Sunday ride

The new hardtail is shaking out nicely. I rode it to work once last week but it took until this morning to finally get it on dirt - nothing epic, just a few loops 'round the local regional park. I'd set the fork's preload to the factory recommended pressure and it seemed perfect, though I did twiddle the rebound damping knob a bit. I expect a few more adjustments will be required as it breaks in. Most of the controls were already where I wanted them. I'd eyeballed the cockpit into a slightly lower and longer profile relative to my SS, and it came out really well. I felt like I'd been riding the bike for years instead of having let it sit for years. I finished the test ride with 7.77 miles (jackpot!) on the cyclometer though I have to admit I did derby around in the driveway a bit to obtain the numerically alliterative mileage.

You can read posts on one forum after another about how you have to learn to ride differently on a singlespeed. Well, it's the same sort of thing going back the other way, too. I'm hoping that all the time spent on the SS has given me a little bit better sense of momentum and flow and that I'll be able to take advantage of the 23 extra gears I have now. I say I'm hoping this will happen because that's not how it went down this morning. I didn't really ride any faster and I didn't flash any more climbs. All I did was ride all the same stuff with a steady cadence rather than alternating between being spun out on descents and stomping out low RPMs on the climbs. I used the gears to bail out my tired legs, not to speed things up.

I'd like to blame my inability to increase my velocity on the weather. The monsoon season arrived in earnest late last week, with Tucson's left side experiencing an absolute turd-floater of a rainstorm just before sunset on Thursday, followed by a second hard rain over the saturated soils on Friday night. This morning's air was dense and humid, like I was riding through soup. Unfortunately, the sweltering conditions were really no excuse because the moisture actually made the trail surfaces feel more consolidated and faster. Mud? No. The kind of mud that sucks at tires and accumulates on frames requires organic and/or clayey soil. The trails at Greasewood Park are more or less mineral, composed almost entirely of rocks ranging in size from sand to pebbles to cobbles to bedrock outcrops. No, as is typically the case, I rode slow because I ride slow.

I did have to thread a somewhat sinuous and therefore more lengthy path, as the rain got the millipedes out in force. I counted a baker's dozen on my first lap and I'm enough of a bleeding heart that I do truly seek to avoid running over them. There were also assorted lizards out partaking of the explosion of insects and the rodents were keying in on the rain-fed bounty of seeds and tender new shoots put out by the desert plants. There was an American kestrel on station in the middle of it all, and I flushed a lesser nighthawk from its daytime ground roost. Oh, and a coyote crossed the trail in front of me. I always enjoy watching animals, even if I have to do it through a pair of steamed-up sunglasses, with sweat dripping into and stinging my eyes.