Shock and awe

I just got back from a short test ride to see how my singlespeed and the newly installed suspension fork were getting along. I've ridden rigid for 3 years and having 100mm of travel and a lockout were, in a word, fucking awesome. OK, so it was two words. I'm also pleased that I went 6.66 miles, one one-hundredth of the mileage of the beast. Photos will have to wait for another day.

Suspended animation

My job has been unusually tolerable lately. I'm chalking it up to my focus on trying to do more fun stuff while I'm away from work so that the good mood follows me through the week. Or maybe it was the excitement associated with a coworker having had an Xtracycle FreeRadical installed on her bike. For a left-wing, pro-bike, childfree, committed commuter-type like myself, a new longbike is like baby news, only without the poopie. Nevertheless, thank Jah it's almost Friday.

In other veloconsumerist happenings, my suspension fork arrived last weekend. The heavier spring necessitated by my weight got here a few days later. I'm still waiting for some preload spacers to show up and then all I have to do is find a few free hours during which to bolt everything up. I'm looking forward to getting a little boing on the front of my singlespeed because I'm still suffering some shoulder/arm/hand pain from my last trail ride. Either that, or I injured myself when I fell off the high horse on which rigid singlespeed riders tend to sit.

I also picked up some new new seals for the old Z2 Bomber on my wife's beloved VooDoo Nzumbi. She didn't put all that many miles on it before one of the seals blew, but admittedly, the fork was a bike swap special. Who knows if the seals and wipers were as new as the seller said they were? Actually, I'm pretty pleased that I can still find replacement parts for a 10-year old fork. This might be a shop job because I don't want to bugger up the seals' seats trying to pry the old ones out or wreck the Enduro Seals trying to cram them in. We'll also get a fork oil change out of it.

If I don't get all of this in time, it'll be another weekend of road bike riding. That sure isn't the worst thing either of us could be doing on a fine autumn day.

Bike on.

Tired

Here's yet more feedback from the perfect ride I took last Monday.

I just spent a contemplative evening dealing with the flat tires I found after I'd returned. And by contemplative, I mean that I was again contemplating just how it is that cholla thorns keep managing to defeat my tire liners. I can understand that some come in from the side, where the tubes are unprotected, but others have gone straight through the plastic strip.

Veelz told me shops love selling Mr. Tuffys to customers- who knows, maybe they have a substantial markup? The kicker is the misplaced sense of immunity to flats - the customers will inevitably keep coming back for patch kits, thorn-resistant tubes, Slime treatments, Spin Skins, etc., all in a fruitless quest to thwart punctures. What a scam.

I may end up having to use the nuclear option and try out No Tubes or some homemade counterpart, though I can buy a lot of patches and glue for what one Stan's kit costs. Also, there's no ghetto tubeless system that would have healed and sealed the sidewall slash demonstrated so ably by my Sith Lord friend, below.


I found this ruinous little cut while searching my tire's casings for errant thorns. From the looks of it, it probably came from one of the millions of shards of broken glass that litter the trailhead area. I was already feeling lucky to have ridden out before dark without having to deal with two punctures but now I'm wondering just how it was that my tube didn't bulge out of the sidewall and fail catastrophically. Maybe I was surfing a wave of good Karma for having picked up a discarded scrap of a gel packet I found on the trail though admittedly, I rode by it once without picking it up because it wasn't my mess. I thought better on the next lap and pocketed it.

The cut tire was past its prime anyway, having already been run for several hundred miles as a front tire before being swapped, dirtbag style, with an even more ground down rear tire. Anyway, I dipped into my bench stock and I now have two crisp new knobbies mounted up, ready for the next ride unless - and I may be jinxing things by even mentioning it - either or both of my freshly patched tubes fail. They won't - I've been just that lucky lately.

I've been listening to a couple of Material Issue CDs this evening. The band remains the very definition of a power pop trio despite the tragic fact that lead singer Jim Ellison's voice is now coming from beyond the grave.



I saw Material Issue in concert at an Edge Fest or KUKQ Birthday Bash or something similar in Phoenix back in the '90s. Big Country was also on the ticket and, in a sad coincidence, that band's lead singer, Stuart Adamson, also committed suicide. Years later, I watched Bradley Nowell, drunk, stoned, or worse, stagger through a Sublime show at the Nile Theater in Mesa. The music of my youth is littered with similar tragedies - Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain - and yet it remains the soundtrack my rides.

How to avoid the bummer ride

Monday last, Columbus Day, I got up from a catnap on the couch and with very little forethought, drove over to Sweetwater for a late-day ride. I parked my truck in the empty lot at the trailhead and geared up in the brisk air. Gale force winds had prefaced the arrival of a cold front during the weekend but this day it was calm. A greater roadrunner was hunting just past the fence, reducing my chances of encountering another sidewinder. It all felt very promising.

I cranked up the main trail, expecting to ride one lap on each of the mellow loops in the northwestern reaches of the preserve and then head back home for dinner. I was also planning to go as hard as I could through the loops’ few rocky sections to determine if having ordered a suspension fork that morning was a good idea.

I started on the shorter of the two loops and immediately noticed that I felt really on. My legs seemed unusually strong, and I was snaking over, between, and around the rocks and shelves with little effort. Of course, riding solo, it’s hard to tell just how fast and flowy you really are, but I was enjoying myself too much to care. I took the junction to the longer loop and banged out a fast circuit there. I stopped in the middle of the figure-8 and looked west to determine just how much daylight was left. I decided to keep going and ended up riding each of the loops two more times before the failing light and rapidly cooling air ended things. I was also getting concerned that if I flatted or had a mechanical, I’d end up limping out in the dark.

I rode back to the trailhead with the sun setting at my back and a blindingly full moon filling my view ahead, thinking that if I’d brought a light, a wind shell and some clear lenses, I might have stayed out all night. Before I even called BeanSS to tell her I was on my way home, I had decided that the ride I’d just finished was one of the best ones I’d taken in 20 years of mountain biking.

At a bit over 10 miles, it was by no means an epic. I didn’t conquer any high-altitude climbs or clean any overly technical sections. It wasn’t a destination ride, the long-anticipated culmination of a week-long road trip. In fact, the trail is less than 5 crow miles from the house. No, all that actually happened was that an unplanned, close-to-home mountain bike ride unfolded absolutely perfectly.

The stoke from the ride kept me up too late but the next day, despite being short of sleep and having dealt with a 42-degree morning bike commute, I found myself still smiling. Even now, still sore from Monday’s ride and the long dog walk and poor-form weight lifting I did beforehand, I’m still feeling pretty damned good. Oh, and related to the pain I’m in, I think that suspension fork will be a useful upgrade.

I checked my singlespeed this evening and found not one, but two flat tires awaiting my attention. Murphy’s Law dictates that the bigger pain in the ass wheel to remove and replace is the one that will get punctured - I have horizontal fork ends aft so there’s the whole axle bolts, wheel and brake rotor alignment, and chain tension thing to deal with. But here, we have flats front and back and, despite wondering just what Mr. Tuffy tire liners and the True Goo I used in the past really accomplish, I’m not even remotely bummed out. Or at least I’m nowhere near as bummed as I might have been if I’d had to deal with them on the trail and hike out by moonlight on Monday.

But good vibrations aside, I'd better get to patching those tubes because I’m going to want to get out and have another good ride soon. Veelz, are you listening?

Rattled

I took an unplanned ride this morning. I say unplanned because I just wasn't feeling it when I got back from the morning dog walk, and I wasn't sure I was going to ride at all. The weather was so idyllic, though, that I knew I'd regret it if I didn't go somewhere, anywhere.

I weighed going over to Starr Pass to punish myself on the babyheads or over to the Pima College/Greasewood Park fire roads, which is where I go when I'm either short on time or out of ideas, but I ended up falling back on what has become my favorite place to roll - the Sweetwater Trails. I probably should have called Veelz, for whom bicycling is now training, but again, I wasn't sure I was going until I loaded the bike into the truck.

Anyway, I arrived at the trailhead, geared up, and rode through the gate. I leaned my bike up against the fence and hiked over to a couple of well-vegetated piles of mining spoil to lighten the liquid load. I did my business and as I turned to head back to my bike, I got buzzed by a rattlesnake. The sound came from uncomfortably close to my feet, so I did an impromptu little jig and moved aside. Once I ensured that nobody had seen my ridiculous little dance move, I checked out the now-coiled snake. I do believe it was a sidewinder, the hornlike supraoculars having been very distinctive.

My first thought was that it was a good thing I'd already taken a leak, because I'd have wet my pants otherwise. But no, I didn't even really get a good adrenaline burst out of it. Perhaps my zoological curiosity had overridden my flight instinct, or maybe I don't have the proper amount of respect for our pit viper friends. Regardless, I'm going to need to be a lot more careful when relieving myself while afield which, as BeanSS and Veelz can confirm, is an all-too-frequent event. Or I could just hold it (the urge, not the rattler). For what it's worth, I made three additional pit stops during my 8-mile ride, and didn't see any other venomous reptiles.

More or less a bicyclist

My ongoing plan to minimize bike commuting in order to free up a little energy with which to ride for fun was fairly successful last month. I rode my mountain and road bikes more in September than I had in the previous five months, and I parked the commuter for almost an entire work week. Now, here I am three days (and two commutes) into October, and my quads are still aching. What that tells me is that it was about time I did something a bit more arduous that rolling back and forth to work. It feels good to be a bicyclist again.