Copy from Jayne's Blog

 

I just about remember the day I learned to ride a bicycle, on a paved walkway outside our flat in Germany, when I was about seven years old.

I had what you would think of as a utilitarian, safety bicycle, which I absolutely murdered, riding off road and trying to jump. That one day changed my life and set out who I was going to become.

The next time a bicycle changed my life was when my brother Pauly introduced me to Mountain Bikes. The humble Mountain Bike has been a feature of my soul ever since I was sixteen years old, other than a brief period when I had to go without at the end of my degree.

I have worked in bike shops, I have worked as a Mountain Bike Instructor and a Guide. Mountain Biking was not just a hobby for me, it was a part of my personality. So as my mobility decreased and I lost my ability to ride, a part of my personality was lost with it. I grieved hard, those close to me will know how much I grieved for my sport.

In 2021, I was sent to see a Physiotherapist about my pain levels in my knees. He looked at my knees and noticed that they bend forwards rather more than is usual. He then looked at other parts of my body and saw something similar. Months before, my friend Dr G had seen me move and she announced that I was hyper-mobile. My GP at the time was close to retirement and discounted it, but the Physiotherapist confirmed Dr G's diagnosis. She was right, I have hypermobility, which is partly why I was able to climb so well as I did. I was able to bend myself in ways that were rather odd, but being able to bend my fingers backwards until they touched my wrist, was considered an extreme. However with age and time, I am stiffening up and losing a lot of my flexibility. The Physiotherapist did not pull his punches. It is only going to get worse, before it gets better, but when the pain stops, it will be because the joints no longer move. Brilliant.

The plus side was his advice. “Go mad, there is no more damage that you can do to your body, it's already knackered.” His second piece of advice was to upgrade to DI2, but we will come to that later.

Hearing the words “go mad...” was oxygen to my fire and I immediately set myself a challenge for 2022. I would user a turbo trainer and over the weeks, do a work out as often as I could and build up a total distance until I had achieved the same distance on my turbo as if I had cycled from Lands End to John O'Groats. On the 11th of November, 2022 I rode twelve Kilometres on my turbo trainer, completing one thousand, five hundred and ten Kilometres, following a route set out by Google Maps.

Sadly, the Physiotherapist was not entirely right by saying that I could do no more damage. Without getting too personal, lets just say that I ended up needing to see some specialists surgeons when I started bleeding inside and developed difficulties passing water. (peeing, not being adjacent rivers!) I had to have two procedures performed with my being under anaesthetic to try to trace the cause of the problems and because I didn't want to see the correlation, I didn't even think that my dear Mountain Bike could be the cause. It was only when I was finally forced off of the bike by severe pain and suffering that I made the connection and I was heart broken.

My spouse Carol, doesn't see the world like most people. If you present her with a problem, she will mull it over, apply her special brand of Carol logic and then present you with a solution that in all likelihood, you would never have thought of. I do not believe that there are any problems in the world that Carol could not fix if she put her mind to it. So she took me to a meeting with the thoroughly entertaining Freetrike in Exeter and persuaded me to try riding a three wheeler. Instantly I knew that this was the answer, however there was no way in hell I was going to be able to afford £10K for a new one and even second hand the prices were scary. But Carol is a force of nature and with the love and support of her incredible family, she set to scouring the online markets, finding obscure bargains. We met some lovely people as we looked for trikes and then a delightful man called Derek delivered a shiny red older model for me to look at it. It was love at first sight, but the old girl needed a professional mechanic to strip and repair some minor age related issues.

The first ride showed me that the gears were toast and the chain had been treated with what I assume was motorcycle chain lube, which was just a smidge too thick. I removed the chain and soaked it in a petroleum based product to clean and once it had been swilled and sorted, I applied my favourite Finish Line wet lube. The derailleur hanger was bent. It arrived bent and Derek informed me that he generally used the front chainrings and rarely changed the rear because they were so janky. I blamed Sram instantly, because I have worked on their products before and have often been left underwhelmed. However, with the aid of my even more janky Ali-Express derailleur hanger alignment tool, I was able to see just how far out it was bent, moving the derailleur out of alignment vertically and horizontally. In this situation, I would usually fit a replacement hanger, often from the always brilliant BETD. But on this occasion, I just bent it back into place, but a new hanger had been ordered, because it is almost certainly going to fail the next time it takes a hit or bending force.

With the derailleur properly aligned, I ran through the gears on my work stand and they were functional... Well to Sram X5 levels. The grip shift is as poor and difficult to use as I remember and quite frankly, this bottom of the heap rubbish needs to go. My eventual aim is to fit electronic gearing that will help with my dodgy arthritic hands. This will likely be in the form of Shimano DI2, but I have considered going into darker waters with something like L-Twoo, one by eleven speed. However, as much as I dislike Sram for their failure rate that was an issue when I was in last in the bicycle trade, L-Twoo are not just an unknown quantity, but a huge risk due to unreliability as they are still fairly new to electronic shifting and they are barely established in the western markets.

So with the trike running and everything working almost as it should, I set out for a first ride and my first impression was that ICE trikes are brilliant fun. However, going down hill at forty kilometres per hour (24MPH), the steering became so quick that it was terrifying and I genuinely thought that I was going to flip over. Thank Specialized, for their brilliant helmets... Just a shame that I had left it hung up with my MTB gear! For future rides, I will be using the helmet, because the thought of going to the sort of speeds where one of these things can flip over, fills me with Devilish glee!

Having hit forty KMH going down hill, I wanted to know how easy it was going back up hill, before I went on my usual training ride. It is very different climbing with a recumbent position. For a start, there is no extra power gained by standing up on the pedals. Instead, this is steady power and careful gear selection. With a front Deore triple (22-32-44) and a nine speed rear (11 – 32), climbing is not hard and if anything, the low wind drag is wonderful. Riding into a head wind, over taking conventional bikes was a novel experience. The cheers I got from the young mountain bike riders as I went past where they were chatting, was entirely uplifting.

The down sides to riding a trike though are serious. Never before have I felt so vulnerable on the road. I am less than a metre tall when riding and even with my flag fluttering in the wind (until it blew off on the sea front) I am still hard to see for many cars. I am also wider than most bikes, so passing close is extra scary for me. To ride on the road, you need to trust other road users and you need to apply your best skills. It is hard to prove you were in the right in road law, when you have been mashed by a Land Rover Discovery! Discretion being the better form of valour, there were times when it felt prudent to ride on the pavement, especially when the road is narrow or I am going to hold up traffic. However, I have undertaken advanced instruction when riding my motorcycle and I applied many of those skills when riding the trike. I do not want to end up as a pancake of flesh, goo and metal.

Riding the sea front was brilliant. My speed was slightly higher than I was on the mountain bike, both ways, even with a rather strong headwind heading home. The less good bits though were that as a triker, I am much closer to dogs, why people allow their extendable leads to trail out across the prom baffles me. Aggressive dogs were a worry. Also, people do not expect to see what is in effect a high speed wheel chair, whizzing along the prom. As I have found when using my mobility scooter, people see that and I become a disability and not a person. If you want to become invisible on the streets, just look disabled. However, you need to make sure that you look properly disabled, you don't want some overly entitled pecker head telling you that you are not disabled enough to park in the accessible bays! If you have something that is an invisible disability, get used to justifying your existence!

On getting home, I did not want to stop, so I started riding laps of my street. From our front door, around the corner, onto the straight, past the garages, around the corner, down the hill and around to the right and then a hard turn and up the hill to the front door is three hundred and thirty metres. Ten laps is three kilometres. Added to the seven kilometres of front door to the end of the sea front and back again, that gives me a total of around ten kilometres (give or take, the computer is reasonably accurate, but I wouldn't want to trust my driving license to it! Lapping the street gets boring very quickly, I know from previous experience, when I started riding again in 2022, I started out barely able to do three laps before I was knackered. Come the end, I could have ridden one hundred, but my brain would have melted out of my ears!

So what is my big take off from this? Firstly, I have got a new spark. I can ride again and I can do so without pain. I have not ridden a bike without pain since October, 2006. I even took my motorcycle training and test with a TENs machine attached to me. Today, I was on pain killers only and my body did the rest. It was brilliant, I loved every second. Yes, the gears were clunky, inaccurate and difficult to use with the awful grip-shift, but the rest of the bike was magnificent. This has, without hyperbole, changed my life for the better. I can ride again and I cannot begin to tell you how happy this makes me.

So it is with joy in my heart that I thank all of the people who have assisted me in getting here. You know who you are and you know what you did. Most of all though, I want to thank my partner in life, Carol. On this occasion, your solution worked out very well indeed.