Ride Lugged

This is an interesting writeup on a city bike with a rack. It’s kind of cool to see the parts break down. More interesting though is in the comments where a guy specs something similar and the price tag is around $3000.

So here’s the question, would you feel comfortable leaving it chained up while you go buy orgainic croutons from wholefoods? You know the granola hippies who hangout there wouldn’t stop someone from stealing a bike. “Hey man, I saw that guy stealing your bike and I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. I said, Karma is going to get you man!”. Damn hippies.

Ok, I normally don’t like to provoke Casey on topics that are pretty much opinion, but here it goes.

When we were at the 24 hours of Seven Springs Casey had a nice wool jacket. I think it was Filson, either way it looked like it was high quality. He also had an Arc’teryx jacket with gore-tex.

Casey always spouts the virtues of wool and complains about gore-tex when his jacket can’t wick fast enough.

But I do remember that the wool jacket was soaked and wasn’t going to dry out any time soon in the conditions we were in.

So I guess my question is what is the solution? Or do basically all materials suck when it comes to really we cold conditions?

Sheep may be warm in the rain as they regulate their body temperature with the wool coats but they are wet and probably not happy about that.

James

Ok so Veronika and i decided to go to Moab instead of 7Springs. I think we made the right call. Anyway it rocked. Lots of good things happened. We drank good beer, hung out with good friends and rode killer trails. The last pic of Burro Pass trail started at 8500ft and topped out at 11500. It was an epic 3 hour climb followed by 2 hours of downhill overlooking the desert. It was rad. (OK, so flikr is cheap so you’ll have to wait for more cool pics.)

OK, here’s your friggin slideshow!

While I had a super time racing in the muddy forests of Pennsylvaniashire with you fools last weekend, it drained all my strength. In order to recharge my cycling power meter I spent this weekend tearing around Brooklyn, New York City. The traffic, shitty streets, and disgustingly industrial environment stimulate the core of what drives my little biking heart. Some pics are here (no fancy slideshow):



Other things which are not fancy (cause I couldn’t figger out how to inbed it in a post), is this movie I took of the opening run at 7 springs.

It was a good uneventful ride. Great conditions not to hot not too cold and the best part was that it wasn’t as dusty as the last two rides up there.

Seven springs recount.
We arrived at Seven Springs around 5pm on Friday, drove around the mountain a bit looking for the camping area, which was just a huge field at the very top of the mountain. Casey saw us driving around and directed us to the area he sectioned off with about 10 gallon jugs of water. It was bitterly cold for the summer, maybe somewhere in the 50s and raining a bit. We setup the tents and the canopy and were out of the rain. We had dinner of burgers and chili, drank some beer and played cards. Nick rolled in somewhere after 10pm. It was still raining and still cold and now the ground under the canopy was starting to get mushy.

We slept through driving rain and strong winds. Rachel and I thought the canopy was going to lift off the ground and smash us in our tent. In the morning everything had been knocked over under the canopy, beer bottles and cards floating in an inch of water. We moved everything to higher ground had some breakfast and got ready for the race. We drew straws and the order was Casey, Gary, Nick then me (James).

Casey started the race with the sprint to his bike. The fog was thick and there was still a light rain. We all waited at the transition tent for Casey to roll in. We waited a really long time, we saw some medical trucks roll out and we thought he might have take a bad spill. When he finally got back he was covered in mud and he had had three flat tires. The phrase peanut butter like mud was uttered and stuck in my head for the rest of the race because that is exactly what the course was like.

Gary then rolled out on his freshly converted fixed gear surly. Nick was able to convince him that he should leave the front break on. Gary went on to log the best time for our team for the whole race, I think it was and hour and a half. On his last uphill climb he was rick behind tinker jaurez but he didn’t pass him out of respect or something like that.

Nick was next out he was visibly nervous with good reason. Pretty much everyone who riding up the hill to the transition tent either looked totally worked over and pissed off or they looked giddy with excitement, meaning they had gone insane. Nick got back with a good time, I don’t remember but it was excellent considering he could probably count the number of off road rides he had done in the past ten years on one hand.

I was next and the first few miles were actually kind of fun minus the jarring rock gardens which I walked a large portion of. The pain of the course didn’t really set in until about mile 9 that is when the real peanut butter mud starts. The trail proceeds through this stuff until about mile 11 when it then takes a turn up a ridiculous switch back up a black diamond. That is the last mile until you get into the transition tent. It’s one of those climbs that some people are able to ride the whole thing but for the most part you can walk about as fast as they are riding. I did have the honor of passing and EVLI on that uphill. He muttered something about telling them elvi is coming.

Rachel was waiting for me at the transition tent and Casey was in there ready to roll out. When casey got back the idea of calling this the last lap was tossed around. It wasn’t settled until gary got back and said he didn’t think he could do another lap. So Nick did his last lap somewhere between 1am and 4am and I did mine between 4:15am and 6:45am and that was it for us.

We broke down camp and we were ready to leave around 10 or 11am. Just as we were ready to leave the sun came out and the fog and rain cleared. God had just smote us for quiting.

if you didn’t see it below check the pictures from the race on flickr

i wrote a bit of journal entry before the race and later, after my second lap, i wrote one at 12pm on saturday, when i couldnt warm my feet enough to sleep comfortably, and the rain sluiced off the car with such abandonment and quantity that i felt the car would surely leak.
anyway, here’s my contribution to the story of the race, again written before i had a chance to reflect or gloss over certain details.

friday morning:
collected black berries, a whole pot full, the wind whipping the bushes so furiously that it was like grappling with thorny tenticles.
stove fell, launched off its stand horizontally by the snapping wind, bacon somehow stays in pan, still crackling, the stove still lit…
camped next to 8′ hill crowned with bushes and scrub trees furiously belowing, redolent of a pounding prehurricane surf.
i arrived second on the scene, after kona jeff, we shared a beer, he talking about where he lived and what he was saving money for. all my comments/jokes whatever fell on deaf ears, talking to jeff is like talking to a wall with a dirty blond afro. he had a gold plated pint glass… lives on a peak visible from my camp site.
the meadow where we camp looks out over rolling hills, small mountains and patchwork grey green farmland, the view seems to go on for a 100 miles, but is probally more like 30. the air is clear, odd considering the rolling grey clouds that damp out all vestiges of the sun.
elvis guys show up in the nite, shining headlites into tent, and then flashlites, but i was tired and couldnt be bothered to get too pissed, and didnt end up saying anything, which was good cause they had no idea how close they were and apologized in the morning. they brought a TV and karayoke kit…
pissing up by blackberry bushes, when pissing with side to the wind, urine flys out at an abrupt right angle… very comical, unpredictable.
as clouds become denser, low drizzle, demoralizing, starts in, entire meadow looks ripe for flooding. vienna fingers arnt as good as i remember. forgot soap. rachel will bring…
1.40pm, two hours 20 minutes till theyre supposed to show. Wind is furious, driving discommodious rain around at all angles, none of which are strait down. thank god for duct tape, its not only patching tarp holes but also sealing seams between tarps, holding tarp poles up, and securing black trash bags which are serving as additional walls of my 4×7 room under the rain, very 2006 john steinbeck. must continually lower tarp support poles to lower ceiling as rain increases. winds become monumental, the noise acting like lightning before thunder, a huge gust wails thru the trees and moments later rolls down the hill, lifting and snapping at the blue tarps like a sail luffing aggressively in a gail, the tiller unmanned. the wind comes up, lifts tarps with a waffling snap, strains the stakes and slacks the guy lines making continual readjustment a must.
my window on the world shrinks as snapping/luffing plastic noises increase as i routinely add trash bags to buffer the rain.
5.00 theyre an hour late. this is unsuprizing. tarp leaking gobs of cold water. trash bag walls failing, toes numb, fingers could, cant feel heels, half gallon of beer killed. long cold wait.

sunday morning 12pm:

time will blunt my current woes, so i’ll write now while my pain is fresh. finished second lap about 15 minutes ago. lets attempt to describe the conditions. foggy, visibility less than 5 feet w/ headlite, worse as a slanting fog wrapped, thin but fast rain coats everything with an other worldly jewel like quality, including my glasses which are rendered useless by the combination of elements assaulting them. the ground has been transformed. the course is normally a slightly loamy rock singletrack, but has been turned into a vile peanut butter stew, a stew that not only stunk but stuck to tires and filled in the spaced between the knobs, making your tires heavy slicks, tractionless in all conditions. you slide around all corners, over rocks, across logs, with only a semblance of balance and a glimmer of hope that you’ll stay upright. downhills are suicide, trees being brought into regular employment as a braking agent. such is the nature of the stew that even strait, flat pedaling can cause the bike to slip from under you without the slightest warning.

the rain soaks my cotton and leather gloves, causing leather dye to leach out and roll down to my fingertips, staining the nails a dark yellow brown and making me look like a very tired cronic smoker.

i flatted 3 times on my last lap, mini-tool-less so i had to wait for some slow guy to catch me and offer a tool, and i eventually had to patch tubes to get back, leading to a shit 2.3 hour lap time. i flatted twice on this past loop, getting more and more innundated with the grainy stinking mud every time i had to pull a tube out. my gloves became saturated with the grey brown mire, and started to smell like a septic system.

the climb to the finish is one mile, a mile so steep that all but the most badass pros walk it, and most mortals can only ride the last 300 yards of. its an incredibly demoralizing way to end a lap. even the last ridable section is painful beyond reason, leaving your legs burning and your mind filling with the strange black void called defeat. i enter the tent seeing black spots, guided to my transition table by encouraging voices rather than by sight itself.