And the camera was off

Mother bear and two cubs ran across Elm Street in front of me on my ride to work this morning. I slowed to nearly a track stand as I waited to see if there might be more than two cubs. A hill begins at that point, and I didn't want to find myself trying to outsprint a protective mother bear on a climb.

The incident made me consider different scenarios. I've seen mothers and cubs along there before, and single bears as well. They come out of the woods with little apparent caution, treating the road as simply an open space to cross as soon as they reach it. Conceivably, one day I could be zipping along and inadvertently come between the emergent mother and a following cub. That would be a serious test of my adrenal glands.

I'd rather not find out.

Moose are supposed to be more dangerous, and I've seen those along that part of Elm Street as well. But they don't have the infamous mother and cub relationship to charge a situation.

After shooting and discarding hours of videos of my commutes and other rides, I tend to leave the handlebar cam shut off except in certain areas where traffic could misbehave. So I got no video of this rare treat.

Work itself is just an interruption between rides. The repairs have tended to be grubby and uninteresting. Today I spent about three hours at a gym down the street, doing minor maintenance on their spinning bikes. They're all rusty and salt-crusted. The work is simple, but time-consuming. I got lucky today, when I discovered that someone in the management of the gym had ordered some handy spare parts without being asked. The gym had a shakeup in management, and my previous liaison was leveraged out. He had been pretty well informed about the bikes and their proprietary parts. Apparently, he anticipated a little more than the ordinary worn-out chain. So, when I found one unit that had a crank arm bolt snapped off in the bottom bracket axle, I was able to find parts to replace the axle. This was after I had tried unsuccessfully to drill out the stub of the bolt.

On the way home I had the camera on most of the time. Of course nothing interesting happened. Just let the battery die or the memory be full, and aliens will land in front of me. You'll have to take my word for it.

The invisible bike

On a sleepy weekday last week I brought the helmet cam and a fixed-gear bike to work so I could shoot video while I rode delicately around the tight course on the sales floor. I'd ridden the rollers a couple of days, but it's more fun to ride where you can maneuver.

Because my netbook and the shop computers are too feeble to handle high definition video files I couldn't view my clips until I got home to the Macbook. The results surprised me.

Helmet cam videos shot in the outside world convey the movement of the bicyclist through familiar or plausible environments, on road or off. Depending on where the camera is mounted you might even see a bit of something to suggest the actual presence of the bicycle. But often it's really just a camera flying through space. We know it's on a cyclist because we've been told that. The movement matches what we know from our own cycling.

In my indoor videos I might as well be walking. On second and subsequent viewings I can start to pick up a bit of the fluidity of being on wheels, but for the slow bits where I'm tiptoeing through a narrow space nothing really indicates I'm riding a fixed gear dextrously down that alley except for my claim that this is the case.

As you may hear on the video, we're always trying to come up with revenue-generating ideas. I proposed a time trial around this indoor course. Riders could win discounts based on their times, but they have to pay full price for anything they break.

This next video is titled "Trouble in the Far Turn." That 180 down by the bikes has taken out many a rider. Okay, it's only taken me out, but it's done it many times. When the ski waxing station is set up you can easily nip the end of one of the waxing profiles and get thrown off your line.

Maybe next week I'll try a handlebar mount for the camera to try to get more of the bike perspective. I'm sure y'all can't wait.