My plan to ride singletrack somewhere other than Mid (the 16 mile trails system on the wooded grounds that surround Mid Michigan Community college) on Saturday was a fail. I had the address, the plan, etc. for another trail system, but then just lost interest in driving two hours to ride my bike when I could ride trails just 25 minutes from my house and still have time to do other things after. C’est la vie.
I tried to get out early this morning for a dirt road ride, I really did. Sadly, my “early” turned out to be 9:45, and things were already starting to really heat up around Michiganderburgh. We get less than ten or so HOT days a year here and today was predicted to be one of them with temps going up into the low nineties by afternoon. Which if you’re from Michigan feels like you’ve been set on fire and thrown into a pool of gasoline.
For a multitude of reasons, I’ve put off getting new tires on the Superfly for months: lazy, cheap, not riding singletrack as much, not racing, etc., etc. I could think of a million excuses, but mostly it was due to laziness (and being a moron). I believe the rubber that was on the SF was roughly two years old and it showed EVERY SINGLE BIT of its age.
Every turn with the Bontrager XR1 Team Issue TLR 2.0/2.2 tires was a thrill, and a guessing game of Will I Go Down or Won’t I™? Finally, I parted with the cash and moved to the Bontrager XR2 Team Issue TLR 2.35s. There’s not a huge difference in the tires, but the added girth + the extra knobs ACTUALLY made me feel like I could take a corner and not eat dirt. That is pretty swell.
With the week pretty open and void of hours at the shop I headed out for another dirt road ride on the Boone today. This time I headed south of town with hopes of more dirt, less pavement, and a few more miles.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Jolanda Neff, I try not to write about her, I [sort of] swear! But she keeps on winning and keeps on doing so with large amounts of #Neffness. Which I believe translates into both “rad” and “Braaap” in Swiss [forgive me for my use of the word “rad”].
