Adventures with Buster

I've had my new chair for a couple of weeks now and I'm still loving it! After the initial frustration with the pushrims, Draft Wheelchairs really came through and sorted new rims for me in a matter of days. The new covers are stitched around the rim and have an extra rubbery coating on top, which will get easier to grip with as I wear them in a bit. They're a bit slippery at the moment (partly because I've been going out in the wet so much, and partly because they need to be worn in) but they are sooooo much better than the ones I had before and I am so happy with them! I can finally enjoy my new chair :)

They even work when I'm actually moving instead of just posing!

I've had a few nice trips out with my chair already, including one very rainy trip down the busway (Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, which is excellent for wheeling) and one training session, although sadly there were only three of us there including me. Getting used to the chair is something I'm enjoying. It definitely feels a lot lighter than the old one, and I know that I'm going further with each push. There is one hill at the West Cambridge site, where we often train as a group, which previously took me about 100 pushes to get up, but in the new chair it only took 70 the first time I tried - and that was without me even trying very hard! This is a really good improvement and I'm hopeful that it will translate into a lot of time over a longer distance.

Training at the West Cambridge site.

As well as having a gentle potter around west Cambridge, John and I went on a trip to the busway with both the club chair and my new one. The idea was that John would have a go in the club chair (for which the seat is only marginally bigger than my new one; fortunately he has slim, manly hips!) and would generally keep an eye on me and also hopefully have some fun.

Support crew walking to the busway.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out like that...John turned out to be a giant pansy a bit too tall for the chair to be comfortable, and the gentle spitting that the sky had been doing when we left the flat had turned into pretty torrential rain! I stayed with him until we got onto the busway itself, but it was too easy for me to forget that he wasn't used to manoeuvering the chair from the inside, and that he wasn't used to how uncomfortable those gloves are until you get used to them (how I moaned to begin with!). He was also pretty slow, but, you know, first-timers and all that... Anyway, once we were safely on the busway I got bored of waiting and just went on ahead, thinking that he'd catch me up eventually. I went about two miles and waited under a bridge. And waited...and waited some more... Eventually I decided to go back and see what had happened to him, which meant braving the rain again. He was under the first bridge, out of the chair, and looking a bit peeved! Once he'd had a little moan, we agreed that I would do another run to the second bridge and back and then maybe call it a day. This did give him the opportunity to take some pictures of me, which I suppose is a bonus as it makes it easier to decide how to illustrate this blog!

Soaked through but loving it.

The second run to the bridge and back gave me an opportunity to fiddle a bit more with my compensator. Fine-tuning the compensator is a mysterious art and it seems to be an endless quest to get it right, which no-one ever actually accomplishes. It's very difficult to give it a fair test, because it's automatic to make little adjustments to your steering through weight or hopping the front wheel a bit, but these little adjustments disguise what you're trying to achieve with the compensator. I think I have it set up nearly straight and we shall just have to see how that goes, but it's taken me about 6km so far to try and decide on a short-term solution! On the way back, I ended up doing a sprint for about 400m (the reason for this will be given in a future article; for now, just assume that I felt like sprinting for no reason) which was really useful for me to do and also allowed for some more good photo opportunities (thanks John!).

Another thing of note re the new chair is that I have bought something for it - I wanted a sticker showing a Halifax (the plane that this chair is named after, and which my grandad flew in the war) but I couldn't find any anywhere, so for the time being I've bought a stamp with a Halifax on it which I will tape onto the frame, where I can see it clearly when I'm sitting in it. It's a reasonably large stamp so just the right size.

Today, I'm going to the track to buy a track card and hopefully to have a go on the track with the chair, which I haven't been able to do yet. I want to try and set up some lanes on the compensator and hopefully just have a nice relaxing session getting to know Buster even better.