Category: Bike stuff

Salty dog

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The Soma Double Cross wearing its winter kit.

Seasonable weather may have returned for the moment, but The Duck! City remains a sandy, salty, gooey mess, and thus the Soma Double Cross now sports mudguards because hey: Sometimes a fella doesn’t feel like taking his exercise on a 32-pound touring bike just because it has fenders.

The DC is another of those absurdly versatile sport-utility bikes, suitable for cyclocross, light touring, or simply trying to keep the muscle memory alive in January, when its lesser poundage — just under 26 elbees with a saddlebag and handlebar bell — makes a real difference on the hills.

I used it for a three-day credit-card tour of central Colorado in 2012, and it’s logged plenty of hours on roads and trails in New Mexico, too.

The DC is just a little small for me, which is fine, especially if you suddenly happen to straddle it on some sketchy stretch of singletrack. When I first got back into cycling in the mid-Eighties I started with a 60cm bike, then downsized to 58, and again to 56, before finally inching back up to 58 for pretty much everything save the cyclocross bikes.

The Steelman Eurocrosses, Bianchi Zurigo Disc, and Soma DC are all 55cm, while the Voodoo Wazoo is a 56cm. I should turn the Wazoo back into a drop-bar bike one of these days, but I kind of like it as a flat-bar, single-ring deal. It’s also less welcoming to fenders and a rear rack, should I want them.

Ordinarily when the weather goes sideways I turn to trail running. But we’ve had enough moisture lately to turn crucial segments of the foothills trails into skating rinks, peat bogs, and tar pits, which makes running nearly as much of an exercise in staying upright as cycling.

“Well, at least the motorists can’t nail you on the trail,” you quip. Ho ho, etc. Wrong-o, sport. Lately they’ve been hitting everything from traffic-light stanchions to tattoo parlors, restaurants, and private homes. Stationary objects, easy to avoid, unless you’re ripped to the tits on your reality-management substance of choice.

The wiseguys used to say that you’re taking your life in your hands just by getting out of bed in the morning. Now you can wake up to find yourself sharing the old king-size with a Ford Expedition.

Not even fenders will keep the road grime off your ass then.

A ‘new’ year

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The Sandias, pre-Snowpocalypse.

January’s getting all, well, January on us. New year, same old song.

It’s been chilly, but not so much so that a fella can’t ride his bike for 90 minutes with three or four layers of 30-year-old cycling kit, adding and removing same as conditions indicate while awaiting the fabled Snowpocalypse, which by noon Thursday was as you see.

The Sandias, post-Snowpocalypse.

Betimes we are reminded that rich people, politicians, and rich politicians can be insufferable, twisted, lying, featherbedding assholes. This is not an annual or even seasonal event.

Meanwhile, just to keep things interesting, evildoers found a back door to our credit card while Herself was in an personal-electronics-free secure area and I was out on the bike, oblivious to my my own digital alerts as I removed and added layers of this and that while rolling around to no particular purpose beyond taking pix of the Sandias.

So, once I had been made aware of the breach in our fiscal defenses, I had to race home, doublecheck my receipts, mumble several filthy words, block the attempted piracy and croak that card over the phone, go get two new cards from a local branch, and then go back to get two even newer ones because the Top Secret Your Eyes Only Three-Digit Security Code was buggered on the first batch.

Now I get to work my way down the long list of bills set to autopay in order that we do not suddenly find ourselves freezing to death in the dark with no Innertubes and The Blog up on blocks.

It should go without saying that today was the day I had to drop Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster at Reincarnation for its semiannual pulse check. I did not ride a bike home from the shop and will not be riding one back there to pick up the wee beastie.

Thirty-three, feels like 25°? No thank you, please. I’ve seen the way Burqueños drive under warm and sunny skies. There aren’t enough layers in my winter drawer and none of them are Kevlar.

Gray Christmas?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
If it’s rolling downhill, why, this must be the valley.

The weather wizards have been spot on lately. When they say “a quarter inch of rain,” they do not lie.

In fact, if anything they seem to be hedging their bets a bit, because our widget reports we got something like .39 inch overnight. And it’s still raining.

I will never be smart. But at least I was not stupid yesterday when I decided to go for my first bike ride in 10 days instead of settling for another plodding hike or p’raps daring to risk a short jog.

As I said, the wizards have been batting a thou’ lately, and when yesterday started looking like my only option to ride without mudguards and rain kit for the foreseeable future, I got right after it.

Before the Snotlocker Surprise paid me a visit I’d been planning to check out some upgrades I and the Two Wheel Drive boyos had made to my old Soma Double Cross. After replacing its chain, chainrings, and cassette while trying (and failing) to accurately diagnose and resolve an annoying skipping issue that occurred under load, I finally discovered the actual cause, which was that its ancient Dura-Ace freehub had gone to its ancestors.

Resurrecting the freehub was beyond my limited skillset, and even the pros at TWD shook their heads in disbelief, as though I’d dragged in a pennyfarthing and asked whether they stocked a 53-inch tubeless-ready carbon disc wheel.

While it was possible that some eBay velo-troll might be squatting on a stash of eight-speed D-A hubs, they mused, it might be simpler (and quicker) to rebuild Captain Retro’s wheel with something, uh, newer? Given the choice between cheap and handsome I went with the latter, a stylish Velo-Orange, which goes nicely with the other shiny bits.

What the hell, it’s my second-oldest wheelset, an Excel Sports Cirrus with Mavic Open Pro rims and DT spokes, and it’s been a faithful companion. So we gave it a new heart and it ticked along nicely for a gentle hour in yesterday’s dwindling sunshine.

Speaking of shiny new bits, you may notice that I pulled the ol’ presto-change-o on the blog this morning. I took down the custom header, a scenic photo with the “Mad Dog Media” moniker, and replaced it with a smaller logo and a text header, which makes it possible for me to add a small additional overlay of snark without having to deploy any fancy-schmancy photo-editing software.

Just like cyclocross, only slower

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Big Red after we exited the Elena Gallegos trails.

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.

In case you’re wondering, yes, the dreaded Brown Stripe followed me home.

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.

Recycling?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

The DBR Axis TT and I went for a spin in the Elena Gallegos Open Space on Tuesday as the temps inched back into the low 40s.

Naw. That ain’t trash, waiting to be packed out. It’s just old, like its operator.

So don’t pack us out, for pity’s sake. Ain’t neither of us ready for the scrap heap yet.

Speaking of old trash and scrap heaps, I finally heard from the WordPress people about the comments issue, which seemed to have resolved itself to some degree after my last complaint on Nov. 22. Quoth WP:

The comment reply box has changed to the new box that adds the options of styling or layout changes using blocks. It cannot be disabled, it is the new default.

Fear not, your visitors don’t have to use the blocks, they can simply click into the box, and start typing.

This is the new “Reply” box as I have been seeing it lately.

A limited inspection of the process indicates that leaving a comment is once again fairly straightforward:

1. Place your cursor (or, depending upon your mood at the moment, “curser”) in the “Leave a Reply” box and start typing.

2. You will then be presented with the option of logging in using a WordPress account, Facebutt, or email (the latter method wants your email addy and a name; providing a website is optional). Select a login method.

3. You also are prompted to have posts/comments emailed to you. The buttons are off by default. Make another selection.

4. Hit the “Reply” button at lower right.

I switched laptops and launched Chrome to try commenting using an old email address. But I was not logged into the Gmail account I wanted to use and got a prompt saying so (O, buggah, etc.).

Rather than dive down that rabbit hole (usernames, passwords, and shit, O my!) I switched to Firefox to post my comment and saw it had me already logged in using my WP info.

I don’t have a Facebutt account so I couldn’t evaluate that option.

Anyway, that seems to be where we are at the moment. We don’t have to face that quadruple-decker “Reply” box with all the arcane symbols belonging to WP’s Block Editor (curse its name, yes). Just start typing and let ’er buck, cowpersons.

Anyone still having issues? Leave a note in commaaaaaaaaah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry, couldn’t help myself.