A Quick But Necessary Discussion About Bicycling In Dallas and Other Parts North Texas, Part 3
(Remember how, in the days of standard episodic television before streaming and binging, many dramas and some comedies would give a thumbnail update starting with “Previously on…”, flashing scenes so fast that people starting midway through a season or story were more confused than before? Well, that’s what this newsletter is like. Look at these as regular updates of how the sausage is made, with what, and whether or not the staff washed their hands after they used the toilet. Or, worse, if they only washed their hands before using the toilet.)
(For those coming in late, this is an ongoing installment on attempting to become a commuter cyclist in the Dallas area. If you want to get up to speed, please feel free to get caught up on Part 1 and Part 2. If you don’t, there’s all sorts of other stuff on this here Web site, so dig through the archives for a while. Nobody’s going anywhere right away.)
Okay, so you picked out your preferred bike, or at least the one that’ll do while you get up to speed. You got essential safety gear, made sure it fits and fulfils its purpose, and installed it where necessary. All you have to do on Monday morning is hop on, pedal to your destination, and go about your business, right? Right?
Well, kinda. The real fun comes when you start riding. You’re going to learn so much about yourself, and not just your physical endurance. You’re going to learn about your ability to focus, your ability to improvise, and your general level of patience. You will see all sorts of little wonders that make your day worthwhile, and you’ll see things that will make you want to drop the whole planet into the sun. It’s the same thing as driving, only all under your own power. The real question is whether or not you’re up for it, and that isn’t intended as snark.
The general assumption with many, MOST, beginner cycle commuters is that you’ll get up on Monday morning, chug a cup of your favorite morning beverage, strap on your helmet and other safety gear, and rush to work. You’ll get there without issues, have enough time to give yourself a spongebath if your employer doesn’t offer complementary showers or a nearby gym, dress for success, and then reverse the process at the end of the day when it’s time to come home. It’s a nice dream, honest. Even if you’ve been touring your immediate neighborhood and the local bike paths, there’s still a big gap between that, where you’re not really in a hurry, and getting to work on time with enough time to clean up so you don’t walk into the office looking as if you lost a water balloon war. There’s also a big, BIG difference between your casual rides after you get home from work or on Sunday mornings and having to deal with the worst of rush hour coming and going, and proper preparation for your first day will help you decide whether you keep going. So without further delay, it’s time to discuss where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and what condition you’ll be in once you get there. First and foremost:
Scope Out Your Route
Even if you know your general route, try scoping out the route in a car and measure the distance. In fact, do this before you get a bike, just in case the trip is further than you assumed. Besides studying the odometer, study the route itself. Look for school zones, construction sites, high water signs, and areas where you might not be able to get off the road when you need to get off the road. Watch for blind driveways and alleys, obstacles that can block a cyclist from the view of an inattentive driver (pampas grass and bamboo plantings are horrible spots to be behind when a driver is too busy worrying about getting home early on Memorial Day Weekend, he said from personal experience), and outflows from store or office parking lots. Consider alternate routes that get to the same place, if only to avoid rush hour shenanigans. When you get to your workplace, look to see if you have places to lock up your bike (some employers will put racks up in the office so bikes don’t have to be left outside) and really WATCH your co-workers’ driving habits. There’s nothing funnier, in pure gallows humor, in realizing that a co-worker or boss has a “It Can Wait” bumper sticker advocating putting down the cell phone while they’re moving through the parking lot solely through the force of their texting thumbs.
When you get back after your trip, assess it, as brutally and honestly as you can. Would you feel safe in full daylight? Would you feel safe an hour before dawn or an hour after dark? Would it make more sense to hold off and continue training in your neighborhood while that road construction is finished? (Fun fact: the DART bus and train system in Dallas allows for cyclists, so you don’t have to cycle all the way from the suburbs to downtown if you choose not to do so. In fact, taking the train is an excellent way to bypass the worst of highway traffic for events in Deep Ellum, Fair Park, or the northern suburbs.) If you don’t feel safe, don’t ride. It’s as simple as that.
Scope Out Your Route AGAIN
People try to tell me all of the time about how flat Dallas is. These people have never had to travel Dallas by bicycle. This is why, after you’ve scoped your route, you want to make at least one dry run before committing to changing your daily commute. I recommend doing so early on Saturdays so as to avoid the day-drunk church crowds on Sundays, but if you have a day off that’s not working hard, do it during the week between rush hour. This time, you’re going to pay even more attention to the route, particularly if bike paths and lanes are available. Is the path in good repair, or are you having to dodge fae nesting sites every few minutes? Is what appears to be a nice flat route by car really a hilly nightmare by bike? If taking bike paths along greenbelts following streams, are there signs of flooding or habitual high water where you don’t want to be caught during a thunderstorm? If a thunderstorm blows in out of nowhere, will you have a safe space to wait it out without risk of impersonating Reddy Kilowatt by the time you get to work? (You laugh, but I’ve not only dodged and evaded multiple thunderstorms that would have otherwise killed me, but a hailstorm that dumped grapefruit-sized hail along half of my route and ball lightning that formed just off my right shoulder.) And the other drivers: do they appear to want to stay in their own lanes, or do they wander into bike lanes or, worse, do they respond to someone on a bike lane by swerving into oncoming traffic to pass you?
Another thing you’ll never really appreciate until you’re on a bicycle is wind. With cars, buses, and motorcycles, Dallas wind is an occasional aggravation. For cyclists, spring and fall mark horrendous windstorms with air speeds faster than you can pedal. For most of the year, the constant south wind is an absolute, but that can go from “light and variable” to “gale force” in a matter of minutes, usually without warning. Warm temperatures only make this worse: even though you’re fighting a headwind getting home, you still feel good because the wind rushes across you and dries out your sweat, and then you stop at a light or stop sign and nearly pass out when moving again. We won’t even start with strong winds forcing cars, construction signs, and clouds of road dust into you or you into them, so this trip is a great way to check to see if you’re ready.
ABSOLUTELY VITAL AND IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION: Do not mess around about hydration when making this trip. Consider how much water you think you’ll need and bring three times as much. If you’re using a Camelpak or other backpack-related hydration system, fill it up with as much ice as you can carry. If you prefer water bottles, fill your pack or saddle bags with bottles, preferably frozen when you start so they melt during your trip. You may have to get your core body temperature down in a hurry, especially if half or more of your route is straight into the wind, and “acclimating to the temperature” doesn’t mean you don’t need as much water. As far as the drink in question, go with Gatorade, go with multiple hydration drinks, go with plain water, but have something on hand when your hands start to shake and you feel a little lightheaded, and always drink as much as you need when you need it. On this first trip, bring a little cash or a credit card so you can stop at a grocery store or gas station to top up if you need it: just stay away from energy drinks and other heavy sources of caffeine, especially if you’re already a little loopy from the ride or the temperature.
As with the first trip on your route, when you get back, take into account how you feel when you’re done. You’ll eventually get into bike-ready shape, but the first week is going to be the worst while your body tries to tell you that humans were never meant to travel with self-powered wheels. If you’re likely to quit, that first week will be when it happens, especially when the aches and pains really get going. If you really feel that you can’t make the trip to and from your planned destination, don’t push it, especially when temperatures start to go up. If you still feel up to it, though, take into account how much time you took getting to and from and add an extra 30 to 45 minutes to it, each way. That’s your commute time with a cushion. You’ll get faster and stronger with time, but right now it’s all about can you make it in the first place. If you feel comfortable with the time it takes to get there and back, then plan for the next Monday, check all of your safety gear to make sure it’s still there and working, and get ready.
Oh, The Pain
If you haven’t bicycled in a while, and you may not have been on a bicycle since you were starting high school, anything longer than a circle around your block is going to hurt the first couple of times. Even dedicated gym rats are going to discover that a freefall bike ride, as opposed to using a Peloton or other fixed exercise bike, exercises muscles, stretches tendons, and excites ligaments they didn’t know they had. If you go on a serious trek, more than a half-hour ride, you’re also going to encounter the beginnings of a phenomenon cyclists call “butt callus.” Namely, you don’t have a butt callus, and a long ride is going to demonstrate it. To be blunt, your ass is going to hurt. So will your elbows, knees, ankles, and all of the muscles connecting them to each other and to the rest of you. If you have allergies, you’re going to need decongestants or an asthma inhaler when you go to sleep. If you wear a backpack on your rides, you’ll end up with spiffy blue bruises on the fronts of your shoulders, especially if the pack straps are too tight. If any of your attire doesn’t fit correctly, particularly around your ankles, the blisters around those spots will let you know. This isn’t even counting the scrapes and pokes from weed seeds and sapling branches as you pass them, eye pain from afternoon and evening glare, the occasional burn from hot pavement and concrete, and the inevitable falls from hitting potholes, random chunks of debris in the road, and the occasional armadillo. Over-the-counter painkillers will be your friend for that first week, especially when your joints ache to the point where the aches distract from sleep.
The butt burn is what usually dissuades beginner cyclists, and it’s bruising from bouncing a bike saddle up and down underneath one of the most sensitive portions of human anatomy. For the first week, you will be reminded over and over that we’re apes that are still getting used to standing upright, especially when you sit down at your day job and wish for a few pillows or a car inner tube as padding. A lot of expensive bike seats promise exotic padding materials to cut down on butt burn, most of which don’t stand up to a regular commute for long. (Fun fact: a story for a later day is the absolutely true tale of the worst practical joke I ever pulled, involving a bicycle seat pad with an insert that allegedly had the same consistency as human flesh and a friend who would come over to my apartment to detox on his way home after truly heroic doses of LSD very early on Monday mornings.) The reality is that the pain goes away with time and regular rides: stop riding for six months, and you’ll have to rebuild your butt callus all over again. Keep going, though, and after that first week, you won’t notice. In six months, you’ll look back and think “Damn: I haven’t hurt in months.”
That’s how the rest of the aches and pains from starting biking will go as well. That’s not to say you shouldn’t pay attention to recurring pain, and strong pain should always be brought up with medical professionals. However, a lot of the tweaks and aches from Week 1? If you keep it up, you won’t notice them.
Be Prepared To Downgrade Your Opinions Of Your Fellow Humans, Including Yourself
Those unfamiliar with other cities may complain about Dallas drivers. They also have reason to do so. Even a few minutes on Dallas roads leaves newcomers with the shock that someone actually gave some of these people access to internal-combustion engines and firearms, sometimes at the same time, and some parts of the Metroplex act as perpetual arguments against brother-sister marriages, especially around the Park Cities. The Monday mornings after Dallas Cowboys games, where half the drivers are both hung over and watching game recaps on their phones in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The drivers completely incapable of getting up to operating speeds on highway onramps, and those who push the limits of Einsteinian space-time to cut off anybody who might get in front of them, only to drop back down to a third of the speed limit when no longer threatened with being passed. Most received their driver’s licenses, if they ever had one, the moment they turned 16 and have never so much as considered driving laws and regulations since then, and think that stop lights and merge signs are vague recommendations that get in the way of wherever they’re going. The ones who think turn lanes are shortcuts to blast straight through an intersection once the light goes green, and the ones who decide they don’t want to wait in a turn lane and instead rush up to the intersection and try to turn without warning. The yahoos coming in from Flower Mound or Mesquite who stop their cars in the middle of the road to point outside and exclaim “Maw-Maw, LOOK! They got buildings TWO STORIES HIGH! I bet they got indoor shitters, too!” The ones who assume that using turn signals takes a year off their lives, stopping at stop signs and crosswalks takes off five, and the time fines triple on the Friday before a federal holiday. And the best part? You’re going to be sharing the road, and often the sidewalks, with them.
If you’re going to be on bike trails and lanes for most of your route, don’t think you’re immune, either. Besides the drivers who think bike lanes are handy parking spots, there are the pedestrians who assume the whole universe disappears the moment they close their eyes at night. The ones who weave back and forth across a path without watching, and who jump and scream if anyone tries to warn them with yell or horn. The ones so engrossed with their phones that even air horns can’t dissuade from their Facebook addictions. You’ll see a lot of people walking dogs and other pets along those trails, and some will watch to make sure they and their pets are out of the way of cyclists and other pedestrians. Others will have dogs on retractable leads when cyclists come through: the dog goes in one direction and the walker goes in another, and the walker will just look at you with a dumb “please don’t kick my ass around my shoulder blades, no matter how justified” grin when you have to screech to a stop to avoid getting tangled. Those are the ones who use dog leads: then you’ll have the fun with dog walkers with free-range Chihuahuas and other yappy dogs allowed to run amok, screaming “Don’t you kick my dog!” as Tiny shreds your Achilles tendons and prepares to feed on his catch. While you’re at it, watch out for the entitled parents, particularly in the “M” Streets and the Lakewood area, who feel that pushing strollers on sidewalks and paths is for The Poors and go right out into the center of the street, jogging with their overbred Golden Retrievers and their overbred spawn while screaming “Do you know who I am?” into their phones. Respecting right of way? That’s for the little people, or at least the people who didn’t go to SMU.
And then there’s the fun if the bike route contains school bus stops, with herds of weeping and wailing parents walking onto the bus, following their scions to their seats, and checking multiple times to make sure their charges have on clean underwear. (Okay, this is understandable if this is the first day of school and your kid is starting kindergarten. It’s mid-May and your kid is graduating from college next year. KNOCK IT OFF.) Likewise, if you’re anywhere near a school on your route, know that Dallas parents whimper “I gotta get my kid to school!” every day the way drivers up north panic about “I gotta get the bread and milk!” during the first snowfall of the year, and they WILL NOT STOP for anything and anybody that might get in the way. If you’re really lucky, you’ll find the bike lane completely blocked off by parents who want to avoid their children being swooped upon by griffins and thunderbirds and park in the middle of the bike lane, walking their kids directly to their seats inside because the school doesn’t have a drive-through delivery lane. This is the time and place where anybody with a “Be Kind: Student Driver” bumper sticker who really IS a student driver deserves accolades and scholarships, because odds are good that they’re the best and most attentive drivers on the road.
Having just unloaded on Dallas drivers and pedestrians, don’t think you’re immune to criticism because you’re now a cyclist. This will irritate and infuriate the Cory Doctorow birth-control glasses and overly-curled mustache contingent who have been told that they’re God’s Special Little Boys and Girls since birth, but this is Dallas, not Portland. This is not Austin, thank Arioch, or Brooklyn, or any other overhyped haven for failchildren who were told over and over that they’re above mere mortals. Just as you should expect motorists, pedestrians, and other cyclists to watch out for you, that means you need to return the favor. This means staying on one side or another, whether road or bikepath, instead of weaving and shredding like Penelope making a shroud for Lord Laertes. This means not screaming at pedestrians on a sidewalk like Cossacks riding their horses through peasants’ potato patches. This means not blocking off rush hour traffic in downtown on a Friday night to “make a statement” on how you and your fellow Critical Mass riders are deserving of special consideration. Essentially, this means not giving reasons for drivers to check you into parked vehicles or oncoming traffic, pedestrians to put sticks in your spokes, and cops to give you multiple tickets for reckless cycling before hauling you in. It means not being a jerk. If you yell because a dolt exiting a parking lot stops to check Instagram and completely blocks off oncoming traffic, fine. However, when you decide that waiting at a stop light is for mundanes and blast through traffic without a care because “I don’t want to lose my momentum,” you don’t get the right to yell when you’re cursed out and nearly splattered. Save your middle fingers for when they’re really needed, and not flashing them indiscriminately until someone decides they need to be removed with an angle grinder. If it makes things easier for the eight people stuck behind you, pull over and let them pass, because you’re not really going to get to your destination any faster. Go out to White Rock Lake or northern Plano on a Saturday, watch the pseudo-Tour de France Spandex set as they ride six across a single lane, and do the exact opposite of everything they do. The Golden Rule, kids. Even in Dallas, this goes a long way. And this goes double for me.
Get Into The Habit
One of the best things about commuter cycling is that having to go to a specific location at a specific time gets you focused nicely on keeping up appearances. If getting to a location by 9:00 every day means that you have to get up at 7:00 so you can be ready to hit the road at 8:00, you get up at 7 so you don’t miss your window. That acknowledgement that you’re getting there under your own power means that you have to keep a good understanding of travel time, because you can’t accelerate enough mid-trip to make up for a serious delay. Bad weather and other circumstances may force you to drive for a day or two: sometimes Dallas gets one of those week-long freezes that makes cycling point-blank dangerous, so you may or may not be on the bike for that time. For the most part, though, keep it going. You’ll get acclimated to increasing summer temperatures, you’ll get a better gauge of where and when you need to stop to cool off, and you’ll even itch for the opportunity to take your bike to other places.
Don’t Give Up
This is the biggest aspect to consider. It’s really easy to look at the clock on Monday morning and think “Man, I could take the car and sleep in an extra hour.” There’s nothing wrong with doing this when the rain is coming down nearly horizontally, the road gutters are rivers, and the local mad scientist looks up at the lightning passing meters above your house and exclaiming “Oh, ROCKY!” The good news is that for every day like this, we get at least two to three weeks of absolutely beautiful biking weather, and it’s just a crime to waste it.
And oh the things you’re going to see on the way to and from work. If you birdwatch, everything from cedar waxwings to great blue herons to the occasional roadrunner. If you prefer reptiles, you’ll see and occasionally rescue turtles, fence swifts and Carolina anoles, and more snakes than you’d ever know, all very happy to stay over there while you stay over here. Mammals? Armadillos, opossums, nutria, and the occasional bobcat and coyote getting in some last-minute hunting as the sun comes up. For close to four years, I played a regular game with an absolutely gigantic red-tailed hawk who perched on a light pole at my midway point: her game every day was to see if she could touch, just touch, my helmet with her talons before I turned around and looked at her, and once she succeeded. If domesticated animals are more your speed, consider all of the dogs you’ll see as they’re walked in the morning and the number of cats in bedroom windows holding court. Take a bridge across a creek and spot the number of bluegill nests scraped out of the debris on the bottom. Two weeks ago, I had the chance to view freshly blooming bluebonnets, check up on a great horned owl camping down for the day, and view a black-footed vulture nest, all without ever taking my feet off the pedals. I haven’t seen any serious exotics for the area, alligators or falcons, in a while, but it’s just a matter of time. I have about another ten years of cycling left in me before I have to consider giving up the bike for good, but until then, I plan to get a lot of mileage in, and especially with gas prices being the way they are, I hope to join you on your own travels. Selah.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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