Finds from the Grind - Running Water

Here's a few scenes from my ride along the rivers on June 24th.

The main scene you should look at though, is the one where you can only see my hands. This particular week in June was the first time I'd been able to tuck my body down enough to rest my forearms on the tops of my handlebars. This also means it's similar to riding without hands: the core and the legs have to be strong enough and stable enough to handle most of the steering. Obviously, bumpy roads are no good because I'm not resting on aero bar attachments, but it's nice to be able to ride like the pros on good stretches of road.

The aero tuck position is only the latest extra skill I've added to my handling of a twitchy road bike. Since 2011 or so, I've picked something to work on besides my fitness during the year. I started with strengthening my right hand so I could hold the handlebars with just that hand (I'd only favored the left hand for about 8 years, which led to imbalanced core) and practiced grabbing bottles out of their cages with the left hand. I still remember that scary feeling of trying to pedal at the same time I'm leaning over on my left side. These days, that's my reflex.

The next year, since I'd learned to handle the bike with either solo hand, I worked on pedaling without hands at all. This is a useful skill for those times you can't avoid using two hands for something, like a reluctant zipper, unwrapping food, or holding your hands up in mock victory.

With that extra bit of balance and handling, the next year I worked on relying on my left brake (which handles the front tire) for all speed modulation. That means handling curves on descents. Since I was mainly using my right hand to handle water bottles and the handling was more balanced between the two hands, I didn't have fatigue in my left hand so much, which meant I could rely on it for braking and not worry about locking up my back tire trying to slow down anymore. I saw all my descent records fall in the year since.

This year, I decided that I should be able to handle riding hunched over without using my hands and just steering with my core and shoulders if I could handle sitting up and riding without hands at all. I felt that same thrill as learning how to ride without hands when I was able to string together several pedal strokes in a row while keeping a straight line. It was fun! And those dolphin yoga poses I used to do helped with the rhythm of my breathing. The only thing I needed to practice was figuring where my forearms liked to be on the bars without hurting and how bad the bumps have to be to grab the bars again.

Fortunately, this is the last time you'll see my hands blocking the camera like that, since I repositioned the camera.

A post shared by Joseph Morris (@joeschmo1of3) on Jun 30, 2017 at 9:04pm PDT

Well, you may see my fingers drop into view when I fold them up every once in a while.