Bike Accessories – Gloves

Nobody tells you that when you decide to start bike riding you are going to need accessories that at least equal the value of your bike.

I bought bike gloves yesterday. I never would have thought I would ever own a pair of cut off finger gloves. Let alone a padded pair.  But now I do.

I was really surprised by how many choices our little bike store even had for women. It took about 30 minutes to try on many of the gloves there to determine that I was a women’s large and that I wanted gel pads on my gloves.  I also decided to get the kind that have little velcro flaps to get them on and off easier.  It was hard to believe how many decisions I had to make just to buy a pair of gloves.  They had a lot of pastel colors..pale blue…pink…green. I settled on a pair with some lilac but mostly black.

The only reason I picked that color was because my shoes have some of the same color.

I guess something in me said that my shoes and my gloves should match. Maybe that comes from growing up in the 60’s when moms wore gloves to church. But back to the bike gloves.

Bike gloves are padded on the heels of the hands and also right under where your knuckles are.

I wasn’t ever going to buy bike gloves, but after our long ride on Saturday, I still had some tingliness/numbness in the two little fingers of my left hand. My son thought that the bumps in the road might be causing it.

Since I had taken my bike in for it’s one month tune-up, I talked to the bike guy about it. He said that gloves could help with the jarring you experience from the road but also that he would never ride without gloves because if you ever fall the first thing that goes down is your hands and it isn’t pretty without gloves. I was sold. I’m really afraid of falling.

I rode with gloves last night and this morning and can say that the gloves do help with the bumps in the road.  I’ve still got some numbness/tingling in those two fingers so it might have to do with getting my seat adjusted right.  More on that later.