Hey Folks,

Haven't posted here for quite some time, but I've been trikking the whole time and reading your posts. I now know that I will be always learning to Trikke....getting better all the time. Going up slight hills (11 degree ramps are very do-able) are easier now....much easier, and I have a much more refined sense of the challenges presented by sand, bad asphalt, soft tarred repair lines, half inch high "curbs" made by a sidewalk section that has uplifted just a bit, massive coatings of those helicopter-seeds from Maple (?) trees, speed bumps, water, snow, ice, (in Wisconsin I have trikked all winter on days when the surfaces are dry "enough," and it's above ten degrees,) and of course the reckless antics of non-hpver's and their mv's.

Now, when I trikke, I really feel like I'm one with the Trikke -- I am in the groove. It really is proper to talk about one achieving "poetry in motion" -- trite as it is to say it like that.

When I trikke past a store window and see my trikking reflection, I am amazed at how effortless trikking "looks like." It seems magical to me that the effort one exerts to trikke is so unseen. If I'm moving aside a skate-boarder or an in-line skater, it looks to observing-others like I am on some sort of motorized gizmo, while the other two are easily seen as "working at it to keep going."

I have been injured three times while trikking, and all of them were at low, or even no, speed. When I'm going over about three miles per hour, I'm paying attention to everything with a good deal of "alarm," and that keeps me focused. A half inch wide stone can toss my carving front wheel into a one foot sideways skid that can give me an adrenaline shot as bad as having a cop in my rear view mirror suddenly put on his lights behind me. But at slow speeds, I can drift into a false sense of safety -- relative to my faster trikking speed psychology which always has an observable "fear dynamic." Slow speeds lull me like coming into town off the highway and suddenly your car feels like it's only crawling...yet you're still doing 55 MPH. At slow speeds, you think, "Why, I'll just carve along that sidewalk crack and nothing will come of it," and then BANG, the Trikke changes direction and loses speed so quickly that I cannot react fast enough to change my own momentum and over I go.

First injury: I'm standing on the Trikke, not moving, and I decide to see how much weight I can put on my back wheels without having the brakes on. KAPOW....down on my butt. The Trikke is a perfect banana peel. If it had been invented 100 years ago, Charlie Chaplin would have been the first to fall off of it, and then about 20 Keystone Kops would fall off theirs. This fall cost me bruising and straining of some muscles and ligaments. If I had been two years old, I would have just gotten up...no harm, but these days....sheesh.

Second injury: I'm carving in my parking lot, 5 MPH maybe, and I hit a spot where the pavement begins to climb up and out of the lot's rain-troughing-sculpting. Well, as I carved uphill traction lessened, and the Trikke began to slip up hill while my body wanted to go perpendicularly to the pavement. I put my right leg down off the Trikke to the ground to catch myself, and I did, but the cost was that, SNAP, I hyper-extended my right knee. Strained knee ligaments still bug me months later, because I trikke so much that I keep those injuries stressed. Probably, a week off the Trikke, and my woes would heal, but how can you stay off the thing?

Third injury: I have a busy street to cross on my daily trikking route, and sometimes, it just takes a full 5 minutes of standing there....there's no traffic light on this busy street. So when I finally get a break, I've been waiting for a bit and am antsy to go, so I go for it. Usually I can trikke across the street without risking being hit, but one time, I didn't have that luxury, so I picked up the Trikke and ran across the street with it hanging from my extended arm with the rear wheels just off the ground an inch. As I leaped up onto the sidewalk on the other side, my back wheel hit the curb with just enough "grabbing-torque" to twist me around, and BANG, down I went with the palm of my hand hitting first. Well, my wrist didn't snap, but something sure hurts there 10 days later, and my shoulder and elbow are complaining too.

At my age, it takes six weeks to heal a paper-cut, so if I had any sense, I'd stay off the Trikke until I was okay again, but no, I'm out there all the time telling myself I'll just work through the pains. If I'm not watching myself, I start gripping the handle bars too hard, and I tend to use my upper body too much instead of rocking and rolling....and the next thing I know, I've got a pained palm and numbness creeping up my forearm.

So yeah, the Trikke's a beast still...never letting me get away with anything--only a perfect trikking motion can leave me unstressed, and so, to the degree that I am out of harmony with it, then my sinews etc. have to take up the impact stresses. Gimme this summer, my first full summer with the Trikke, and maybe I will have built myself up enough to be pain free.

I have yet to get into relating to the Trikke as a touring vehicle. If I had easy access to a nice, flat bike path, then I could see getting into an "Ah, I got to Point A and now back to Point B" kind of goal-oriented exercise psychology, but I have to drive my car to get to any such path here. So, mostly I use the Trikke as my "morning calisthenics," and then, about three times a week, I do a follow-up cool-down biking afterwards as my aerobic conditioning. I do my trikking route (local sidewalks, parking lots, bridges) in 20 minutes if I really "put out," and at the end of it, I jump on my Trek bike (Trikke Trek....go figure) and cool down by biking easily for an hour or whatever. This is a great routine....my muscles are being sculpted...lots of definition showing up.....nice. I am younger by almost every definition, and the acquiring of ever more refined trikking skills gives me daily esteem inputs.

All in all, as I've spouted here in the past, trikking is not so much recreation as it is a religion. I'm in a cult and cannot stop!

Edg