Going to ride the North Shore Century solo this coming Sunday. That'll be another first. I guess it should end up at a solid 200km as I'm going to ride up to Evanston and back too. Does this qualify as epic?! Probably not... Personally epic?
I reckon I need more riding buddies around here. I only have one who will tackle such rides with me and he's going to be out of town. The next closest one is in Houston, TX (Doh!). Anyhoo, I'm considering trying to make my own gels as per the cycling tips blog. Can homecooking save me from eating soylent green? We shall see. I am sort of addicted to these Honey Stinger natural energy gummies, but I bought a gross of them a while back, so I'm still "holding."
I have been pretty beat up over the last week since the HHH ride. My knee was in pretty sketchy shape after, and then Friday I came down with some pretty harsh lower back pulled muscle action. Was walking like a crippled old man Friday night, Saturday day, feeling a bit better Sunday and finally felt pretty human again today. Did my first two days in a row off the bike in quite some time (since May?). Got back on the iron horse today for a 30 mile ride around with my lady and JBI today, but I better put in another good solid 50 before Sunday I would think.
Got to go see a man about (hopefully) saving my deformed front wheel (see last post) tomorrow. It's not turning out to be easy to find a couple year old Mavic Ksyrium front wheel in black thus far, so I'm going to go to a straight up posh shop tomorrow and see what sort of tricks they may have up their sleeves for getting a pretty severe hop out of a low spoke count wheel.
I'm in the midst of building up a 29er now. I would say "this just in" or some such, but I've been putting this mess together for some weeks now and just not sharing about it. I found a guy on a roadie forum selling a very well-kept On One Inbred frame with a smattering of parts still attached for the low, low price of $150 plus shipping and it just tripped my mental "buy order" to put one of these together. Another guy with some Bontrager disc wheels, another with a White Bros. fork (so cut down it just BARELY fits, but thanks to a really short headtube, I think it fits nonetheless. Who needs to cut their fork down that low?!? Just use a few spacers and flip the stem for the love of God!), and I'm pretty much in biz. I'm waiting on a rear derailleur now, but I think it'll be here in a few days. Here are some pics of the beginnings of a (hopefully) fun offroad bike slash crappiest part of unplowed-streets-winter bike (I can put my Nokian ice tires on this thing in a few months. A few short months....... (sigh)
This:
plus this:
equals this!
I'm beginning to learn some ins and outs of hydraulic disc brakes which is kind of making me shudder with recognition of my car tinkering past. I don't miss prying back disc pads, brake fluid, etc. but I guess once I get all this crap together I can just enjoy some quality braking.
There is an embarrassment of bike racing on the interwebs right now. The Vuelta is in full swing, dudes started coming unhinged in the mountains just today. Also, the considerably less dramatic first stage of the Tour of Missouri happened today as well. Mark Cavendish is the 90s Chicago Bulls of cycling, not a terribly exciting afternoon of watching to see who's going to win a flat stage that he is riding in. Great sprinter, but makes for a pretty boring finish to some often boring (flat stages) overall days. Chalk up another vote for losing the radios (Thanks team Motorola!).
Finally, from the same blog as above, I had to repost this (Thanks Rebecca!):
First off, I'll just spare the suspense and say IT WASN'T HOTTER 'N HELL! I mean, none of us really have any way of knowing how hot it may be in hell, but I'm thinking mid-80s is a little on the low side for the fiery home of eternal damnation.
Anyway, here's what happened:
After the Coal City Century ride of the previous Sunday, I cleaned and packed up the Look and shipped it off to Austin on Monday.
My 'ol right knee was a bit on the aching and tender side after that ride. This knee used to give me pretty regular mild-ish problems, I played soccer with a compression sleeve on it for years, but it has been behaving rather well for quite some time. So, though I was disappointed, it wasn't a big surprise.
At any rate, I figured I'd better keep to something resembling training during the week. The Tuesday after, I met up with my friend Joe who was in town for the day with his bike and did a nice mellow 30-ish miles with him from River North to Hyde Park and back before going to work. It actually made my knee feel a bit better. Took the day off on Wednesday, which was our travel day to Austin. Wednesday night I reassembled my bike at my brother's house and went to bed. The missus and I had Thursday to go and have some fun, so we rolled out on our bikes around midday to do some shopping/eating, etc. As I rolled my bike across the floor towards the door, I noticed to my dismay that my front wheel was pretty terribly out of true. I just sighed, loosened the brake and headed to The Peddler bike shop down the street to see what the situation was. In a nutshell, the situation was that UPS screwed up my wheel, which is not a cheap wheel (Mavic Ksyrium Elite, black even). Tom at The Peddler took a crack at it and basically got it back in true vertically (forgive any improper terminology here), but radially, it had a pretty significant hop in it that he could not do anything about. Kind of a bummer, made even more so by the fact that there wasn't really visible damage. They must have just plopped something heavy down on my flexible bike box and done a nice little job on that poor wheel. Being the bargain hunter that I am, I paid for that whole pristine wheel set, the price of replacing the front one, so after a bit of poking around on the internet, I realized I was going to have to just see how it went and worry about it later. After riding about 20 miles on it that day, it did seem like it would get me through the ride on Saturday, so I decided to stop worrying about it.
Myself and my friends R and J packed up a rented minivan from Austin Friday afternoon and got on the road around 4pm, about an hour later than we were hoping. Registration as well as the spaghetti dinner we had prepaid for ended at 9pm and it was about 5 hours drive to Wichita Falls, so it was going to be tight. We stopped at Czech Stop in West, TX and picked up some kolaches for easy fueling in the morning. We ended up in a big rush as we headed into Wichita Falls. It was around 8:45 when I took an exit that said "Downtown" which turned out to be poorly signed or poorly interpreted by me. Either way, after a 5 minute trip in the wrong direction, I punched the name of the local coliseum that was the epicenter of activities into my phone and got going back in the right direction. We figured we were screwed, but that we'd go ahead and give it a shot as one of us was not pre-registered and the other two of us needed to pick up packets anyway and doing this at 5am or so didn't sound ideal.
I pulled up to a parking spot at the Kay Yeager Coliseum that was hilariously great. In Chicago, I wouldn't have been able to get within a 1/4 mile of the door of a place like this, but here I pulled up into a space right on the circular drive about 30 yards from the entrance. We raced in and found that things were still humming along nicely, so we were able to register, pick up packets, and even make it into the spaghetti dinner at the coliseum. This place had an active ice rink inside and we got to feast on a styrofoam plate full of overcooked spaghetti and iceberg lettuce salad in an almost empty 55-ish degree cavern. Yum! Still seemed like it'd beat driving around looking for food at 9-ish pm.
Sleep was crappy (is it always before a big ride?). Every little sound woke me up. Another thing that woke me up was when my lovely wife forgot I'd already be well asleep and called at 1:20 in the morning, sending me into hyperventilation practically. If anyone knows how to make an iPhone only make the alarm sound, please comment below! I think I managed a poor 4 hours altogether. The upside of which is that it tends to be a relief to finally get up and get on with it!
Ate some kolaches, showered, stretched, dressed and we were rolling out to the start by about 6:50am. Here is the scene:
After a really tinny rendition of the Star Spangled Banner (through some little high-school type PA horns), there are a very well-executed Air Force flyover of some F18s or something in the "missing man" formation, which I'm told was for Kennedy (way to go TX if so!). They drop a little sonic boom right over the top of us and we were off. Well, by off I mean, we began to spend the next 10 minutes watching the 5 to 6 thousand people in front of us begin. If I ever do this ride again, I'm definitely cramming up the very, very, very front. When we finally began moving, it was this curious little scooching situation, half of folks were clipped in with one foot, sort of skateboarding along with the other, and the smarter ones (I eventually woke up and got on board with this group) just got off and walked their bikes. After a few hundred yards of this, we finally were able to go fast enough to sit on our bikes, just barely though. Judging by the bib numbers we saw, there we close to or better than 14,000 riders at the start of this. I believe many of them were 20, 50 or 70 milers, but thousands and thousands were certainly going the distance. We rode along in a claustrophobic fashion after finally reaching speeds of 15-ish mph. There were a steady stream of fast traffic on the left and people inexplicably dropping bottles about every 50 yards or so. Lots of shouted warnings and such, a few single person wrecks and flats starting within the first mile. Whose bike is in such crap shape before a ride like this?! I guess lots of them.
In short, we ended up skipping the first 3 rest stops and not stopping until mile 40 so that we could pass up about maybe 3000 or so riders and get into a more sane grouping on the road. During that stretch, we began to see a couple of what I imagine were some coronary incidents with ambulances screaming up the road from the other direction, etc. One funny incidental scene at one of these sorts of episodes found several hundred riders get off and walk for a hundred feet or so and being out in the middle of pretty quiet nowhere, it sounded like some weird tap dance army hearing all the various horseshoe sized cleats clopping in approximate unison.
We were doing a nice 17-ish mph average during most of the ride. After our first 40 mile stop (featuring some really friendly country dogs serving as county ambassadors!), we stopped again at 60, then at 70 and 80 too. The rest stops featured long lines at the bathrooms most of the time and plentiful cut fruit along with a lot of chipper volunteers filling bottles with Gatorade and water. There was amusing scenery amongst the riders along the way with some wacky recumbents and a couple of guy in some bootleg land-speed-record type torpedo contraptions. Lots of fancy, fancy bikes, lots of fancy lycra and whatnot too.
Throughout the ride, I was holding up pretty good in terms of legs, never really felt too thrashed, my butt and feet were doing pretty great too. I made the risky move of wearing some new (to me, but slightly used) SIDI genius shoes I had bought from a guy online and ridden once for about 30 miles, but luckily they worked out just great, super comfy. My right knee was pretty tender, it had been since the Coal City Century. I had taken a couple of Celebrex pills that my brother had which I think helped with the inflammation, but I ended up wearing a compression sleeve for about 40-ish miles, which made everything feel quite nice, but was a bit rash inducing after a while.
Every time we hit nice pavement (and there was plenty of it that was not particularly nice...big, clunky, pebbly, ashpalt as the road grade for maybe 30 to 40 of the miles) I noticed the hop in my front wheel, whup, whup, whup, whup. I fear that it's basically shot, but I also knew it would make it through the ride.
At mile 63 (?) we came to HELL'S GATE!! This was the much ballyhooed cut-off point (I think you had to do that distance in 6 hours or something to not get pulled, not too difficult). Talk about an anticlimax! It consisted of a freeway underpass with a sign and an inflatable hulk guy. No flames, no fake flames, c'mon people! What about some of those things that blow the streamers upwards?! Something...
At one point, we came upon some guys around mile 75 giving away fresh cut watermelon. We made a special stop for that, thanks guys! Keep in mind, it never got above around the mid-80s, I barely sweated a drop all day long (though I am a light sweater, but still!).
Around mile 92, we came onto a big wide highway shoulder headed back into Wichita Falls. It was on a slight downhill with a tailwind and I found myself going around 21 and just feeling like it was effortless. All of a sudden, since we were within about 10 miles and had been riding pretty conservatively, I thought it'd be fun to just go for broke and make a little personal race of it for the last 8-ish miles. I ramped it up to a good 27-30 mph for the next few miles, really fun stuff! I was flying past hundreds of people and was surprised I didn't poop out at these speeds. Maybe it was the GU gels I'd been snacking on here and there during the day. I did end up hosing myself down with water on a few occasions, it was a big help. I did not realize that the whole time I was blasting along, my buddy R was madly chasing me down! I thought I was just running a little personal time trial, but it was actually a mad race. I didn't even let myself look at the odometer for about 3 miles and when I did, I thought "you'll never finish at this pace!" During a few windy/slight uphill stretches, I did some down to 19-24-ish mph and it ended up being a full 10 miles to the finish for just over 102 total. However, only one guy passed me in those last 10 miles, I drafted off of him for about a 1/2 mile the first time, passed him again on a giant freeway overpass that was the last big climb before town and was passed again by him in the last half mile, but I don't think he'd been going like the devil for 10 miles either! It was a lot of fun anyway, I think I kept up a 24-ish mph average for that last 10.
Came through the finish, went over and stood in some blasting water and about 1.5 minutes later I ran into R and found out he'd been within shouting distance of me a few times! Probably would have gotten creamed were it not for the element of surprise at the "start" of our little race. Here's me looking, perhaps not as fresh as a daisy, but not TOO bad:
Got some nice finishing pics of J who kept a more sane pace the rest of the way through about 10 minutes later.
After gasping and standing around and watering up for a bit, we rode back to our humble abode, ate some pasta, drank a beer, packed up and headed back to Austin. Final times:
Total ride (including stops): 6:48 Ride time (excluding stops): 5:51 Total mileage: 102.8 Max speed: 35.5 mph Average speed (while moving): 17.54 mph Average speed overall: 15.1-ish mph
I felt really good after this ride, not at all as devastated as the first on the week before. We drove back to Austin and had a tremendous feast and margaritas at El Si's and I got some good sleep!
Not the date, the length of bicycle ride. I did my first one today and ended up going fairly well beyond an imperial century to nearly a metric double century. Feeling not very well-prepared for next weekend's Hotter Than Hell 100 ride in TX (I've had a cavalcade of out-of-town guests and a busy work schedule conspiring to keep me off of the bike), I spotted the posting for the Bike Psychos Century ride on the chainlink yesterday and quickly recruited my friend Zac to come along and do it with me.
I arose at 4:30 am this morning, not terribly well rested. I did go to bed at the pretty civil time of 10:45 PM but was pretty amped up about it and kind of had a tossing/turning/went-to-bed-too-early-to-sleep-well sort of a night. Probably got circa 4.5 hours of decent sleep maybe. I did have the presence of mind to pack and prepare about everything I'd need for the morning including pre-loading the coffee maker and prepping a nice eggy breakfast last night, so the getting up and being ready part was pretty easy.
We left Chicago at about 5:35 for Coal City, IL, a small town just southwest of Joliet. The pre-dawn light in Chicago was quite nice and I had a crazy vision driving east on Belmont upon seeing this TREMENDOUS bank of clouds over Lake Michigan. It literally looked like mountains and weirdly made Chicago look like a flattish street in California or Colorado. It was eerie, but quite beautiful. Once on the Kennedy, the whole lake was like a cloud mountain. Construction crews found a way to make traffic at 6am on a Sunday, namely but blocking the freeway down to one lane, but we were soon on our way out past the deep burbs.
We arrived at the Coal City Early Childhood Center and registered up in minutes, borrowed some sunscreen from a nice fellow rider parked next to us and were on our way. It was a beautiful route of mostly cornfields and some other crops, a lot of farmhouses and just some nice woodlands as well as quite a bit of the Illinois River. Almost completely car-free roads greeted us for quite some time in the morning and even throughout the day, cars were a very minimal sight. What a welcome change from Chicago where you are watching out for your life every few minutes throughout the day!
After taking our second ride-lengthening detour of the day through this old park that dead ended at an Army Corp of Engineers facility (there was an little unmarked dogleg in the road that we chose the wrong way on), we (perhaps foolishly) skipped the first rest stop at 25 miles and kept on plugging away. We started hitting the first few hills shortly after that. I was finally glad to have a compact double crank on my bike! Not that these were Pyrenean by any means (I don't even think they would change the route description from "flat" on a grand tour), but pros we ain't!
At one of the steeper hills a young-ish guy on a carbon Orbea fairly blasted by us and Zac decided he wanted to catch this guy, so we pounded away back on the flat up above and caught him, forming a little three man pace line for about 10-ish miles, eventually the three of us came upon another guy we had passed earlier in the day. This guy was on a new-ish carbon Lemond and was clearly a bit older from his grey crew cut and mustache. We were feeling the strain of our approximately 20-22mph pace by now, Lemond and Orbea were in front of us just chatting away, like they were riding to the farmer's market from brunch or something. We heard Orbea say he was from Colorado, so he must have literally been drowning in oxygen on this clear 60 to 70 degree day in sunny Illinois. Eventually, we found it wiser to simply get back to a more sane personal pace and dropped off the back of these two. About 5 miles later we came to a much needed 50 mile rest stop.
After eating some very "al dente" slightly seasoned dry pasta and some much nicer fresh fruit, we re-embarked just a little behind old Lemond. He was cruising along in his report 2005 jersey just riding his ride. We both decided he was our new hero with his easy cadence, looking like he could do a double century and mow the yard after. I told Zac I'd feel good if we simply kept him in sight for a while, but after warming back up, we somehow bridged up to him from a few hundred meters back. I jumped on his wheel and asked if he minded some hangers on. He told us it was fine and eventually we got to chatting after he remarked that he remembered a certain hill we rode up to. I asked him how many time he'd done this ride and he said "Oh, 5 or 6 times." After a bit more chatting with me mentioning how he seemed a bit older than us and we were really impressed with his riding, he told us he was SIXTY!!! Holy crap, this guy's calf muscles looked like a current pro tour rider! He said this was his 11th or 12th century ride of the year. I must say that I found that pretty inspiring as a newly minted 40 year old. The idea that I could ride 100 miles in a day for a couple more decades plus makes getting older seem pretty alright, especially the way this guy obviously could have simply notched it up and left us in the dust at any moment. I shamelessly sucked this guy's wheel for most of the next 20 miles and he just didn't think a thing about it. Didn't catch his name, but on the off chance that he's a crazed internet scourer, thank you kindly sir! That was a fun leg. We all made it to the 75 mile rest stop and there we parted ways as we took off a bit sooner than him.
At this point, the ride was starting to seem a bit long. My previous longest ride was the 81.5 miles to Milwaukee, so we'd hit that by this rest stop. We still managed to plug along at a decent rate, maybe circa 17.5 average, but we hit 100 before the last 87.5 mile rest stop. We finished up the last couple of miles with a nice woman on a really fancy Guru carbon bike with a PowerTap hub, aero bars, the whole nine yards. She had dropped her husband a few miles earlier after we passed them all and she gave us a much needed steady pace into this rest stop. She turned out to be a social studies teacher at Decatur High School, where Zac went to school for a year. They chatted about who was retired and who was still there. Always a small world. It was pretty hard to leave this final oasis. I ate a PB&J and more fruit. Hydration and eating went pretty well over the day. I was always remembering the mantra "eat before you're hungry, drink before you're thirsty," and it did not let me down. My knees were feeling pretty weird by this point, not really in pain, but just a feeling of unfamiliar worn-outness. (Later that evening, they would feel genuinely achy, but I think I'll survive.) We just rather grimly pushed on through the last 13.5 miles. Still kept a nice pace up. It was at this point that we went through a pretty great wind farm area. I'd never been so close to these goliath turbines. We were practically riding right underneath them. I find them quite beautiful in their minimalist splendor. They must be about 15 stories tall, just silently cranking away in the sky. This was also one of the most hilly sections (damn you, route planners!). I never thought I'd be so happy to see a street called "Carbon Hill Rd" as we made our last turn and rode the final mile or so back to the start. We pulled up right at 114 miles and just rode straight to the car and plopped down in the hatchback for about 10 minutes of panting and staring before we packed up to head back to Chicago.
We fueled up on some McDonald's (?!?!..groan) french fries and a chocolate shake on the way out of town. This was they first time I've given McD's any of my money in as long as I can remember, but there wasn't much to choose from in Coal City on a Sunday afternoon. It was necessary to split the drive between us some we did not pass out and kill ourselves, but we made it back in one piece and now I feel like I sort of know what I'm in for in Wichita Falls next week.
Here are our final stats: Miles ridden: 114 Total time (including stops): 7 hours 8 minutes Average speed including stops: 16.05 mph Actual riding time: 6 hours 26 minutes Average riding speed (excluding stops): 17.74 mph! Max speed: 38.6 mph (there were some pretty good downhills!)
Sadly, I did not take a single picture. For some strange reason, I left my phone in the car. Much good scenery was missed.
They are easy to take shots at, with often seriously asshole-ish, superior, condescending attitudes flying around every which way you turn. However, they are also often pretty underpaid and perhaps underappreciated skilled workers* (at least many of them). This best of craigslist post sheds a little light on some of the sorts of people and questions they perhaps have to deal with.
* A good friend of mine has been having nightmares with the shop in Houston he purchased his bike from. It was supposed to have free service for however long, but these dillweeds started making him feel like an idiot from about the second time he brought it in, bent his derailleur hanger when he brought it in for a tuneup before a big ride and then did their best to tell him he bent it, slammed the Park Tool maintenance book down on the counter in front of him on another trip in to get the wheel trued, and so on. He subsequently went to another shop to see about getting his wheels to stop having constantly loosening spokes and going out of true and they told him his rear wheel had been trued too many times and probably wouldn't last much longer. This is a Mavic CXP22 and a Shimano hub purchased new with perhaps 1500 miles we're talking about here. How hard is it to not screw that up!? This is why I generally opt to learn how to do it myself, no offense to bike mechanics as a class, it's just such a crapshoot. I'm also a raging autodidact, so if it's feasible, I'd just as soon do it myself. However, I have learned many good tricks/procedures and been bailed out once or twice by a skilled mechanic, so I will give mad props to many of them.
I'm usually the last person to see these things, if that's so, I apologize for posting it, but there must be other virally challenged people like myself. This thing is pretty, pretty funny.
I tried to ride to Milwaukee today again with my pal Zac, but I had some serious "mechanicals" as they like to say in the biz. Namely, 3 FLATS! What the!? Well, in the name of training for the HHH100 ride, I wanted to ride my fancy pants bike and the Michelin Race 2 tires that were on there were sort of coming apart, so I am in the midst of replacing them with some Vredesteins, but they were not here yet, so I put on the older Conti Gatorskins I had taken off of my Surly a couple weeks ago. Now, this was sort of dumb because I had gotten a couple of flats on those, which is why I replaced them, but I also thought I was sort of over reacting and maybe they weren't totally shot. Now I know that they are! Anyway, Zac was riding the same tires as I'm getting and he had no problems all day, so that makes me feel better! To be fair to the Gatorskins, I probably put 600+ pretty hard city miles on those without one flat and I had gotten them used on a bike to start with. They are good tires.
Fortunately, our support car (i.e. my wife, who was driving up to Milwaukee to visit her Grandma) came and picked us up in Racine (Thanks again iPhone, you overpriced albatross. Score one for you!) as she was just on her way past us anyway on the highway. We "abandoned" and just went and ate a big lunch. Still got 63 miles in and didn't get lost in Racine this time. We were doing a pretty smoking pace too, riding along at circa 20-ish mph on the gravel paths even. I was wheelsucking most of the time as I'm in the ballpark of old enough to be Zac's dad, but I was hanging in there alright! It's so rare that I have anyone to draft off of that I had to take advantage. We also got rained on for a good half hour, always a fun time. Gotta go give some TLC to my filthy bike now.
I made it to last Friday's Critical Mass ride. What a hoot! Highlights include (and see pics below for all of these):
-Hippie dude in a crazy tent cart thing jamming electric guitar -PENNY FARTHING RIDER!! -Very touching and brilliant marriage proposal -Guy with a pretty jamming stereo playing Parliament/James Brown/disco hits as we rode down Michigan Ave.
The only lowlight was getting a flat and losing the ride on the outskirts of downtown. Doh!!
Afterwards, my wife and I went to eat at a delicious restaurant in the heart of the frat boy haven that is Damen and Division (how things have changed in a decade!) and while sitting on the sidewalk eating, we were passed by the ride! I was immediately jealous, but we just watched and enjoyed and took a few pics.
massing at Daley Plaza:
Aforementioned hippie dude:
Doing the swirl before takeoff:
Your humble servant:
Penny Farthing guy! Hooray!
The proposition:
Suitor on bended knee (she said yes!):
This guy had the stone cold jams, we stayed behind him as long as we could!
Still jamming on Division St:
Also last week, I went by the Soldier Field Cycling Series races on Wednesday for a little look-see. I watched the women race for about a half hour. I was surprised by A) how not very well attended it was and B) how fairly bootleg the whole affair seemed. I guess when you have a fairly fancy website, one thinks it'll be a big crowded event. Basically, there was a maybe 1/2 mile course made from traffic cones and some temporary fencing and people seem to ride around it for about an hour. Apparently that's a criterium. The women's combined field (women always get the shaft I guess) was only about 9 riders, but it looked pretty fun anyway. I was sorry to be out of town a couple of weeks back during the Chicago Criterium. I guess that's an entirely different affair. Anyway, checking it out made me think I might just go down there and give it a shot. It can't be much different than hauling ass up to the Botanical Gardens which I have managed at a almost 20 mph pace including city traffic before. We'll see though, as I've had this nagging cough for over 2 weeks that I just got medicated for. It's not helping my preparation for the HHH100 ride in just over 3 weeks! Very annoying, but I have some meds now.
Finally, I've decided to make the Surly Pacer my sensible ride. I resisted anything that made a bike heavier for the last year, but realizing that always carrying a backpack or depending on the locks of others is not that practical. I'm going to try and morph it into a sem-touring bike. I was also further inspired by Jay Ryan's lovely Surly Long Haul Trucker I saw on our ride today (Thanks Jay and Nate, that was fun!). So, I have some decent fenders back on now, I had to mod the front one for toe overlap, it's perfect now. I also got some new Schwalbe Marathon tires as my Continental Gatorskins were pretty hacked up, turned out I had a nail head stuck in them on the Critical Mass ride. I also got a new rack today. More on this project as it progresses!
I squeezed in a 22 mile ride after work today. Went up the really stinky North Shore Trail again up into Evanston. It really, really smells like ripe and mildly toxic sewage anywhere within about 15' of the Chicago River. Way to go Chicago! At least we send it out to those poor saps downstream of us, misery loves company as they say.
Rode into downtown Evanston and stopped at Turin, as I like to stop at a LBS anytime I pass by one and just pop in, pick up something cheap, etc. I discovered while buying a tube there that Turin joins Rapid Transit in Wicker Park in having the distinction of the most expensive tubes I've ever bought. Not $5, not $6, but $7 for a regular 700c/23-25 tube! I mean, REALLY! How can the same thing be $5 at Boulevard Bikes, $4 at Smart Bike Parts on Armitage and need to be $7 at these places? Methinks I shall abstain from shopping at Turin in the future. Tubes are not a luxury item, they are like oxygen to a cyclist (or beer). Anyway, I got my 22 miles in.
Also, I spent the weekend in Madison, WI and enjoyed riding about 85 miles in 2 days on the bike-tastic paths that the city is infested with. It was like shock treatment coming back to the streets of Chicago. Oh Madison, why can't you not be a frozen wasteland in the winter, I love thee in the spring/summer! While there I popped into Cronometro and had the pleasure of being entertained by the owner Colin for a good 15-20 minutes as he showed my wife and I around the shop, discussed the fitting process, Seven and Serotta bikes, etc. etc. A VERY nice guy and a perfect example of what a small bike shop owner should be like, i.e. FRIENDLY! Anyone could be your next customer. And while Cronometro may have $7 tubes as well (I didn't check, but I like to think not), greeting someone in a friendly manner and taking the time to give them a nice shop tour even when they say they are just there to look around would make such things go down a lot smoother. I'm not sure when I'm going to get around to buying a new bike in the $4,000 to $12,000 range, but when I do, that place will be a the top of my list. Thanks Colin!
If you are all carbon-fibered out from Le Tour, here is a little old-fashioned racing to cleanse the palate:
Finally, I'm seriously considering going ahead and building up a 29er bike. I keep thinking about doing more of that riding. I'm now online browsing and early-lusting, we'll see where it goes. Could be fun for some fall trail riding and also really handy for the deepest armpit of winter as I don't think my big ice tires will fit on my Surly Pacer very well, but they'd go swimmingly on a 29er frame. We shall see!
And finally-finally, my other developing lust is for putting together a S and S coupled bike. They had an incredible Seven Alaris at Cronometro with that setup and my wife was being a super sweet enabler and telling me how I had to get one. She is really good for being the "just do it" devil (or angel depending on your point of view) on my shoulder when it comes to not prudent purchases, god bless her! Anyway, I think I'll manage to hold off on that insanity for a while, but it got me thinking about doing that to my Paramount frame. Waterford Cycles, where I was planning on sending that thing for the beauty treatment, does the retrofits and I could also have it done by Bilenky Cycles in PA, which is perhaps the leading retrofitter of this setup. If you do not know what I'm talking about, click here. The idea of having a regular sized suitcase to take on trips is pretty awesome to me. I hope to be doing more and more bikeable travel in the coming years, and I think the Paramount was coming in at just over 20 lbs. with a pretty heavy set of wheels and pedals, so I think it'd make a pretty swell sub-40 lb. suitcase bike. We'll see on that one too. Probably at least several months away no matter what, but my interest is piqued!
