“Hold the lane”
It’s spring, 2021, and I’m biking with a friend north of Nyack. My bike computer had crash and stopped working and hour earlier but, with two phones and one working computer, my friend and I felt confident enough to plow ahead. Rain has been in the forecast but scattered and didn’t seem like anything to worry about. We are biking up a modest hill when my friend swings out from behind and comes up alongside to get me to stop. “Look behind us.” I look back and see dark clouds, and, slightly further off, a bolt of lightning. “That looks to be directly behind us.”
We looked at Google maps and compared to our weather map, trying to figure out what was about to happen. We were biking west to east up a hill and the storm was moving in the same direction, with a small red blob slowly closing in on us. “Did you see a road that goes south coming up?” I ask, suspecting not since the maps showed nothing. He nodded his head. “If we turn back around, we are going to take direct hit and probably be going downhill” he said. We stood silently for a moment and looked at the maps. “If we can get over the top of this hill and take it down the other side, there’s a road that we can turn onto the breaks to the south. I think we can get out the red at least,” my friend continued.
We settled on the plan. “You can pace the climb, since my climbing skills are…” “you’re really slow” my friend chimed in. “I was looking for some gentler words. I’ll take the lead on the descent though.” “Your descending skills are truly insane.” I laughed, “Tom Pidcock is my spirit animal. Let’s go.
As we crested the top of the hill, I swung out from behind and prepared to lead rhetorical descent. As I passed my friend, he waved and I slowed to talk to him. “We have to hold the lane on this descent, it will be dangerous if a car tries to pass.”
Normally, best practice is to ride single file on the right hand side of the traffic lane going the same place as you. Sometimes this might put you in the left of two lanes because you’re turning with traffic. The general principle is what matters.
When you maneuver to hold a lane you, in cooperation with whoever you’re riding with, spread across a lane to block a car from getting through or around. Your goal is to make the ability for the cars behind to get through or around too dangerous. You do this temporarily and to address a clear and specific danger you’re seeing on the road. When the danger subsides, you return to single file.
“If you take the inside third I’ll hold wide.” I was telling my friend to position himself a third of the way in from the edge of the road while I would hover around the yellow divider, pulling a bit in when there was oncoming traffic. I could see and respond to something right in front of me but not to what’s going on behind me. By holding, we could focus on what’s ahead of us on a decent that we knew we had to blaze through.
On the descent, I swung wide and went into the super tuck to try and accelerate my speed. The super tuck. This was later famously used by Matej Mohricto win the 2022 Milano San Remo. well, technically he used a dropper post to get around a super tuck ban from the UCI. The UCI, the governing body of cycling and forever looking for ways to ruin the sport, thought about banning them after this win. But, given they’re already widely despised and generally incompetent, they decided against this.
We kept descending, trying to reach where we could turn onto a road that would swing to the south and we could start riding away from the thunder and lightening. As we hit the road, the rain started a bit. We figured we had about ten more minutes before we would be under it. We raced harder, the rain picking up but never becoming too heavy. The storm passed over us, with the the worst of it to the north.
“Nice super tuck on that descent. Your pedal strokes are uneven though.” “Thats what was on your mind during that descent?”
