Most, if not all, of the dirt road rides I do north of town take me on North Crawford Road at some point, especially now that I live spitting distance from the paved portion of Crawford; a portion that I am on for just a nugget hair over a mile until it turns to blessed dirt.
Remember when mountain bikes were called “fat tire” bikes? Yeah, me too. These days fat usually denotes fat bikes which utilize 3.8″ wide tires and up. And now there’s 29er and 27.5 plus bikes too. I’m at a loss on what exactly I should call my mountain bikes that run 2.2″ tires.
Sunday was another blessed day of sleeping in before the school year REALLY starts in earnest this Tuesday. Yeah, sure, B started back last Monday, but it all seemed like educational masturbation. This week will be the real start, PLUS two soccer practices, and a tournament come the weekend. It will be a real test for B, AND for us! But let’s not put the shitty, school year cart before the summertime horse. We still have another day!
From my best guesstimate I rode twice this week–Tuesday and Thursday thus far, with high hopes for some sort of crap riding over the next three or four days.
I seriously had to consult a calendar to see when the last time I rode was, it was Thursday. I rode dirt roads on the Boone, it was OK. I took some photos of birds along the way. They were pretty OK too.
After Sunday’s muddy, rain-soaked, dirt road slog on the Fatterson, I was off the bike on Monday to let things dry out, go to the chiropractor, get some things done, and take advantage of the cooler, dryer conditions to get the lawn mowed, thus freeing up more time for later in the week for outdoor hijinks.
After three months of hot, dusty, dry weather, we finally had some heavy on/off again rains Saturday evening. Because of that I had resound myself to not riding on Sunday, or riding the fatty to plow through the soft sand and mud on the dirt roads. While the first the first option was extremely appealing, I opted for the latter.
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.
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.
