Having grown weary of thumbing through heaps of dusty grimoires in my fruitless quest for the incantations through which I might impose my will upon the WordPress Block Editor (curse its name, yes), I stepped away from the Mac, climbed onto a bike, and pedaled out for an hour of rolling meditation with a heavy overlay of just not thinking about the fucking thing.
The bike was my red Steelman Eurocross, sporting a new seatpost; its predecessor, a RockShox suspension post, had begun showing its age, and for safety’s sake it’s worrying enough that the senile old fool in the saddle has been doing that for a few years now.
So I thought I’d get that minor gear change dialed in, and since the sun was out, I decided to take it off the pavement and onto the dirt at the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
Except the dirt was mostly mud, except for where it was snow or ice or all three at the same time. Oh, yeah, right — we got a half-inch of precip’ on Thursday. Duh, etc.
The mildly sketchy conditions reminded me of the Good Old Days™, when that bike, its mango-colored older brother and I motored around Colorado in search of 45 frosty, filthy minutes plus a lap.
Nobody else in Elena Gallegos was rocking drop bars and 35mm rubber today, and a couple spectators at my one-man not-so-hot lap pronounced themselves impressed, which says less about me and my mad skillz than about the visibility of actual cyclocross in The Duck! City.
In truth, I shouldn’t have been on those trails, as wet as they were, and once I saw how soft the surface was with no improvement in sight I headed for the nearest exit and thence for home.
At least I didn’t have to wash my bike and kit at the car wash as in Days of Yore©. No quarters in the saddlebag.
Mad Blog Media 
Out riding the range eh? You’re breaking Old Herbalong’s heart. We’ve had nothing but rain here in the Mitten State for just about a week. Hell ya gotta put on your slicker and galoshes (Google em up if you are a young whippersnapper….and look that up too) just to go to the mailbox STILL stuffed with color catalogs despite attempts to get off all mailing lists. Who the hell needs a left handle shovel or a wall switch shaped like an apple anyway.
Bout that seat post…..smart move replacing anything cockpit related on a bike that gives you pause.
Herb old rain dog, it’s been dampish and chilly here too for just about as long. We got a quarter inch of rain on Nov. 18, and then a bit more the next day, and then that half-inch on the 30th. So I should’ve known better than to try the trails — they generally dry out pretty quickly but that’s a lot of water for us over a couple of weeks.
I’ve been paranoid about seat posts ever since I saw the aftermath of a dude breaking one during a remount at a Bibleburg cyclocross. No, don’t ask. Ow wow yow zow. …
Suspension seat posts never made sense to me. You dial that seat post height in just right to preserve your knees until you don’t need them. Then the measurement changes up and down through the entire ride.
Paddy me lad, I had RockShox posts on both Eurocrosses during my storied racing career, and I thought their short travel helped keep the rear tire glued to the ground when the course froze up and got bumpy.
But they’re both gone now. I prefer simplicity and predictability in my geezerhood. One less item to maintain.
Point well taken, PO’B! Perhaps it’s “Parkinson’s Law” (work expands to fill the time available) at work? Or Voltaire’s “the perfect is the enemy of the good”?
Or Confucius, “Life is really simple, but we insist on complicating it.”
But and however, I have never ridden cyclocross and was an early adopter of mountain bike suspension. So, Patrick’s experience outweighs my opinion. Plus, I think we have had this conversation before which reminds me of a Groucho Marx quote.
George Mount (Smiling George)
” The older we get the faster we were”
“If I have told you this story before, don’t stop me. I want to hear it again.”
Groucho Marx