Bike shimmy. Something I thought only happens to noobies. I guess my bike handling skills aren’t paying the bills.
One of my wife’s friends has taken up cycling (woo hoo!) and recently rode her bike on a toll freeway near our house. It’s officially a bike route with a wide bike lane, and since it’s a toll road, there’s hardly any traffic. So I thought I’d check it out.
Have I ever told you about my fear of heights?
There’s this bridge. It spans one of the many gorges that are ubiquitous in this region. I don’t know how tall it is, but as I approached my heart started pounding. Going south, the bridge ascends, and though the bike lane is wide the guard rail is not very high and I was not at all happy about riding right next to it. I put my head down and just looked at the road ahead of me. Soon enough, I was over the span. I even looked over the side a couple times. I’m such a wuss.
Heading back north, I descended the span into a nasty headwind. Really gusting at times, pushing me all over the bike lane. I got into the drops for stability and tried to get as aero as possible, but my nerves were getting to me and my knees were wobbly. Why does my fear create such an intense and debilitating physiological reaction?
Suddenly, the bike started to shake. First the front wheel, then along the entire frame and the back wheel. I felt like I was going to crash at any moment and fly over the guard rail into the gorge below. It felt like both tires had punctured and I feathered the brakes, trying to bleed some speed, but the descent made it difficult to slow down.
As I slowly came to a stop, the shimmying worsened, and it felt like an eternity before I had finally stopped. I checked the tires. Both ok. I noticed that the road surface had those rain grooves and I realized that I was in a perfect storm for bike shimmy. The headwind was being channeled up the bridge, gusting at almost perfect intervals. I thought of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge; my nerves, the road surface, and the headwind had all conspired to give my bike a bad case of the shakes.
I pushed off and the shimmying immediately resumed. I limped over the last few hundred yards of the span, and finally made it over. Once past the bridge, the bike was fine and I continued on for another 30 or so miles without incident. From now on I’ll leave the freeways to the cars.