Author Archives → soiledchamois

Lost

birds_of_the_corn

My Garmin 500 shit the bed like Spud from Trainspotting last week, and no longer mounts up on my Mac. Despite hours of Googling, scouring bike forums, multiple resets, bitching, moaning, and nearly smashing it to pieces with a meat hammer, it just refuses to cooperate. Since then I’ve felt completely lost on the where’s, when’s, and what’s of my riding. Yes, those rides could probably be summed up with words like crap, crapper, and crappier, but I like to actually see the multiple layers of statistical crap on my computer screen.

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Not Dead (Lucky-ish Me)

undulating-dirt-rad

After last Thursday’s OK-ish short and quick double loop on Sally’s Trail, I returned to dirt roads on the Fatterson on Friday. My chiropractor recommended limiting myself to shorter rides, but since it’s hard for a fat, crap, cyclist to make his short rides  even shorter, I somehow managed to ride nearly thirty miles of dirt roads on the fatty. Not sure that qualifies as “long” in any world other than the one in which the person in charge of my spine lives; I rode it nonetheless, and it felt OK.

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Lack Of & Making Progress

butter-alma-mi

Towards the end of my Tuesday dirt road ride, I found that I was getting some of the hip pain that I usually get when mountain biking. It wasn’t enough to make the ride painful, or get me all pissed off, but I knew it was there. I put it out of my mind and made some plans to ride the Fatterson on Sally’s Trail on Wednesday, since I had to go down the shop to get my Superfly that was getting some love from Napper who was fixed the pedal threads one of my crank arms. Yeah, only I could jack up the threads on the crank installing/uninstalling pedals. I shouldn’t be allowed to touch tools.

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Corn Sniffing Parts I & II

fast-moving-corn

Dirt and gravel road riding has continued this week with a 30+ mile late afternoon ride on Monday and a 30 mile early-ish morning ride on Tuesday. I rode the Boone north of town both days, and most–but not all–of the roads were thankfully void the deep washboard ruts that are currently prevalent to the south.

The corn is huge right now, with most fields towering over me as I ride. I’ve ridden past corn fields for my whole life, but it wasn’t until I moved here that I really noticed how much you can actually smell the corn as you ride by. It’s as if I have my nostrils right down to an ear of corn sniffing it like I was doing lines of coke. Or something like that.

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Better Focus

old-barn-in-field

Sunday morning I sat at the computer and wrote a blog post about Saturday’s mountain bike ride. Then Wifey came into my office with some sort of failing DVD workout drama and interrupted me. I never did get around to actually publishing that post, and it was probably for the best. See, Saturday’s ride on singletrack didn’t go so well in the back and hip department, and I aborted after about 7 or 8 miles of riding. This left me in a hell of a funk, swearing that I would not even attempt to ride singletrack the rest of 2016, that all that physical therapy was a waste of time and money, and that I should just spend my Saturdays sitting in a comfy chair watching soccer, drinking until I pass out, blah, blah, blah, blah. And most of that stuff is true (especially the blah, blah, blah part).

Regardless of how poor the ride was, or how disappointed I was, I decided there was no point in spreading that self-pity around, and to focus on the fact that I had three rides under my expanding belt before I headed to MMCC to ride on Saturday, and those rides were just fine, so just get out to ride instead of sitting around bitching about one ride.

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Three Day Blur

dever-road-evening

The week thus far has been a three day blur of riding, house shit, chores, heat, humidity, traveling, soccer practices, and AC repairmen. None of that is all that bad except for the AC needing repaired during one of the hottest summers I’ve experienced in my almost six years here in Michigan. Thankfully we had some sort of appliance, warranty bullshit and that covered the cost of the repair. Now just to hope that the thing holds on for the summer without having to have the unit replaced!

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Back To The Boone

misty-shaded-dirt-road

Last Thursday I resurrected the Fatterson– Jesus vs. Lazarus-like–for a dirt road ride in which I whole heartedly expected messy, gobsmacking mud due to some thunderstorms that came through on Wednesday night. Instead I found tacky dirt roads that were near perfect for riding. So when I woke up on Friday morning and saw we had received more rain, I figured I might as well just roll the Boone since the dry roads have been sucking up the water pretty good.

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The Beast is Back

musk-on-dirt

For five months or more, the beast of a bike that is the Trek Farley (better known as the Fatterson), has sat in the garage with no seat post, and still sporting studded tires. I have thoroughly enjoyed months of riding the Boone and the PrOcal, but for some reason I had the urge to roll like a tank over the gravel and dirt roads of central Michigan, so I set about swapping out the post, and finally getting some studless meats on, so as to do just that.

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