Popping wheelies in the rain

Five in the wet

Woke up to a steady drizzle that stopped and started. I got out into it when it seemed to have quit. It fooled me.

Five flat neighborhood miles later, however, were enough for me. I mean I was already pushing my luck by being out there without a brake so I packed it in having learned a couple of things.

While the rain does make for clean tires, it also makes for treacherous footing both getting on and off of the bike. All of which is made doubly more tricky when you cannot use the brake to do a pedal dismount. Around which my stopping  device was also not there for me to use to bring the front end back down when it hit a large  bump.

And it was this that happened tto me when I made a left turn where two roads dipped where they intersected. The front end came up, I leaned forward and all was well. Experiencing this, I got a little cocky thinking that if the front end came up I could just shift my weight forward and I would be fine. I lifted the bars at ten miles an hour. The front end came up fast. Too fast for me to compensate. in the same instant, I was off the bike with   the front end high in the air. I had popped the ulimate wheelie. And neither I nor the bike had been compromised!

Hmmm, it was this that reminded me of the emergency dismount I have on video in the HiWheel section of BikeRoute.com. In that one I showed how to stop on a dime on a regular HiWheel. The stop I did today felt a lot more spectacular. Wow!!

It's still raining as I type this up on my iPhone. A simple email message, this goes right to 2009hibustour.blogspot.com. This is practice for those times when I will not have a net connection or access to my lap top...

Thx for all of u!!

Sent from Martin Krieg's iPhone 

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