Pregled posta

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I spent a bunch of time yesterday biking. I've been trying to do some cycling every weekend, on top of my regular commute (5 miles each way, every workday). This is partially because I want to build up to randonee form, but also because it's damn fun.

So I've been mostly doing road-ish cycling of late, which means that my triathlete boss's urging that I really need to get a road bike and ride that more has been resounding.

This weekend, I randomly decided to bike to Fremont Older, which has a number of nice mountain bike trails. As always, I started at home and biked there (which was a good move, because the parking lot for the park was packed, but also because I'm too cheap to buy a bike rack for the car). And I grabbed the map and started riding.

Now, the thing about mountain biking vs. road biking is that mountain bike trails are usually akin to hiking trails. So, there might be a 50% upward grade, but it's not going to be that long before things flatten out a little bit. The technique for extreme grades like this, to prevent your front wheel from lifting off the dirt, is to get your center of gravity low to the ground and towards the front of the bike, which is where bar ends come in handy. It was fairly taxing, but again, the Wirehead of 2 years ago wouldn't have gotten anywhere at all.

It was a little fun at points because of all of the ruts in the dirt from people riding their horses in wet weather. I was glad to have the suspension on my bike, that's for sure.

I made it up to the highest point of the park, Maisie's Peak, which is around 1100 ft above sea level, before heading back.

On the way home, it was rather fun because some roadies on a ride came up behind me. I realized they weren't going above my top speed on a mountain bike, so I sat there behind the last guy, but outside of wheel-sucking range, riding at somewhere around 25mph the whole time. I kept pace with them until I veered off. I think they call that being a "Fred".

For those who care this is a list of the work I did to get this bike back on the road:

-- Replace front forks (both bent, one snapped)
-- Replace front wheel (brake disc bent)
-- Replace front mudguard (destroyed)
-- Replace radiator, fan and assorted tubing (smashed)
-- Replace handlebar (bent)
-- Straighten headlight mounts (bent)
-- Replace foot brake lever (twisted)
-- Replace rear brake pad (worn to the metal)
-- Respray front mudguard, gas tank matt black
-- Stencil stuff on the side

All in all a pretty insane amount of work. All the parts are second hand and were dirt-cheap because this bike is so common every other guy in London has one sitting in parts in a shed somewhere. Can't do that with a Ruckus, at least not yet. I don't even wanna think what all these parts would have cost from Honda, or what a mechanic would have charged me for all this work...