Originally Posted by
firstian
That's In general, it is just not intuitive to me how to recover from a slight loss of balance effectively.
My bike skills in general is very poor indeed (I never learn to bike probably; I "learned" at 15 by being left behind by a bunch of friends in a camping trip with a rental, on a 45mph single lane full of semis
). I'll go read up and practice. Thanks for the explanation.
You are talking yourself intelligently through your present riding paranoia and you CAN do this.
Last summer I was leading a group of American college students on a field trip in Arnheim, NL. When I asked everyone if they knew how to ride a bike, of course everyone assured me that they could. But when we rented a bike for everyone, it was amazing (and frightening) how few of them really knew how to do anything but pedal in a straight line. Without practice, without much experience, learning how to ride & steer & avoid things in the road & stop & go at intersections is pretty frightening. And all of those things happen every few minutes or blocks on a bike. Our ill-fated field trip with 19 riders managed to cover 3 miles in an hour - yes, 3 miles and then we ate lunch and started back to the train station. I learned a good lesson about commuting, that my own experience on a bike is NOT everyone's experience and that it takes time in the saddle to get comfortable with urban commuting.
Yep, you'll figure this out because the alternative is getting back into a car or riding the bus and those are much less interesting than life as a cycle commuter. You've gotten lots of good advice and you're headed in the right direction (so to speak).