Bike Transition Skills

After my debacle at the mount line of not being able to get on my pedals and clip in, I am starting to take very seriously my buddy ML's admonition that jumping onto shoes that are already attached to the pedals is the way to go. I know there is some trick with elastic bands that hold your shoes level on the bike, but I will have to do a session with him to get through that.

Tonight I took my bike down the street to the Waterfront Trail, the 1.1km site of my ultra-short try-tri brick workouts last year, just to practise handling the bike safely while reaching down to my shoes with my hands, etc.

Dude reaching for his shoes. (those are my exact bike and shoes!)

New Skillz practised, mostly did each over and over for the 1.1km length or more:

• reaching down with hand to shoe loop
• reaching down and holding loop for a few seconds
• pulling strap off
• pulling strap back across
• nice tight turns at the turn-arounds
• pulling feet out of shoes (I lost a shoe a couple of times, and it dragged on the ground)
• pedalling on top of shoes
• running while holding the bike's saddle
• steering the bike by pulling the saddle in and pushing it away
• getting onto bike with the right foot in the shoe
• reaching down and pulling the loop up, re-strapping shoe
• kicking into the other shoe, which was extremely difficult with it hanging upside-down! (this is where the stupid elastics come in)

Other Skillz I threw in:

• checking over my shoulders while in aero
• making turns on a slight downhill in aero
• going over rough ground in aero

Wow, all this took probably an hour, but I got so confident so quickly! At the start, I didn't think I could reach all the way to my foot at all without falling over, especially on the left side, as for some reason I've grown accustomed to doing stuff with my right and holding the bike with my left - right down to switching the left gears with my right hand! (Don't mock me.) But I took to this constant reaching down very quickly. I could even do it from aero safely at the end.

I read that while you're doing each of the skills for each shoe, you should break up each action by pedalling for 15secs or so,  to keep a decent speed up so you can be more stable. So the above skills were done by taking a few pedal strokes in between each, but I'll have to pedal more IRL.

At the end, I did one more out-and-back ride at full speed, just cause I wanted to fly on the straight-away. (:

--Distance: ~20K, but lost count of the back-and-forths
--Duration: ~60mins, dunno

When I got back home, I went for a ~1K running loop around the block to shake out my legs. I realized from the race photos that I'd basically forgotten how to run. Gah. So I focused heavily on skills - midfoot striking, abducting my knees, more bounding strides. I didn't feel pain, but I did have a kind of tightness through the left hamstring, like I still can't open up my stride. Baby steps.