Hello world! I'm a queer bike rider with #longcovid who as part of my rehab got a #recumbent #ebike so I can keep cycling with my orthostatic intolerance & post-exertional malaise.
I care about accessibility and urbanism and want to make sure that adapted bike riders like myself aren't forgotten in the process of reclaiming cities from cars.
@bicripple it takes a bit to figure out how to navigate things, and it seems like the "that's on an other instance" experience ought to be better, somehow. I run into that sometimes, not sure how I got there, and I've been doing computer stuff for quite a while.
ALSO!! YOU CAN FOLLOW HASHTAGS. THAT IS IMPORTANT.
I follow things like (leaving off the # so as to not pollute other people's feeds) blackMastodon, bikeTooter, carryShitOlympics, disability. (I'm neither disabled nor black, but /
@bicripple if you want to hear those opinions/experiences, that's how). CamelCase the tags so they work better for ScreenReaders, some of the clients undo that but I assume that bug will get fixed.
I should use tags more myself, to me it has a weird feeling of advertising and self-horn-tooting, but I think that's just how you do things if you want people to read it, and why are we writing here anyway?
@dr2chase Yeah I've noticed and been a little frustrated by how the web interface keeps taking the camel casing out of the hashtags.
Is there a client you'd recommend that doesn't do that (so much)? Thanks!
@BarbChamberlain Thanks and glad to see people like you doing this work! My city (Montreal) has so far to go on making bike infrastructure accessible.
A lot of the bike parking available is designed on the assumption of a "regular" bike.
Inter-modal transit is lacking - public transit rarely lets you take a bike on, and it has to be a "regular" one. And if you try it on the metro you have to be able to carry the bike up/down multiple flights of stairs because so few stations have elevators 😬
@Dangerous_beans From what I can tell the bike hasn't /treated/ the #PostExertionalMalaise - I still "crash" just as readily and still need as long to recover. (Getting rx'd steroids have helped me on that though!)
What the ebike helps with is avoiding the push-crash cycle - if I want to speed up or go up a hill I just increase how much the motor contributes to the pedal assist, so that I don't have to get my heart rate up and subsequently crash. That's opened up so much more of the city to me.
@Dangerous_beans Yeah that was a huge reason I decided to go for the ebike. I had an old Rans Rocket #recumbent already and it was good for the POTS but my city has a lot of variety in elevation and just huge areas of the city were effectively cut off from me because of hills I couldn't climb without crashing.
It would have been much cheaper for me to do a kit conversion of my old 'bent but it was old and I had been wanting for ages to get a nicer one.
@xtaran Yeah recumbents are great for biking with orthostatic intolerance! Being physically vertical is really hard on my body these days.
OI can be caused by a ton of things not just long covid. Lots of cardiac, neurologic, & vestibular issues can make just being physically vertical hard.
I actually first started riding my first #recumbent in 2009 because I had issues with back & shoulder pain. The other 'bent riders I know in person were mostly motivated to get one by chronic pain issues.
Bi cripple on a crip bike
dr2chase
BarbChamberlain
Alex von Kitchen
Jeri Dansky
knapjack
Axel 🚴😷🐧🐪⌨ | #WeAreNatenom