Strapped on for dear life

This weekend I finally grew a pair, slipped on my bike shoes, strapped myself to my bike and hoped for the best. And it wasn't bad! We did 20 miles around the suburbs south of Denver and I'm completely in love with my new bike. Even with a 20 mph headwind, I was leading our pack going up a solid 5-10 mile climb. I never thought I'd like hills! Ok, so I still don't LOVE hills, but they don't fill me with dread anymore.

I had no troubles clipping in and out of my pedals and could really feel the difference. And while I usually rode by myself, riding with a whole pack was much more enjoyable. All of these positive outcomes really had me feeling good about my decision to upgrade my bike. Over the past month, while I've been too nervous to try out the new pedals for the first time, I started second guessing myself and worried that perhaps I had spent way too much money. I haven't. It's totally worth it.

Since my big scary first ride was out of the way, I decided to ride to work today on the new bike instead of the old one. I think I got a little cocky. As I was coming down my back alley, the garbage truck was backing up it, so I pulled off into a little gravel parking area, promptly forgot to unclip and fell over. I've been told by all cyclists that everyone falls over at least once, so hopefully this was my time. My palm is a little raw and my shin for a good raspberry, but all in all, it was mostly just my ego.

As I was sitting on the ground, still locked into my pedals, the garbage truck driver walked past and asked if I was alright. It was at this point that I realized, I can't get my shoe out of the clip. Instead of the typical road bike clips, I have mountain biker clips, for no reason other than the free shoes my boss gave me came with those on them. These clips have two screws that bolt them to the shoe. At some point between Saturday and this morning, one of those screws came out, so as I tried to twist my foot to pop the shoe out, it would instead keep rotating. I'm throwing this into the "thank goodness I found out when I did" category, because if I had tried to unclip at an intersection, I would have found out unexpectedly that I could not and likely would have fallen into traffic.

So the garbage man helped hold my shoe while I put my foot back into it and I proceeded on my way to work, clipping in and out with my left foot instead. When I got to my office, I just took my foot out entirely and walked to the elevator with one stocking foot.

Thankfully, my boss has an extra pair of shoes with her, so I'll use those after work to ride to REI to get my other shoe fixed. So long as we can figure out a way to pop my broken shoe out of the clip!

And so my adventures in riding begin...