Last Thursday I headed back to western PA for a couple-ish days. I wasn’t all that keen to make a trip back right now, but with my dad recovering from a recent heart attack, I thought it was only proper to head home, check up on him, and pay a visit. It would also give me and my family a chance to catch up with some great friends that we haven’t seen in a while. I wish I could have seen a few others during my stay, but that will have to wait for later in the summer or fall.
After a great ride in the woods on Monday morning, Monday night brought some long overdue rain to mid-Michigan. The cool temperatures, dark clouds and knowledge that I had nowhere to be Tuesday morning made it real easy to sleep in and be no use to anyone. I like easy, so that’s what I did, and it felt damn good.
Going to do a bit of catch up here on the blog this digital fish wrap I call a blog. Bare with me, as I am condensing three days worth of crap into one big blog post that no one will should read. I will type some shit, I will post some pics, I will care little about either (and neither will you).
After four days in a row of riding, which included: a mountain bike ride in the woods, a fast dirt road ride on my Boone and two fat bike rambles on the Farley, I was back at work at the shop today. As always, it was nice to get back to contributing to society for 8+ hours. Of course I am not sure how much society appreciated me there to contribute to it.
The following is the unsolicited opinion piece you never knew you needed.
I’ve read various things, both positive and negative, in the past few weeks about gravel riding, gravel racing and gravel bikes [Gravel™]. Because I am a negative person, I tend to dwell on the negative comments rather than the positive. Guitar Ted writes that some folks feel that gravel racing has gotten “too big.” Yeah, a fringe race genre within a fringe sport, that 98% of America hates or doesn’t even know IS a sport has gotten too big. That’s like saying Fugazi got “too big.” For fuck’s sake people!
To my knowledge no one has ever put a gun to anyone’s head to do a gravel road race or any bike race. Of course I can’t rule out that some crazy ass Italian put a gun to someone’s head back in the early days of the Giro, or that more than a couple Keirin racers haven’t had a guns pointed at them by nut jobs with gambling arrears so as to produce desired results. But I digress…
Even though I didn’t work yesterday, I still didn’t ride (call me slack, it’s OK). I needed to catch up on what seemed like a million different things around the house as well as prepare for my buddy Dave and his family to stop by for dinner and to spend the night. I have been friends with Dave for fifteen years or more; we used to work together at the newspaper back in Pittsburgh before he moved to Florida, I was “co” best man in his wedding and we still have a strong relationship via texts and email. Sadly his wife’s grandmother recently passed away and she was being buried in her home state of Michigan. Since all their family were coming up for the services, they extended their trip to see some of Michiganderburgh’s sites and to stop by and see us (a true Michigan sideshow attraction) before heading back to F-L-A this morning. It was awesome to catch up with him and to finally meet his two kids in person.
Thursday was a day off the bike and a day in the bike shop to earn some cash money. The shop was fairly busy and I found myself building up another Weehoo (Weee Hoooo!!). Thankfully I only f’ed up a few things along the way–way better than the last Weehoo build which took me forever due to a parts issue. The rest of my work day was spent getting my balls busted by Napper and Terry, unpacking and checking in inventory, and pimping bikes to folks; including a couple of Mennonite kids that I initially helped out a couple of weeks back.
The last time these two kids were in, they were with their mom looking and test riding. This time the three of them returned with dad in tow, and after his approval they left the happy owners of two new bikes. The boy in particular was stoked with his X-Caliber. Of course I wept a little bit when he wanted a kickstand installed. I waited until they left before I buried my tear filled eyes and chubby cheeks in my dirty palms.
Just when I started to think that I might never ride my bike again; I did. I rode last Wednesday then my work schedule (who’d a thunk that would happen?), appointments and weather kept me out of the saddle for four days in a row. While it’s easy to blame all those things, it was mostly just laziness that prevented me from riding. What can I say, I’m pretty swell at being lazy.
As I headed to bed last night I knew what today was going to have in store for me: a trip to the dentist office to FINALLY get the left side of my mouth right (what?) and then working at the bike shop ’till six. On paper that is pretty swell, especially since I would have a few hours in the morning to putz around before work. Here’s what happened…
After feeling good on the bike yesterday, I found myself creeping around the house last night and early this morning like someone repeatedly hit me in the back with a baseball bat. Me thinks that my lower fat back did not take kindly to the hip stretches that I did yesterday, oddly enough, done to relieve me lower back pain! Typical me-ish-ness.
