with bike equipment and its importance in injury reduction.

During this two-day event, the Bronze course – an introductory level education course – will instruct participants on the methods of working with a bicycling client.

Specific topics will include:

• Introduction to the bicycle
• Bicycling biomechanics
• Bicycle injuries
• Clinical evaluation of bicyclists and their equipment
• Setting up your clinic for the evaluation of bicyclists

The course will be led by Erik Moen, PT, the founder and director of Corpore Sano Physical Therapy and BikePT.

This is a 16-hour course that will take place on Friday, April 26, and conclude Saturday, April 27, with a bike ride around the Boston area.

Class will begin 8:00 a.m. on Friday and 9:00 a.m. on Saturday at 2 Constitution Plaza in the Charlestown Navy Yard.

Read all about the BikePT’s Bronze level course here.

Register here.

Bicycle Sundays are a great time to introduce kids to recreational road cycling, or to simply enjoy riding along beautiful Lake Washington on a safe road with no motorized vehicles.

2013 Bicycle Sunday dates:

May 5, 12 and 19
June 2, 16 and 30
July 7 and 14
August 25
September 1, 15 and 22

What do you see in this picture?

Left cleat has a more centered position than right. Right cleat is medial in attachment implying that the right foot sits wider on the pedal. Right cleat seems to be rotated in slightly, creating a slight heel-in bias of foot on pedal.

Cleats and shoe are obviously impacted with dirt. It is suggested that cleats be mounted to the shoe with a greased screw. This will improve your chances of removing the screw at a later date, when you need to replace cleats.

Shoe tread is worn. This will accelerate wear to the metal cleat when the bicyclist uses the shoe off the bike (walking, hiking, scrambling). What injury or pain syndrome might you expect this rider to develop? One could expect asymmetrical knee pain, either at the patella-femoral joint (knee cap), or laterally, representing the iliotibial band.

If this sounds overly technical, well, it is, but that’s because it is an important aspect of keeping riders healthy and on their bikes. These are the elements a BikePT Pro has to consider when addressing cleat alignment issues, cleat setup, foot/pedal problems, and rider pain.

It’s easy to overlook cleats as the source of a problem because cleats are often the most neglected part of a rider’s setup. They are out of site and out of mind until pain occurs, and even then the attention is often on the injury, not the cleat. Whether you are a rider or bike fit professional, checking cleats for wear and position is an important task.

The off-season should be a time to consider the use of new equipment and changes to your bicycle position. It’s also the ideal time to have a physical examination from your primary healthcare provider that evaluates blood/hormonal chemistry and cardiac function, and have a musculoskeletal exam to see how you measure up to your sport readiness.

My favorites off-season activities are to work on improvements with an aero position and consider the inclusion of new equipment. We have been working on a winter project that describes kinematic changes in accommodating long or short cranks. We’ve been utilizing Retül motion analysis and an adjustable Calfee sizer-cycle to see the impact of differing crank lengths on the aerodynamic position. Findings demonstrate an appropriate crank length range, revealing that relatively long cranks alter and interrupt the pedal stroke in aero position.

What are your great goals for the upcoming season? Start the dreaming and start the work. An off-season of planning and preparation is the key to a successful competitive season.

So how do I keep my motivation for training up? That’s a tough question to answer, but it gets a lot easier when I remember that bike time is my time. Regardless of the weather, riding is when I get to feel most alive. It’s time to forget about work or think about it more clearly, time for ideas to develop, or time to just take in some sweet bike meditation.

One great thing about riding in winter is the type of rides, which are simple in nature. Just getting out and ticking over the pedals at a good steady cadence is enough for the time to be valuable. It needn’t be any more complicated. I’m not concerned with going fast or winning sprints, and I don’t need to set any new climbing times. Just nice easy miles. Mostly, I focus on listening to my body and making sure I stay warm.

Keeping it conservative
When I’m feeling really good on a warm winter ride, I might mix in one or two short, informal, high-cadence intervals, usually as the road points downward slightly. I have an abnormally fast cadence anyway, so ticking it up a notch or two is not a big stretch. Still, I keep this to a minimum in winter to avoid injury. The point is to keep it interesting without going too far.

Since I’ve long had a tendency to push my body too hard too early in the year, often resulting in strained muscles or tendonitis, I try to keep in mind the advice of wiser riders to keep it slow and steady. On days when I feel like I could go another hour or two, I save the energy, which makes the next day’s ride far more likely to actually occur.

Keeping it fun
One of the most appealing things about cycling is the opportunity to open up your body’s throttle. If you sit at a desk all day, with trips to the break room vending machines your only active respite, getting on the bike is when life gets exciting again. Maybe that’s why keeping it slow and steady in the winter has always felt like a kind of punishment when it’s really still reward time.

The benefit to keeping it slow on winter rides is in spring and summer when I can really open it up and feel my winter training paying off. It feels pretty awesome. I’ve largely maintained the same type of riding in my post-racing years because it’s what I know, and there’s a nice benefit to that approach in that when I feel like racing, I always know I can put in about two months of steady miles mixed with mild hill intervals, then jump in a couple of races and do okay.

The knowledge that riding slow through the winter maintains fitness, makes me healthier, and keeps my good form at the ready should I decide to race, all keeps my motivation high for riding through the cold winters.

Japanese roads are different from their American counterparts for a number of reasons. Beyond the first-noticed change in direction of traffic (Japan drives on the left); road width and the availability of a shoulder are probably the factors that stand out the most. Cycling in Japan is very enjoyable but some mental adjustments are recommended in order to fully appreciate the experience.

More seasoned riders understand that making a car wait and taking the amount of road space in which they feel safe is far preferable to attempting to squeeze into an uncomfortably small sliver of the road. This is particularly true if the line the cyclist is trying to hold is so small that they continually weave all over the road, potentially causing an accident. In the United States, however, there are typically wide shoulders on many roads that a cyclist might ride on. As a result novice cyclists are really never forced to learn to take the space they need when confronted with roads without shoulders. Indeed, many novice cyclists simply avoid these roads altogether.

In some ways these shoulders do cyclists a disservice. Not only do they enable us never to learn how to ride in the same space as cars but the cars don’t learn how to appropriately drive in the vicinity of a cyclist either. The argument could be made that shoulders and bike lanes sometimes make bikes less visible to cars, not more. Motorists tend to pay less attention to things not actually on the road, making bikes more vulnerable to being turned into or squeezed off the road if the bike lane or shoulder disappears unexpectedly. Cars also tend to feel that they have plenty of space to pass fast, and anyway the attitude of most people on the road in US cities is that they can’t wait to be where they are going. In the case of Japan it is doubtful that attitudes or people are substantially different from those in the US, but the roads certainly are.

Urban Riding
In the city the destination oriented mindset is tempered by narrow roads that are sometimes not even big enough for two cars to comfortably exist, let alone the myriad bikers, walkers, and dogs nearly always on the roadway. Because of the narrow roads there is no choice but for cyclists to take up some portion of the roadway – after all, if you are riding a road bike the roadway is all there is (Japanese riders on cruisers or “mama-chari” bikes are more likely to ride on the sidewalk than in the road if a sidewalk is available – the sidewalk is rather chaotic, partly because of the mama-charis, but also because of the numerous pedestrians there). This sharing of the road can be a little nerve-racking even for experienced cyclists in that there is just so much going on. Of course, no one would suggest that a person ride through Shibuya crossing in Tokyo.

Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo

That doesn’t mean that there will not be times when it is necessary to ride through streets that are filled with cars, pedestrians, mama-charis, dogs on leashes, etc. on the way back to a hotel or house if cycling anywhere near Tokyo (keep in mind that over an hour away by train still counts as near Tokyo). Even when one moves farther from the city the narrowness of roads will still ensure that bikes and cars must exist in the same place at close to the same time. This doesn’t have to be something to worry about so long as the rider is comfortable in the space they have chosen to occupy. In fact, motorists appear to be relatively patient with cyclists. Particularly when compared with the road rage one may sometimes find in the US.

Making the selection of roadway even more important are the numerous obstacles and pitfalls on the road. In urban areas the main issues are high curbs (which unexpectedly change drastically in height; for example from not being a curb to suddenly being a foot tall), telephone poles which encroach into roadways, numerous manhole covers and road paint that become slippery when wet, and of course the other people on the road.

A side street in Yokosuka City, Kanagawa Prefecture

It is always important to pay attention to the obstacles down the road when riding in any country. Here it is absolutely essential because of the number of obstructions, but also because certain barriers (manhole covers, curbs, some road paint) are not especially visible in advance. Taking in the foreseeable obstacles (people, cars, telephone poles) can help avoid last minute maneuvering that could lead to swerving in front of a car or another cyclist.

Regarding both urban and rural riding, the roads in Japan tend to have corners that are much sharper than those in America. Given this, it is important to watch out for mirrors. The first time a fellow rider told me this I was a bit confused. Thinking that he meant those attached to cars, I wondered whether I wouldn’t be better served to watch out for doors, as opening car doors seemed like a much larger and more potentially maiming obstacle to avoid. I realized after a short time however that the mirrors he was referring to were those that were attached to walls, buildings, and poles that showed the oncoming traffic that lay around the corner. Now I find myself lamenting the absence of mirrors when a corner appears to have been overlooked in mirror placement. Although the angle of corners in Japan may be sharp, the mirrors elongate sight distance in order to compensate.

As one might imagine, these sharply angled corners do not lend themselves well to a grid system. In fact it appears that plots of land must have been owned by individuals before roads were put in, and instead of buying the land and repurposing it as a roadway, the state simply build around.

Riding Farther Afield
If urban riding isn’t something you are interested in, that doesn’t mean that cycling in Japan is not for you. There are wooded areas available even from relatively close to Tokyo, and a large National Park only about an hour away from downtown by train. Around 70% of Japan is covered by forest¹ so it follows then that not all of Japan looks like the middle of Tokyo.

The good news about riding in areas that are farther away from city centers is that on roads with higher speed limits telephone poles no longer occupy a portion of the street, and there are fewer pedestrians that look as though they may jump out into the roadway. On the other hand steep concrete ditches begin to make an appearance. These are usually about a food wide and 2 feet deep. Sometimes they are covered continuously by cement slabs, but more often they are covered intermittently – ostensibly to prevent a car from driving in completely – while creating what seems like a much more painful stop than would be obtained by simply burying oneself completely in the ditch. These ditches are a great reason to stay away from the very edge of the road.

Japan, being a series of volcanic islands, is also quite mountainous. This is a further complication which may contribute to the lack of long straight roads as discussed above. As one might assume, it also leads to the creation of numerous tunnels and bridges. Many times the number of tunnels, just like the number of ditches, increases as you exit the cities. Tunnels come in many varieties and can basically be divided into three types.

Firstly, the most common tunnels are those that are dark and relatively narrow. They are varying in length, with some being so dark in the middle that it is impossible to see without removing sunglasses. A bike light goes a long way towards alleviating this issue. Additionally, a rear flashing light is a really nice addition to a bike in any country, but it is particularly helpful in these types of situations.

Secondly, one will more rarely encounter short wide tunnels that are relatively well lit and sometimes include a sidewalk and two lanes in either direction. These are the easiest tunnels to navigate.

Thirdly and lastly are the rarest of the tunnel varieties; those that are wider but very long and serve as a high speed passage from one side of a large hill to another. Typically these tunnels have sidewalks that are separated from the roadway by a large concrete half-wall. As much as I dislike riding on sidewalks, in this case – use the sidewalk. The great thing about these tunnels is that they are so long that most pedestrians don’t use them. You’ll have the sidewalk mostly to yourself and won’t have to worry about avoiding the cars without the benefit of a shoulder. Occasionally you may also come across longer tunnels that are not so well lit but do have a sidewalk. I don’t use these. Who knows what might be lurking in the middle of the sidewalk halfway through the tunnel? I’d rather not have to swerve into traffic to try to avoid whatever road sign or sidewalk marker might lie ahead. Of course as with any article of this sort, use your best judgment.

When we first moved to Japan I found that riding here was more mentally challenging than riding in the States. Perhaps someone accustomed to riding in New York would have a different view, as I’m sure the obstacles there are just as numerous as those here. I do believe however that the construction of the roadway in Japan is fundamentally different from that in the United States. Perhaps this is because of the age of the roadway or the way they were originally laid out. Regardless of why, I found that riding here does take some acclimatization – if you will. That being said, it does not take very long to feel comfortable here on the bike, and just as with any different system, there are both benefits and downsides of the more chaotic nature of Japanese roads.

1) “Statistical Handbook of Japan 2012” Statistics Bureau, Japan.
    http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/c05cont.htm. Dec. 31, 2012.

Also, see the bicycle-friendly rankings for every state on the League of American Bicyclists site.