Cycling #2
Myself and an ex-mate (another story) used to go into town on our bikes of a Sunday, back when Sunday meant that everything was shut and no-one was there* (Christ that makes me sound old). That meant no cars needed to be parked, and that meant that multi-story car-parks would be closed to cars, making them there for sole purpose of tearing around on bikes as far as we were concerned. The multi-storys around here were simply awesome for riding bikes through - they had an up and a down ramp at each end, and the road surface was grippy and super-smooth. You could condense the hard slog to the 5th/6th floor top level to about 60 seconds flat if you stayed on the ramps at just one end, and you could extend the thrilling race down to a good few minutes, even at ludicrous speeds, by going down the ramps at opposite ends each time. Hours of fun.

The problem with it being hours of fun is that hours of fun is also hours of practice, and we ended up getting pretty good. We learned the quirks in each ramp, where the lumps to avoid were, what was the best line to take, etc., and began to use less and less caution.

That we were getting better was easy to see from our timed-descent times tumbling, and that that wasn't necessarily a good thing was easy to see from the time we both clipped the barrier coming off a corner. Nowadays that carpark has a thick wire mesh in front of the barriers and honking great girders behind them, but back then it consisting of nothing more than a thigh-high barrier of the kind used in central reservations on a motorway. This barrier was all that was there to keep people on the 5th level safely on the 5th level, as opposed to plummeting to their death and/or severe manglement. It was probably not in the design specs for it to keep speeding cyclists from toppling over it if they happened to glance off it at too high a speed**.

Suffice it to say that there was much flailing and wailing, but, despite not feeling like it at the time, or it deserving to be, it was just about confined to the safe side of the barrier. Funnily enough, that was the last attempt at the world record for car-park descent on a bike.

* Sunday shopping is great for sticking it to the people who think that their sky-pixie gets to decide when I can shop, but I do miss having days in town when there was no-one else around.

** If by some fluke of irony it was indeed in the design specs, I really don't think much of their margin for error.
(misanthrope is so adjective he's verbing nouns!, Fri 13 Feb 2009, 3:43, Reply)