Tag Archives | Gravel

The Second Season Part II

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My “seconds season” of riding has kicked off and I am fairly stoked with the results: ten hours and forty-five minutes in the saddle of a borrowed fat bike, a shit cross bike and two different (excellent) mountain bikes on pavement, gravel roads, dirt roads and singletrack.

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Adequate

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I mentioned in an earlier post today that I was off to ride, try out the WTB Nano 700 x 40c tires I picked up and try to make peace with my Kona Jake The Snake. Well, you may or many not have seen my afternoon edit on the post, but if not I will mention again: the tires were most excellent and well worth it, but I think my time with the Jake is done. I just don’t feel good on it… it’s almost painful. I doubt I’ll sell it (unless you want it?), but it may become a townie or a two-wheeled paperweight.

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New Meats

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For some reason, earlier this summer, I fell out of love with my four-year old Jake The Snake cross bike (which has never been used for cross, only gravel riding). I’m not 100% sure why, but after putting literally thousands of miles on it, I’ve been opting for my Ti El Mariachi mountain bike whenever riding gravel and dirt roads. Not wanting to see the bike sit idle, and knowing that if I tried to sell it I would get very little for it, I had the cassette, chain, cables and pulleys replaced (something that should have happened about a year ago). Now I am making a last-ditch attempt to save the Jake from becoming a two-wheeled clothes hanger and my El Marichi from becoming nothing more than a flat bar Fargo. I also picked up some new meats from WTB: the Nano 700 x 40 Comp.

It appears the Nano’s more aggressive than most cross tires tread, girth and added volume will get the job done on our shit Michiganderburgh dirt, gravel and paved roads and maybe add some comfort. From a short spin around the block yesterday they seem to roll pretty good on pavement and look meaty and delicious on the Jake.

In about twenty minutes they tires are going to get initiated into gravel and wet cement-like Michigan dirt roads, I suppose after that I will have a better idea of what the future holds for the J.T.S.

POST RIDE UPDATE: Sometimes it is about the bike. The tires were great, but I think my relationship with the Jake The Snake is over. Wanna buy a cross bike?

Bullet Points

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I’m lacking time for my normal verbal diarrhea of a blog post, so I’m going all crap sales meeting Power Point presentation on you [not really] and doing it all with bullet points of random information nonsense. The only thing missing is a wig wearing sales director in a bad suit, bored as hell employees doodling sketches of him being chased by an angry bear with a knife and poor slide graphics (not designed by the in-house graphic artist, but instead downloaded from the web at 72 dpi and enlarged stretched to 900 dpi for that cool, “What the hell is that a graphic of?” look).

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Bad Ideas Turned Good

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As I mentioned the other day, my buddy at the shop lent me his Trek Farley* to ride for a few days and see what I thought. I did a lap on singletrack last Saturday and thought it felt a bit harsh compared to my Pugsley and made the pre-mature decision to shelve any ideas of considering one in the future. Then I got to thinking: whether I buy one or not, I think my assessment was a bit rash and not all that fair, given that while I have ridden my Pugsley on singletrack, I have only done so for 10-12 miles at a time to mix things up after I’ve done a “real” lap or two on my Superfly, or when conditions were shit.

I’ve love the Pugs in the snow and on the deep sand ORV trails, so I figured I should give the Farely another go before I return it this week, and ride it on surface that would be more akin to what I would actually use a fat bike on. The trouble is (thank God!), there is no snow on the ground and this week won’t really allow for me to head north to those ORV trails. So I had an idea– I would use the Farley for my dirt road ride today. Afterall, some of those roads are pretty sandy and pretty shit… It was a bad idea; sort of.

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A Weekend of Dirtz

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My plan for Saturday morning was this: get up, drink 2 to 14 cups of Bust Ass Coffee, eat some sort of lame breakfast, watch football (YES!!!) and then head out to ride some singletrack north of town. All of that was on course to happen until I checked the radar on Weather-dot-look-at-all-these-ads-and lame human interest videos-dot-com and saw that my trails appeared to be getting pissed down on with rain by the uncontrollable, loose bladder of Ma Nature.

Plan B was activated.

Plan B was to grab the El Mariachi and head out for a couple of hours or so of pavement and dirt roads. Obviously not my first choice (made fucking obvious by the fact that it’s Plan B, NOT Plan A. But dirt is dirt, miles are miles, calories burnt are calories burnt and a fat, crap cyclist is a fat, crap cyclist).

Upon fetching the El Mariachi (my current “go-to” gravel road bike that is really just a hardtail mountain bike) from the Not-So-Stankment®, I realized that in a raging fit of laziness [surprised?] I failed to rinse the bike off after Tuesday’s muddy dirt road ride. No big, I sort of like riding around with what amounts to an extra 2 to 5 pounds of dried cement on my frame. What’s a few extra pounds of dried cement on my bike when I’m already sporting at least 15 extra pounds of beer, pizza and general fuck-up-ness around my ever broadening and bouncing midriff??? Nothing!

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The Curse of Tuesday

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I’m not going to lie, I HATE Michigan winters. Of course, I also hated every one of the, slightly shorter Pennsylvania winters I experienced in my first thirty-nine years of life before moving here in 2010. On the flip side, MOST of my time here in Michigan has been blessed with some amazing summers and falls. I would have included spring, but our spring is the drunk, psychotic uncle of seasons; cloudy, cold, sunny, blustery, warm, rainy, icy, grey, humid and dry. However, this summer has been pretty darn excellent in the weather department; not too hot, not too humid and sunny most of the time. Except on Tuesdays.

It seems that Tuesdays in central Michigan are reserved for heavy rains, strong winds and storms. Tuesday also happens to be the day that Wifey has the option to work at home, which allows me to get out for a ride during the day. Sadly–more often than not–on the days she has done so, I have awoke in the morning to the sounds of rain blowing against the house. Today was no different.

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Fat on Fat, Man on Bike Love

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With B-Man in Pittsburgh with his Poppy for the week and Wifey in Baltimore on .gov business, I am considering this week a vacation week. There will be many miles ridden and copious amounts of beer drank. There will be drunk Tweeting and Facebooking, strippers and casual sex with throngs of horned up CMU girls aching to get a piece of me. OK, that’s all pretty much a lie. I plan to get some miles in, hit up some new riding areas, drink a few beers and maybe hang out with some friends. The rest is just perverted daydreaming by a 43-year-old man with a wife of seventeen years and a 10-year-old son out-of-town for the week.

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