Ride Sounds
November 30, 2023 at 05:30PMJoe Lindsey has been writing about cycling since Jonas Vingegaard was using training wheels. When hereditary hearing loss turned into something even more incapacitating, he was forced to re-engage with the sport and pastime he loved—an interior upheaval that continued even after all his senses returned. A lovely, meditative read.
Last year, Bicycling magazine published a short video about a blind bike mechanic in Iran. In it, Reza Alizadeh explains how he uses touch to replace his sight when working on a bike. “The majority of the work for a blind person relies heavily on a sense of touching,” he says at one point. Like Alizadeh for his sight, I used touch to replace sound. And even after regaining my hearing, those techniques stayed with me.
When I tune a drivetrain, in addition to using my sight, I now place a finger on the back of the rear derailleur; I can turn a limit screw or the barrel adjuster (or press Di2 buttons in the micro-adjust setting) and as I hand-turn the cranks I can sense the change in the chain’s vibrations as the pulley cage moves. When truing a wheel, the whispered scrape of rim on caliper is, for me, felt in the stand as much as heard. A creak in the bottom bracket? A subtle vibration through the crankarm and pedal, to the strain gauge that is the nerves in my foot, exquisitely more sensitive than the most-accurate power meter on the market.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2023/11/30/ride-sounds/
via IFTTT
Watch