Russel Mills

After colleagues GC and SM showed me these wonderful trails, I brought E there Thanksgiving weekend. Today was our third ride there, and E has rediscovered the joy of mountain biking.

Wicked Ride of the East

Sunday was the big autumn ride of the New England Mountain Bike Association (NEMBA). I haven't done one of these before, but after learning some friends were going, I decided to try it. This idea soon started unravelling, as I learned they were planning over double the distance I've ever ridden, and I couldn't line up our start times. I decided to go anyway.

Rain overnight made for a slippery start, over wet roots which tossed all of the group I found myself in. The start was crowded, and it reminded me strongly of a road century ride, so I tried to pass people when possible, to move up toward what I hoped would be a less crowded area. (Like day 2 of the PMC, this start was staggered over time and with random abilities, and I learned on those rides to move up as quickly as reasonable.) But passing opportunities were rare on slippery singletrack. I did see groups stopped at intersections, and moved up in those places. After a mile or two, the trail sped up a bit and the riders did thin out. I found myself riding in front of someone I took to be younger, and I called out some encouragement after he rode over some logs. We parted a little later, but then came an unmarked intersection where I couldn't decide whether to go left or right. At first I followed some folks to the left, but when it started to sound like they didn't know where they were going, I turned around, went past the T and found my log acquaintance looking for the next segment. I saw a sign then and we were back on the trails. (After the ride I learned that I'd gone the wrong way, probably at this intersection, and really rode the second half of the trail instead of the first.)

Harold Parker is a rocky place, mostly a continuous rock garden mixed with rolling short climbs and descents. It's a bad place to get tired because it takes a bunch of power to get up those climbs, even in low gear. If I put a foot down, it was hard to get back on, and efficiency fell way off. I got hot after a couple more miles of this, then wound up riding more conservatively.

Then I found myself at the top of a house-sized steep descent down the side of a huge solid rock. If I'd had more time to look this over I would probably not have dared to ride it, but I was already rolling into it by the time this occurred to me. The back of the saddle grazed my belly as I rode the brakes and tried to keep the front wheel out of any dip - fearing that would easily trigger an endo. Then I realized I had two different signs to read on the way down to stay on the trail! An extra set of eyes would have been handy.

The course was laid out in roughly a figure eight, with the start and end in the middle. I was feeling pretty tired on the approach to the middle and toyed with the idea of skipping the second half. When I realized I was out of water, the decision was made. In total I rode 12.6mi, which is still the longest MTB ride I've done at pace. My friends rode 22, and I'm glad I didn't try that.

At the end I enjoyed the rest of the event: various foods, a booth from a lighting manufacturer and another by Sinister Bikes. At the latter I saw a demo bike with a suspension design so familiar I almost exclaimed "it's a copy of the Heckler!" [by Santa Cruz]. I think the Sinister dudes would not have appreciated that.

It was a good ride and I'd like to try it again. I'll need to train more, though, and preferably on these trails.

Flight of the Monarch

Bumblebee came with a Monarch 3.3 rear shock, made by RockShox like my favorite forks. Last week I noticed it was leaking air, plus it had smeared out the anodized sag markings, so I contacted the bike shop. At first my sales guy played Mr. Hyde, saying up to 20PSI lost overnight is normal. Then he offered to sell me seals, take a class, or pay them to fix it. After arguing that it's not normal and pointing out it should be under warranty, then reminding him it's a Monarch rather than the more common Fox shock, he became Dr. Jekyll and ordered a free replacement and offering free labor in the shop to swap it. The new one is an upgrade to the Monarch 4.2 (shown above), and it's excellent.

I had thought this was just an air leak issue, and I should fix it to avoid the hassle of refilling the shock before each ride. But it turned out to be far more important. I'd taken the smeared sag marks to be grease shot through the seal, but now I believe it was rub damage from a seal assembled without any grease! (On the internet I've seen others had this problem.) Not only was the shock self-destructing, but the drag was wrecking the suspension action. The bike feels much better with the new shock, giving substantially better traction and a smoother ride. All is well - except now I need to start over learning the feel of the bike.

(Also, I finally cut down the handlebars, so they fit my narrow shoulders!)

Fall Century

I've ridden the past CRW centuries with DP and TT, until the Spring one this year which I rode alone. After learning that DP's injury was going to keep him out of this ride too, I was delighted to learn that my colleague CP was riding, and was interested in riding together. CP was one of our Deerfield crew, and is one of the few year-round bike commuters I work with. Later on he mentioned he had a friend who would join us.

As I looked forward to the event, one of my favorite rides of the year, there was a time or two when intimidation started to gnaw at me. CP has been training for triathlon, and is much younger than me. His friend is from his racing club. I have never raced and wouldn't consider it. To me, racers are another species, eager to wrestle each other for a fraction of a second, pushing each other to achievements ever further from the reach of us mortals. Would a bike commuter like me keep up across 104 hilly miles?

I did the usual hasty bike prep the day before the ride, even working in a quick wash of the frame. Then I packed everything into the car and was heading inside for the night when I remembered I wanted to check the chainring bolts, because the chain seemed to have a mote of wobble in the middle ring while riding. The sun was down, but by the car's roof light I found one bolt dead loose, and the majority not tight enough. The last one I tightened produced a snap sound, when the lip of the outer piece sheared off. These were aluminum bolts I'd "upgraded" to in the spring, to save some weight compared with the steel ones supplied by Shimano. I'd always feared aluminum bolts, and the shear was exactly where I'd feared they would break, at a sharp inside corner which makes an ideal stress riser. The only reason I trusted them is because the new Shimano cranks use aluminum, even the MTB (XT) ones. I replaced the failed one with an old steel one, and the rest will be changed out soon.

The morning of the ride was colder than forecast, 39 degrees and the first time I saw our thermometer under 40 since spring. I packed some extra clothing and headed out, passing beautiful sea smoke rising from the rivers along the way.

Right after I parked, I realized I'd left my cellphone at home. If my plan was to ride alone, I'd have gone back home to get it, then start late. Instead I redoubled my commitment to stay with CP. While the riders assembled and waited for the start, a pair of hot air balloons flew low over us, pointed out by CP. I can't imagine a more impressive send-off.

We met up with CP's friend, P, and chatted with some of their friends before the start. Then, much later than scheduled, the ride organizer gave us some advice and updates, including, 'There is a bunch of new asphalt on this route. The rest is potholes.' At the end, he staggered our start by first asking the folks who thought they'd ride it at 18MPH to go, then he worked down. Our group had been grumbling about waiting in the cold, so we went in that first wave, though we had no specific pace plan.

Around mile 30, a lot of us missed a turn, which degraded into dozens of cyclists debating which way we should go, while scouts ran both directions looking for the arrows painted on the street. I asked a man walking his dog, but when his name for the street we stood upon disagreed with my GPS, I decided he wasn't helpful. Later, someone who really knew both the roads there and the route spoke up and she led us back toward the start. We found that the turn we missed was earlier than we'd imagined, and later I realized that the dog walker was essentially right.

The kickoff speech had mentioned a short 15% climb, which is steeper than anything near my commute. In the 2 previous times I rode this route, I did not realize it had anything this steep, though I vividly recalled the two long climbs after the first water stop. Writing this with hindsight, my guess is the 15% was part of a rolling section near mile 30-40. Here I fell back behind CP and P, and started to wonder whether I'd catch up. But then I found CP stopped to take off his jacket, then P had stopped to retrieve a water bottle. We were together again!

Not long after that, I was toward the front as we started a long, shallow descent. This is about my favorite kind of riding, because it feels most like flying. I wound up at the front, then started to recognize the area. We were dropping into the Souhegan River valley, and riding along the river. I stayed in front and pulled, partly for the joy of it and partly for the contrast with my first time here. Back then, my first century ride ever (2004), I'd fallen behind my friends. This stretch has few intersections because of the river, so there were no CRW arrows to confirm I was on the right path. I'd started imagining I was lost and alone in NH. But this time I knew the water stop would be roughly the next right turn, and I was able to confidently pull till we arrived there (mile 52).

My preference at water stops is to minimize the stay, otherwise I need to warm up again. But these are social rides and P and CP knew lots of the other riders at the stop. I joined a group where a rider was saying she'd just had a 100 mile race a couple weeks ago. I was thinking, 'that's a dedicated cyclist,' when she clarified it was a running race! She made the cutoff at 30 hours (no sleep) and she reported it wasn't so bad, as long as you don't mind the beat-up feeling from all the blisters and such. I'd never even heard of an event like that - where do these people come from?

In my experience, CRW rides are happy to travel closed roads, so it didn't bother me when we ignored two different marked detours. But even I hit the brakes as we approached the sign reading "bridge closed", and saw the wall of chain link across what had become a cliff with a river running far below. Another rider found a pedestrian bridge not far away, and we rode across.

I really felt the cumulative effort in the last part of the ride. On a climb, I fell to the back of the group, and started to drop off. Then CP came back to give me a pull - and it was a good one, since he's tall and wore a water pack, so I enjoyed a big wind pocket. With his strength, we were soon near the front, and after a nice rest, I took a pull on a descent. But then the cycle repeated, as the next climb dropped me to the back again. Just as I felt I was getting dropped, we arrived at a stop at an intersection, allowing me to catch up. Mysteriously, I found myself in the lead across the intersection, until a climb. This repeated a couple more times, surprising me each time. I felt like I was putting out constant power - the little bit I could manage at that point in the ride. Were the others speeding up for the climbs and then resting on the descents?

In the end we made really good time overall. In fact, my average was half a mile per hour faster than my previous rides over this route - quite a lot in the bike world.

Overall, this was a great ride and a wonderful way to both end the summer and begin autumn.

(post script: 4 days later, my legs are starting to feel recovered.)

Chamois Creams

Chamois creams are handy for controlling chafing, irritation caused by skin rubbing against skin. They can also be used for hot spots between the skin and pants, and are named for this.

(Historically, real leather chamois was used as a pad between the skin and clothing over the saddle. Chamois creams helped keep that leather soft and flexible, while also protecting the rider's skin. An old quick remedy for chafing on the road is a banana peel, which may account for some of the enduring fondness of cyclists for bananas.)

For years I've used the Assos product, and it served me well. Unfortunately, it was recently changed, and I don't like the new version much at all. The old stuff, shown on the left above, was light tan in color and came in a jar with red on the label. It felt just right and was made of natural ingredients. The new version, shown in the center, is light blue and comes in a black and white jar. It's mostly synthetic chemicals by my reading of the label, and isn't as nice. I've also read on the net (for what that's worth) that the new version isn't as good at preventing saddle sores, which comes down to antimicrobial properties. Like the old version, the new one is expensive and found only in bike shops.

While net surfing on the topic, I saw one comment that a couple folks were using Noxema as a chamois cream, and strongly preferred it over the new Assos. I tried it and I'm now in that camp. As with anything affecting your body, try it on a short, non-critical ride first. But after it served me well on Deerfield, I feel comfortable recommending it. It's also around 1/5th the price and available in grocery stores.

I use it at the top crease at the front of my inner thighs, where pedalling can otherwise cause friction.

(If this all sounds like an over-share, this post is partly in response to my quest for advice years ago. I worked up the courage to ask a bike shop staffer I'd spent hours with, and with whom I'd formed a good working relationship. He just mumbled something about checking my saddle adjustment and changed the subject. I hope this post can help someone.)

Blur LT Lower Pivot

I'm a big fan of Santa Cruz engineering. In fact, I think there are several examples of objectively better design than many of their competitors. But I have found an element of this design which makes me worry - though it has not actually failed in any way.

This frame has a bottom linkage which drops down toward the ground when the rear end is not heavily loaded. This means rocks and logs can hit it, and they do. There's a grease port (fitting) for re-greasing the bearings, and it's effectively a hook shape and smacks hard into those rocks. The swingarm is also vulnerable there. I've only ridden it through rock gardens a couple times, and it's already looking a bit rough there. The 'net has several posters who claim no one has actually damaged the grease port, but my luck tends toward things breaking if I think they can.

The top picture is my second attempt to protect this area. (The bike is upside-down.) The bottom pic is au naturel. I've started an email thread with Santa Cruz, including these pics, asking them to address this and to offer a protective plate. (I'm glad I don't have a carbon swingarm.)

Deerfield 100k

The beautiful scenery of the Connecticut River Valley, dirt roads and friends - all the ingredients for a memorable bike ride. This year's Deerfield Dirt Road Randonee was a blast.

We had eight riders in my group, mostly from work, and we brought a wide range of bikes to the event.



I carried four water bottles, a new record. The fourth rode in my jersey pocket.


DB brought a classic mountain bike.


CP had a homebrew semi-cross bike with a special "wide-range" double crank based on mountain bike gearing.


DH brought classic European cycling style and his wife's hybrid bike. Thanks for the French and Italian cafe music for the drive to the start!


GC modified his full-suspension hard-core mountain bike for the day.

The 100km ride starts at 9AM, which makes logistics easy but means the sun is high for the whole thing. After arriving early, we waited for almost an hour in the farm field we parked in. The forecast was for a high of 90, and I wished we could have started early.

The first dirt road climb was a shock to most of us. Riders from another group, just ahead of us, slipped their road race tires in the loose gravel and switched to walking, leaving us an obstacle course of people and bikes to try to ride through. On the other hand, we riders got a bit spread out along the trail, and we never got blocked like that again.


We spent some time on roads, along farmland and rolling hills. The terrain in the picture above made me think of giant fingers lying on the ground. We all knew we'd be riding up those hills soon.

GC, our only rider on a full suspension, had the most amazing joie de vivre of the ride. He flew by me on a loose gravel descent that made nearly everyone nervous and caused a couple crashes. In fact he bombed down every descent I saw, and even wheelied up a chunk of a switchback! If I could imagine going this distance on my MTB, I'd consider trying it - GC made it look fun.

At lunch, next to a covered bridge, we ate baked potatoes and drank what we could. PF trained me long ago to bring my "cytomix" (a blend of Cytomax and a little protein powder). Others drank what was offered at the stop, (grape?) Kool-aid. We thought Gatorade was going to be available, and a couple of our group decided to home-brew the stuff by mixing Kool-aid with the table salt set out for the potatoes. Another rider, unknown to our group, snapped a picture of us here. (I'm standing between the two yellow shirts with sunglasses on my hair while most of the rest of the group is sitting along the river nearby.)


After lunch we rode a delightful flat dirt road along a small river to let the food settle a little, then veered up into the hardest climb of the day. The top part of the hill was the worst: although the dirt transitioned to pavement, the tree cover we had enjoyed suddenly evaporated and we felt the 90 degree sun-baked heat in the utterly windless low-gear grind. But just over the crest, all was well again as we had the view shown in the topmost photo above, and a water stop with fresh produce from the farm there.



SM, above, on a 29er rigid MTB, led us a lot of the time and knew the course perfectly. I'm afraid I over-relied on his guidance, and predictably I noticed this only when I found myself alone and unsure of my location and cue sheet position.

Over the after-ride dinner, the topic of next year's ride was never far from thought. At one point I got into a rant about how I'd like to try the 112mi ride sometime, and it won't get any easier. 'If I could ride it, even just once, it would be the kind of accomplishment that would go on my tombstone!' GC added, 'maybe the same day.' That gave me my biggest laugh of the weekend.

One definition of a good ride is it leaves you inspired for next year's ride. Deerfield was a great success this way, with all of our group discussing route options, bike upgrades and nutrition for next time, starting midway through this ride.

SM took some video and compiled it into a taste of the ride. The video was shot with a hand-held Flip, and I'm impressed he could keep it as steady as he did. Thanks, SM!

For those of us dreaming of the full ride (maybe it's just me?!), a nice blog of the 112mi ride this year was posted by another rider. Sounds inspiring, but also very intimidating!

Honestly, my most ambitious idea is to ride the 112mi route until the lunch stop shared by both routes, then switch to the 65mile route, making a 93mi version. Still, that's probably not sensible unless I can train way better next year. But it would be nice to be on the road starting in the nice cool (and dark) air of the 6AM start the 112-milers get...

Deerfield Rig

Deerfield is Saturday! A long hilly dirt road ride requires pretty big changes from the road rides I'm familiar with. I'm starting with the Independent Fabrication I've been using as my summer/long-distance bike for years now. It's the Club Racer model, which is designed to accept full fenders, and it does that by using "long reach" brakes, and having good clearance in the frame and fork.

The seatstay gap is 35mm, the limit on tire size. I'm a big fan of Vittoria tires, so for the dirt roads I picked their cyclocross tire, nominally 32mm wide but which measures 30.5mm on my rims. This size perfectly fits, with a little gap for dirt. (This would not work well in mud, and cyclocross bikes have much better clearances for this, but it should suffice here.)

Low gears are important for the hills, including the power loss of loose gravel slipping under the wheels. I favor low gears anyway, to keep my cadence high, so I setup my lowest chainring set, 26 / 42/ 52. But I swapped my 12-27 road cassette for a mountain bike 11-34 cassette to get a really low climbing gear. To do this I had to swap the rear derailleur to a MTB version, including one of the "brifterizer" hacks I build to connect my 10 speed Campy shifters to 9 speed shimano cassettes. The shifting is noisier, benefitting from more nudging than I normally need, but the range is great. (In test rides I found I need to remain seated on a steep loose climb or the wheel will slip - so I'm missing a skill and need extra-low gears to compensate.)

No rear derailleur I know of will handle the full range of gearing described above, so I locked out the large chainring. (The derailleur's bottom pulley moves back and forth as one shifts to take up the slack in the chain for the selected gears. I have a "long-cage" derailleur, able to handle the widest range, but even it has a limit.)

Water is another challenge. While there will be water stops, the organizers are recommending hydropacks so the riders can carry enough water between. I can't imagine wearing that hot thing for a long ride, so my plan is to carry 4 bottles, with 3 on the frame and one in my jersey.

This ride will rely on cue sheets more than any other ride I've ridden. So I added a handlebar bag as a cue sheet holder, but it's a classic touring accessory and I may find I like it.

Excellent Local Bike Shop

In the run up to the Deerfield randonee, my biggest ride of the year, I've been trying to get the bike set up properly and well tested. So I was alarmed to find last night, three days before the ride, that my saddle has cracked. This means not only finding a saddle fast, but I won't have an opportunity to verify the new one is installed properly, with all the fine adjustments critical for comfort on a long ride.

Let's back up a bit over two years to the start of this story. I bought a Specialized Toupe from CycleLoft in Burlington. They have a more liberal return policy than the other shops I know about (which is to say they accept a new-condition return). Around a year later, I found the saddle had cracked, with the effect of making it softer - a very bad thing on long rides. I bought a replacement right away, then later came back with the bad one. They refunded my purchase price on the original one, and said if I'd brought in the bad one, they would have just swapped it for a new one. By this time I believe I was talking to the owner, but I'm not sure. I went on to describe what I see as a design flaw in the saddle, and he mostly agreed, but also said the saddle is designed for people lighter than me. (There's no weight limit on the saddle packaging.) I parted asking whether my new one would hold up, and he said 'worst case you bring it back and get a new one each year. It's an ideal situation'. For me, ideal would be a reliable saddle, but I guess this isn't too bad.

Now return to today. Saddle in hand, I start with a random salesperson who tells me the saddle is more than a year old (so past warranty) and anyway they don't have a match in stock. (Well, they do have white, but I don't like that look. The same out-of-stock issue happened last time and I shifted to a slightly different model.) I didn't argue, but I did ask questions and wound up chatting again with the owner (I think). The three of us searched the store again for the matching saddle which their computer says they have, without luck. Then the owner says they can order the right saddle and in the mean time, he has a Toupe on his own bike which I can borrow! As he was taking apart his bike in front of me in a daze I actually said out loud, "this is like the shirt off your own back". He was saying he wanted a white one on his bike anyway, but I was so amazed that I didn't quite follow how this all works from his point of view.

Bottom line, I'm all set for Deerfield, and in a week or two they'll send me an email* to come pick up my new saddle for free. Where they could have said 'out of warranty; out of luck.' I'm a fan!

Other CycleLoft goodies: 10% off if you're a member of any bike club, and they'll put it in their computer and it becomes automatic forever. Friendly and skilled mechanics (unlike that other bike shop I go to). And my friend DP says they just did a great job servicing his Campagnolo brifter shift discs - work few bike shops will attempt - and they did it for far less than an online shop in CT that I'd figured I'd use when it came time for mine to get serviced.

* email itself is amazing because even this year I've had trouble finding a bike shop that will do email.

Bumblebee

The new bike is finally together. Unfortunately I haven't really ridden it yet as a stomach bug knocked me out just as our two months of drizzle came to an end. Any day now...

The yellow frame with black parts has become my signature, as well as my favorite of the frame colors. Where I associate the colors with friendly pollinators, A sees Pittsburgh sports teams (Go Steelers, Penguins, etc!) and MF sees the Boston Bruins. I think I'm missing a gene.

(This bike uses one of those new-fangled external bearing bottom brackets. I just don't like it, though it should suffice. I wouldn't put one on a road bike. Next time: ISIS or Octalink.)

New Bashguard

I once again cut down a Nashbar bashring to make it smaller and lighter. (The first one was last year.) I took pictures this time. The resulting part weighs 99g, and has a radius 0.15" smaller than the original.

First, cut down the radius. This is the only functional change, adding clearance for rocks.



Next, I drill out some excess metal to lighten the part. The finished hole size is big, 3/8", because small holes don't achieve much savings.




At the end I pared out some excess metal near the edge, using a ball mill at the end to provide a big inside radius to minimize the chance of cracking the aluminum after a big bash.

Wheelbuild, Concluded

I finally finished the wheels last night. Whew! I'm a perpetual beginner/intermediate at this because I go 2-3 years between builds. The bottom line is I'm happy with how they went together and I think they'll serve well, but I've not ridden them yet.

Below is a table of the wheel weights, in case anyone wants to borrow bits of the spec. Note that I strove first for strength and maintainability, using brass nips and mostly (5/8ths) the strongest spoke type. One could build a lighter wheel by giving up some of this longevity.

Bare wheels (no skewers, rotors, cassette): Front = 706g, Rear = 845g. Total 1551g. (This is the number to compare with factory-built wheelsets.)

Full wheels except tires & rim strip: Front = 899g (160mm rotor), Rear = 1319g (140mm rotor, XT cassette).

Rim tape is Stan's yellow tape, claimed 5g per wheel.

Disc Wheel Lacing

I'm building up a new wheel set, my first using disc brakes. These brakes affect the lacing design because the torque applied by the brakes is carried by the spokes to the rim and tire. In contrast, rim brakes (as on most road bikes) apply no torque at all to the spokes.

While I want the wheel set to be strong and reliable, I also want to optimize its weight against the strength required for each part of the wheel. The spokes are a significant part of the weight, and they are available in different thicknesses. I made up a lacing pattern which uses two different spoke thicknesses in different parts of the wheel.

The front wheel has the most complex pattern. The only torque these spokes carry is during braking, so it's all in one direction. I'm using the thinnest spokes in the positions that do not increase in tension when the brake is applied. The thin spokes are also laced inside the hub flanges. The thicker spokes, which carry the brake tension, are laced outside the flanges. This provides a few benefits:

• When braking, these high-tension spokes are outside the flanges, forming the widest possible bracing angles and therefore the stiffest wheel in terms of resisting side loads.
• The thicker spokes are the ones furthest from the center plane, so the tip of a stick is more likely to hit a thick, strong spoke instead of a weaker, thin one.
• The simple rule of thin spokes on the inside of the flange makes them easy to track. The thin spokes must be tensioned more carefully because they can twist or "wind up" more than the thicker ones, and they must be kept untwisted. (I've also marked the thin ones with a pen during the wheel build.)
  

The rear wheel uses thin spokes only in the same, non-brake-tension position, only on the brake side of the wheel. The drive side (with the cassette gears) has thicker spokes in both directions, to handle both pedalling and brake torques. (I'm treating these hubs as capable of carrying significant torque through the hub shell to the opposite flange, but I consider that torque important only for braking. My pedalling forces can be carried on just the drive side of the rear wheel.)

The main downside to optimizing the lacing this way is complexity. It's easy to put the wrong spoke in a given position. And more spokes need to be purchased and tracked - for example, there are four different spoke sets in the front wheel. (Two thicknesses x a different length for each side.) The rear wheel has three different spoke sets.

I'm rusty enough at wheel building that I made a few mistakes at the beginning, but now both wheels are laced and I've started tensioning the rear. I'm happy with the result so far, and am excited to ride them!

[Notes: The spokes are DT Competition (2.0/1.8mm) and DT Revolution (2.0/1.5mm). All lacings are three-cross (3X). All spoke nips are brass for strength and resistance to corrosion. Hubs are Shimano XTR which are available near half price these days as they seem to be out of favor, and I've had good experiences with my Shimano hubs over many years. I think they're a good value now. Also, I like the loose ball design for hubs because I know how to rebuild and preload them - I'm not excited by the trend toward cartridge bearings. On the other hand, they have the lowest flanges I've seen on a disc hub, so they demand high spoke tension and are probably best for XC-only riding. The rims are Stan's Olympic ZTR, a lightweight and slightly radical offering from a new small manufacturer. I plan to run these wheels tubeless, at least at first, and these rims are designed to work that way or with tubes. Thanks to GC for his great info and experience on these rims.]

Brewster

Friday evening, the start of Memorial Day weekend, was my third annual ride from home to Brewster on Cape Cod, via a fast ferry from Boston to Provincetown. The bike setup was based on the century 0f the previous weekend - for example, the fenders were still on. I added the big headlight and the relatively new Garmin HCx GPS.

As you may recall, I broke our previous GPS on a long ride last year, apparently from vibration through the handlebar mount. That was disappointing given that I used a handlebar mount made by Garmin, exactly as intended. This time I was determined to be more conservative, even though the new unit appears stronger than the old. I decided upon a couple layers of vibration dampening before the handlebar mount. First, I moved it to the end of my (carbon) handlebar so the length of this tube can deflect a bit to absorb bumps. My hands and upper body help dissipate shock and vibration here, especially when I'm "in the drops" as I am most of the time. This vibration dampening is the main reason I use a carbon handlebar. After that, I attached the GPS outside the foam handlebar tape, so the tape itself is a cushion. On the tape I mounted a short extender piece, which then had more handlebar tape on its tip, then the Garmin handlebar mount. And I tried not to compress any of the handlebar tape more than necessary, so the foam would retain its softness.

I left home after work and made good time down to Cambridge. I started the GPS as I approached the end of the bike trail, but it was unable to acquire satellites as I rode. At the end of the trail I stopped the bike and restarted the GPS, while I reworked the GPS mount. (It proved too loose on one layer of handlebar tape, so the whole unit kept flipping upside down.) The GPS locked normally this time, and I continued across Cambridge and Boston toward the ferry dock. One segment of the trip is still a puzzle: the bumper-to-bumper stopped traffic in front of the museum of Science - this time I tried the leftmost lane for a while, and that worked pretty well, but the sidewalk is likely the fastest route if I were willing to ride it.

My hopes for the new GPS included improvements in the routing algorithm. Both old and new units have a mode for "bicycle", but the old one didn't seem to act much different from "car" mode. Around a mile from the ferry dock the new GPS gave me a different turn from last time, evidence of algorithm progress! I landed at a security kiosk I'd never seen before, in front of a beautiful arch reading "World Trade Center". The route is already more scenic! Immediately after passing the arch, though, I found why I'd never seen this before: I was two floors above ground level! Rather than explore, I walked down polished stone stairs with my bike, stepping gingerly in my awkward bike shoes with their metal cleats. I'll take the old route next time.

After a quiet ferry ride, I started the second part of the ride as the sunlight waned. In Provincetown, the GPS periodically tried to divert me to Route 6, instead of the quieter 6A I've used before. The good bit of preparation I did included putting last year's route on the screen of this new GPS, so I could compare it with the GPS advice. (The bad part of my prep was neglecting all forms of paper maps and instructions.) After I merged with 6, the GPS started finding little zig-zag roads to divert me from 6. This must be a new "bicycle" algorithm - it was nuts. Route 6 is not very bad (PMC uses a lot of it), and it's obviously faster and smoother than the side roads. It's also pretty obvious that zigzags are not a safety enhancement since most of them require crossing the highway. After I figured out what was happening I just used the 2008 route and stayed on 6.

It was dark when I reached the transition to the Cape Cod Rail Trail, roughly my halfway point on the Cape. This was a lovely ride like last year, though very different in character because the weather was great this time. Here I turned off the GPS routing entirely, leaving it as a map only, and I turned off my other beeper too. No more gadgets or cars, just trees and wildlife - this was delightfully peaceful. A line of radio towers looked like an alien invasion as I neared then passed through the plane of their aircraft warning lights. I chased a coyote, rabbit and raccoon along the trail. The rabbit was the only foolish one - it veered away from my path then reconsidered and jumped high in the air in front of me. A quick stop prevented impact, but I can't figure out what it was thinking. Why not wait till I'm past to cross the trail? Maybe it recognized me as a mountain biker and offered me a bunny hop salutation?

This segment ended quickly too, and the ride was done. I've been buying water between P'town and the trail head, but from now on if I'm on this year's pace I'll skip that.

I concluded the GPS is vulnerable to vibration, preventing its lock on the bike trail. While it worked fine after lock, this makes me nervous that something is moving inside the unit, perhaps the antenna. This sounds like a recipe for metal fatigue, so I'm going to try to figure a way to give it yet more isolation from vibration. Ugh. Also, next time I'll try the "car" routing algorithm instead of "bicycle", and then constrain it to minimize highway use, etc.

CRW Spring Century 2009

Yesterday the calendar reached the CRW Spring Century, the first big ride of the year. Landing at the end of a busy week, the preparations were not altogether stellar.
Base Miles: check! Commuting a couple days per week through most of winter gave me confidence I could finish the ride.
Long rides: not check. I managed zero rides longer than a commute this year, and my longest route of 25 mi happened only once or twice.
Bike condition: check! I found time the day before to put the fenders back on for the forecast rain, and to put on a new chain. I've ridden the bike on enough commutes to be confident of the other parts. (It's taken a bunch of maintenance this year though.)
Sleep: not check. A party the night before turned into an extended tarot reading featuring rounds of JC's delicious and hearty margaritas. Then I had trouble sleeping as I alternated between feeling hot from the tequila and feeling cold from the fresh breeze through the window.

Luckily, by the start of the ride the forecast had calmed to just morning rain, and as we riders gathered for the start the rain was light. I briefly considered taking off my vest and leaving my glasses in the car but instead I left well enough alone. Four friends of mine had tentatively planned to ride this, so I kept a lookout while the start assembled, but I couldn't find anyone. The ride started late, and in waves, and after standing around in the rain around 20 min I was happy to leave with the first wave - the self-selected fast riders. In the back of my head I heard the advice of my late father in law, "don't ride with the young bucks", but it seemed preferable to more waiting.

The pace picked up as we warmed up, but I held on reasonably well in the group-ride style of previous CRW centuries and the PMC. About half an hour in, a cold front with strong rain came through, and I was very happy I'd never taken off the vest. In fact, a full jacket would have been nice though I wouldn't have stopped to put it on. My glasses also saved me - I was quickly reminded that group rides in the wet mean riding into the continuous fantail from the wheel ahead.

After an hour, my plan to avoid pulling at the head of the group finally unravelled. Pulling means doing more work than anyone else in the group, breaking up the still air. Over the first hour we'd averaged 21MPH, which for me is unsustainable and even unwise. Trying to pull this group was doomed to fail, but it was my turn. I pulled briefly, up to a stop sign, overcooking myself so thoroughly that the group passed me after the stop and I could not keep up. I was "shot out the back of the peloton (group)," as the race announcers say.

I rode alone for a while after that, then was caught by a rider I recognized from the lead group, named Tim. He wanted to work with me as a pace line (taking turns pulling for each other) to try to catch up to the leaders. We tried, but had such different styles that we weren't effective, and my legs were so weak that I told him I couldn't help him anyway. He didn't give up; then we found we'd missed a turn. I was ready to turn around but Tim pulled out a big street map and plotted a course to intercept and possibly save a mile, which might help us catch up. Tim's plan worked beautifully, and when we finally crossed another CRW mark, I was thrilled and shouted to him, "Thanks very much!" Tim was still focused on catching the leaders, and the vital question became how the distance of our route vs CRW route compared. I had to pull over to figure this out. I wanted to keep riding but I figured I owed him for getting me back on track, so we pulled over and I searched the cue sheet as Tim got out his map. Then the leader group zoomed past us and we jumped back on the bikes and tried to catch up. Tim made it, I did not. I never saw any of them again, but after a couple miles I was content with the situation because I couldn't have held their pace anyway.

After a while I reached the commercial center of Exeter, NH. The problem is I wasn't supposed to do this - I'd missed another turn, and turned around to backtrack.

After the first water stop (near the halfway point of the ride) I saw the mark for the first left of the route to the last stop, but then no confirmation marks, and after another mile I turned around again. By this point I felt quite discouraged at my inability to stay on the route, but fought to stay committed to it. (And I redoubled my efforts at checking marks and noting the mileage when I reach one.)

At the two-thirds mark, I caught up to a couple individuals on the ride. This was encouraging as proof I wasn't the last one on the route, and that my pace was somewhat reasonable. I said Hi to the folks and rode behind one briefly, but I shortly decided I wanted to pass them. I tried to let them tack on behind me, and they seemed to take me up on it informally. But just as we were starting to get organized, the markers indicated we were to turn onto a closed road, into a gap between a pair of Jersey barriers. I shouted the news back and rode through the gap. It was about three feet wide, not unlike some bike path barriers on the Cape Cod trail, so I didn't sweat it much but the other riders fell back enough to lose drafting. After a short ride on this road, with grass growing through the pavement, the exit pair of Jersey Barriers came up. Again I shouted back the news, but then as I bore down into it I realized the gap was narrower, about 2 feet, and I started to regret my decision to take it at speed. I wish I'd at least pulled my hands from the handlebar drops up onto the top to save some width, but I just held it and rode cleanly through. Whew! This pair of obstacles was not on the route before!

The last water stop was near mile 75, meaning mile 80 for me including my wrong turns. At this point my Achilles were getting sore and I would have been pretty happy to be done for the day. As I snacked and refilled my bottles, I heard two people give up, seeking rides back to the start. And I heard another had given up at the first stop near mile 50. I've never before heard of someone dropping out of these rides. While I felt sad for the folks pulling out, the news encouraged me too. It wasn't schadenfreude, rather an external confirmation that this was a tough ride and I wasn't the only one feeling beaten down.

From here I faced just 25 miles to the end, just like my summer commute home from work. I counted down a few different ways: miles covered, miles to go, water bottles remaining, ETA. And I sang to myself what I could remember of Joan Osbourne's Spiderweb, with a little bike dancing thrown in. My emergency double-caffeine Gu helped me celebrate 15mi to go. In short, I pulled out all the stops to finish the ride.

In sum, I'm glad I did the ride in terms of my training. I learned a bit about following route markers. But riding alone for most of the day was less fun than the centuries with DP and TT.

---
Technical note: One of the many bike tech debates is whether to trust the lubrication that comes on a new chain. Without much planning, this ride was an experiment and it confirmed Jobst Brandt's argument that it's a good lube and so well applied that it's probably the best lube job the chain will ever have. I rode a new SRAM PC-951 on this ride with just the factory lube, and it ran smooth and quiet throughout the ride. I heard a bunch of squeaky chains just after the second water stop. And my fenders make life much harder for the chain than if I didn't have them - I'll guess three times worse. (Very few other riders had fenders.)

Two Flanges per Hub, Please

Tearing apart the FSA three-flange hub design.

[This is a rant about bicycle physics, perhaps the first in an occasional series. It's written for someone conversant with bike mechanics. Unfamiliar words are likely defined in the Glossary by the late Sheldon Brown. I'm heavily influenced by Jobst Brandt, and in this case I recall he heaped derision on this three-flange hub, but did not explain much about why. He has written an excellent book about the mechanics of the bicycle wheel.]

Strong wheels are wonderful. But modern wheels have traded off as much strength as possible in a quest for lots of gears in the cassette. If excess strength remained, the cassette would get deeper, but instead since the ancient 7-speed cassettes, cassettes have stayed about the same size and the chain side plates have paid the price, getting driven to thinner and more expensive designs.

A conventional rear wheel is a careful balance of forces to form a reasonably strong yet lightweight structure. The difficult kind of strength to provide is lateral: resisting sideways forces on the rim. Spokes act only in tension, so the rim's lateral position is held by tension in the spoke set on each side of the rim, the drive-side set and the non-drive set. The drive set has a small bracing angle, meaning the spokes are almost in a plane parallel to the rim, but they do pull toward the cassette. The total lateral force from the drive set is perfectly balanced by the lateral force of the non-drive set, but the non-drive has a larger bracing angle so the non-drive tension is lower. (This describes a hub with equal counts of spokes on each side, like my Shimano ones - other designs exist but are ultimately comparable.)

A properly built wheel has the following balance: the rim is compressed to the limit of its strength (or is close to it) by the sum of the tension in all the spokes. The spoke tensions are matched within a given set of spokes, but different sets may have different tensions.

In a conventional wheel, the limiting factor in lateral strength is getting enough lateral tension on the drive side with the limited bracing angle. The drive side spoke set also handles the majority of the torque transfer from the cassette by increasing tension in "pulling" spokes while reducing tension in the lagging spokes. These spokes are doing a lot of work!

The FSA design has three flanges: a pair in fairly traditional locations, laced radially, plus a third flange in the rim plane with a large diameter and crossed spokes to transfer torque. Radial spokes cannot transfer torque. Each spoke set has a third of the total spoke count (8 each, rear), and the even spacing of the rim holes tells us the spoke tensions are all similar. The rim design is conventional, so total spoke tension is about the same as a conventional wheel. But since the drive-side spoke set 'lost' a third of its spokes to the center spoke set, the drive side lateral bracing force has been cut by about a third. There's no way around this - the wheel is substantially weaker than a conventional wheel.

Jobst's quick take on this was that this design is so bad the whole company should be avoided by his readers. That's bad news for me, since their chainrings have received good reviews, and they're a player in the crank market which has for the moment abandoned road triples like mine. If FSA were to offer a good triple, I'd like to be able to consider it - but I'm afraid I'd have trouble ignoring Jobst's advice.

If you're interested in more about bicycle wheels, get it from the horse's mouth.

Sedona '09

We visited Arizona for school vacation week. The Grand Canyon was our first stop, for just an afternoon. We went to the busiest part of the rim, expecting it to be off-season. It was beautiful, but I was amazed how many people were there. The rim felt like a theme park, not wilderness. We did a small part of a trail toward the river 3/4 mile below us, but even that was quite crowded. (The trail visible in this picture is about halfway down - we didn't get nearly that far.) Another time we'd try the North rim or some other, less crowded place.

Next back to Sedona, where we've visited the last few years. We did the usual fun things, but came away wanting to do new things next time around. E found a new trail for us, along side of a "lion's head", ending in the shady spot in the pic below. Other new experiences include a delightful stargazing stop and a large snake crossing the trail right in front of me.


Since the three of us have some different interests and exercise preferences, we did a little more as a pair and one, with different mixes and activities. I got a 3 hour hike mostly in the high desert, with a bonus rumor of a rattlesnake blocking the trail while A and E rode horses. (I didn't see that snake, so it doesn't count.) Another time E and I mountain biked without A, exploring new trails.

Sedona itself has changed over the years too. We didn't see as much new housing this year as last, but the motorized tourist industry sure has grown. Where there were Pink Jeeps the first year, they're now joined by red and yellow ones, and there were so many that they sometimes dominated the roads. I've grown a real dislike for these things after we tried one years ago - I felt like I was taking part in actual destruction of a beautiful and fragile (once) wild area.

I half-expected to find a new statue of Joe the Plumber, but never saw it. On the other hand, one of the first ads I saw was for Maverick helicopter tours.

Winter Bike Pics

Now that winter is ending, let's look back at the crazy stuff I used to ride it. Above is SlushBike, the thing I built up specifically for bad weather riding, and it's optimized for the worst case which is slush. Besides the 26" studded road tires and big fenders to match, it takes on bad weather with its Nexus8 internally geared rear hub where most of the gearing is sealed from road dirt. It also has an internal brake which is also sealed. The nexus is intended for a frame with horizontal dropouts, which I don't have, so needed to retain the rear derailleur just as a chain tensioner. I took advantage of that, though, by keeping two chainrings to widen the gear range. This sacrifices light weight, but I like the range, and this bike is so heavy that the derailleurs don't matter much.

One of my major limits for cold weather riding is cold toes. At this point I have 2 different hacks going. Above are the Lake MXZ302-X boots which I bought only after they came out in a wide size in 2008. (Even these are narrower than my feet, so I bought a size or 2 larger than would be ideal.) I use these on SlushBike and the MTB, and they're pretty good. But after the first season some heel stitching fell off, which I attribute to a design defect, so even after Lake re-stitched them for me, I added tougher stitching which you can see in the shape of an "M" above. The insoles are made of bubblewrap, too, which might be warm but which pops and falls apart. These are surprising problems coming from what looks like a mature shoe company.

Below are Keen boots I modified before I heard the Lakes were going to be available in a wide model. Here I made plates of 1/4" aluminum, cut away the soles under the plates so they'd be close to flush, and assembled it. The plates are for mounting the pedal cleat, as well as stiffening the boot for pedalling efficiency. I use this on my 'summer' bike, which uses Bebop pedals, allowing me to ride it down to around freezing. (This bike cannot use studded tires, so I wouldn't want to ride it much below freezing anyway.) I sewed the gaiters for wind protection and visibility. (I took pictures of this project, but can't find them now.)

PR Meditation

Saturday morning I rode the PR (the "Private Reserve", a local spot with good MTB/hike trails). This is a strange time of year, when warm temperatures release mud and riding becomes bad for the trails. Now that I have studded tires on my bike, I much prefer mountain biking below freezing, when the surfaces are harder and I can't contribute to erosion. The weekend forecast was Springlike, so literally too warm to ride. The best chance for a ride was Sat. morning, ending around 9 when the forecast rose to melting.

The trails were about half frozen, so I was glad to have the studs as the terrain meandered among snow, dirt, ice and rock. But the studs are less grippy on the ice than I had expected, and they're worse than summer tires on rock. The melting snow exposed scarier parts of the trails, hidden for months now, and its smooth contours yielded to the rougher trail textures. Put together, the trails felt harder than I expected. This was worst on the bridges, homemade stream crossings in various states of disrepair across the PR.

I felt thoroughly limited by my mental state. This feels ironic in what looks like a physical sport, but that got me thinking about yoga. According to my book, yoga has been practiced for millenia and is seen as a form of meditation, though it too looks (and usually feels to me) purely physical. (I am a rank beginner at yoga and barely past that stage in MTB.) I would like to chat with a yoga expert and an MTB expert on whether MTB can be a meditation in the way yoga can be. I suspect there's at least a bit of overlap.

XC Ski Tophet Chasm

We've had the best snow in years over the last two weeks, so I've been XC skiing instead of biking. (At the same time, the snow piles at intersection corners are so high that I've heard car drivers voice fears about the poor visibility with other cars.) For the first week I warmed up on the trails I help maintain behind my work building. After that, inspired by MF's description of snowshoeing there, I took my skis to Tophet Chasm. This is a place I've mountain biked plenty of times, but it hadn't occurred to me that it could be skied.

When I bike at Tophet I usually drill Oak Hill, which for me is a textbook on climbing and descent. When I go with friends we generally take in the Chasm trail too, but I'm still nervous on it. There are only one or two places where this trail is beyond my strength/skill, and that would be ok. My problem is controlling fear as the side drop on the right side of the trail steepens as we climb, becoming downright cliff-like.

The first time I went to the chasm, I brought snowshoes and fully expected to need them for the approach to the chasm. Half of it is a fire road, but so steep that I can have trouble biking it. I found I never needed the snowshoes, and was further surprised that other ski tracks were already on the trail. I skied up and down the trail a couple times, and tried a little off-trail. The whole area was spectacularly beautiful, and the skiing was wonderfully fun. It's a tribute to the quality of the snow that as of Thursday there were only about three bits of exposed rock on this trail under pines.

I took these pictures going both ways on the trail. I found the lens of our digicam isn't wide enough to capture a real flavor of the trail alongside the chasm edge. The picture above shows the steepest place on the Chasm trail, where someone approaching the camera skis down a steep rock face. It's so steep I've never biked it, but these pictures look more flat than the real place. My climb requires stair-stepping through the trees to the left of the trail, around that rock, and as far as I can tell I'm the only one doing that, so I believe the other skiers are descending only. (That surprises me because descending is much riskier than the climb.)

Forecast shows another good week, staying below melting and some snow Wed, so I'll be out there some more. One of the great things about Tophet is it's nearly on the way to work when I drive, so stopping there on the way to the office costs little time and energy. I hope the XC ski season keeps on running!

Snow MTB

A week ago I decided to try mountain biking on snow, specifically the ice-glazed snow of the PR. I've ridden a couple times on trails with enough traffic and melting that the ice was intermittent, but here was a new category. We had plentiful snow, followed by rain and warm days, followed by cold, leaving the trails with a smoothly undulating ice over enough snow to cover even the tips of the rocks. I don't have studded tires for my mountain bike, and the rubber slid easily on the ice. I crashed twice in the first 50m, but my pads and the impossibility of going fast made crashes nonthreatening. The crashes did not bode well - I hadn't even reached a slope yet. I was surprised that the trails seemed utterly unused - providing none of the icy texture I've had before. And the ice weakened off the center of the trail so that if my tire drifted (slid) there, it would often break through the crust and become stuck. I started thinking about heading home and switching to a road ride instead.
After that 50m there's a substantial descent, steep enough that E still has trouble climbing it sometimes. Before I got there I had decided to walk it, but even that was tricky with the smooth ice and the bike sliding around. I had to kick into the crust to make tiny steps. Boding worse.
By default I took the path E and I normally use, heading toward the jumps. But I found myself walking as much as riding, and even the riding parts felt out of control. At the first bridge, a short straight non-rickety one, someone had kicked off most of the ice, but the approach and far side were so slick that I could easily imagine failing to line up the three segments. I did ride it, but was sliding again on the far side. Soon after that, again walking a trivial climb, I gave up: I just don't have the right equipment for this and I'm going home. And I'd made a mistake - I had thought about using SlushBike's front wheel with its studded tire on the mountain bike, but I didn't remember to set this up before coming. So I began planning my next attempt as I backtracked.
A turn before the base of that substantial hill I was on a flat trail and was riding for a change. At the turn to go up the hill I had a flash that at this moment I was having fun, so maybe I should continue on this flat trail another 50m or so, then turn around and go home. The path began a slight incline, but it wasn't terrible, so I rode it and kept going. Then I shifted to riding until I got stopped, then I'd turn around. But I was on a perimeter, easy trail here, and by the time I did get stopped I'd forgotten about turning around. I wound up walking the bridges, but riding most of everything else.
When I reached the "cliff" above Route3, I decided to take a snack break. (This is the eastern edge of the PR, and I'd started on the western edge then heading north.) While watching the cars go by I thought more about how I was breaking through the ice and decided to let some air out of the tires. Before this I had discovered that unlocking the suspension helped, and later I found that standing off the saddle helped - my technique evolved to trying to float over the crust, and this also maximized my steering grip. And I hadn't realized it while riding, but I'd been riding some much tougher hills than I could at the start of this ride. I was improving!
I continued south then west. There's a flat singletrack with rather dense forest on either side heading east, and those trees lifted my spirits and I found myself going fast. Why not see how fast I could go? After riding in the lowest gear almost all day, I shifted past 2 into 3 and I think 4, and it all held together. Here's where I really felt the difference in standing out of the saddle, and the softened fork actually started doing the work of absorbing bumps. (In this case, this cushioning was spent making my passage gentle enough to avoid cracking the ice or bumping my balance, forcing a tiny lateral or other force which could make the bike start sliding.) In this mode I completed that part of the path and connected with a fire road (a boring trail). Before I reached the fire road, though, it occurred to me that I had missed visiting one of E's favorite areas, which we call "mosquito land". (This is roughly due west of the biggest log ride in the PR, out to around the middle of the PR west-east.) So, after reaching the fire road and turning around, I headed there.
Mosquito land is a swampy area featuring some of the worst bridges in the PR. I'd forgotten about a short steep descent to enter it, and I couldn't even clearly see the trail so once more I was walking. Then a short ride but with enough turns and undulations that I lost that feeling of confidence I'd put together above. Then I faced a bridge, this one rather long, primarily a ladder shape made of inadequate lumber, with the near half submerged in the swampy water. To patch that situation, there was a 2x8 informally bridging the near shore with the middle of the bridge. To frost the cake, a fallen tree lay nearly along the right edge of the bridge. Unlike the frozen pond areas I'd ridden over, this area was wet and black. I stood studying the obstacle, decided to ride it and tried to clear my mind of distractions. Fully focussed, I mounted the bike, rode the icy land to the bridge, and started along the plank. I soon dropped onto the slightly-submerged ladder part, but that was ok. What I didn't count on was the ladder part then shifting and canting under my weight. I naturally steered to adjust, but by then I was on the dry side where the tree lay along the edge, and when my front wheel touched it I lost steering control and then balance and tipped out over the tree. This was all low-speed and I had my foot out to land on, but I couldn't quite reach the grassy bump I aimed for, and instead I sank to the middle of my shin in the water.
On the far side I took off all the wet stuff and wrung it out or smacked it as best I could, making a big mess of brown on the clean white crust. Then I thought of Shifu from E's current favorite movie at the moment, and what he said to his student, the Kung Fu Panda: 'when you concentrate, you suck.'
My wool socks were impressively warm, and in fact I never got cold at all. But I did head back home after that, boot squishing the whole way. I tried to get to the car quickly, largely because a month or two ago, when E fell into the ice at Mine Falls, getting cold was a big worry so we sprinted the mile to the car as fast as possible. Riding fast would have been a good idea anyway, to really nail down the technique I'd been building. In fact, I only half realized what I'd done when I rode the bottom half of the substantial hill near the car.
In the end, it was a great ride and I've ordered a rear studded tire for next time. I'll ride the road front wheel from SlushBike.
(If you're interested in the tires, I ordered one Nokian "Freddies Revenz Lite" tire, which is 2.3" wide with 336 studs. I picked this because it's their widest studded tire, and I really want width to help me float over the glazing. SlushBike runs Nokian "Hakkapeliitta W106", a 1.9" wide road tire with only 106 studs. Peter White has a good but stale article about these. They're made by Finns with a fun sense of humor I don't quite understand. I believe "Freddies Revenz" is a reference to Freddy Krueger. And my Hakkapeliittas came with tags on them featuring the smiling, disembodied head of a Ward Cleaver type with a thought bubble reading, "Hi, I'm your dad!".)

Crank Upgrade

Ok, this wasn't strictly necessary, but my friend MF found a great deal on nice modern (silver) cranks, my quick research showed they'd save significant weight over what I had, and my old blue ones were frankly on the ugly side. Here's the finished pic:

One surprise was I found my BB shell was damaged, perhaps from when I broke my chain a few months ago. (This is the part of the bike frame which holds the bearings the pedals spin around.) This didn't matter for the old crank set, but the new-fangled type press in from the outside and are sensitive to any imperfections. I thought about putting the whole frame on the milling machine and trying to face it myself, but decided to bring it to a bike shop. CycleLoft did a good job and charged me less than quoted over the phone. The more I read about troubles with these new BB designs, the happier I am that I did this. Here's the BB face before and after facing:

The other surprise is the weight difference is only 60g. "On paper" it looked like it would be bigger, but I found a lot of the difference is in the big chainring, which I don't use. The pictures below show the parts of each crankset that I did use, and is apples-to-apples.

A sub-part of the weight surprise is that the left crank is actually heavier in the new XT than the old LX crank, including the fasteners for the respective crank. XT is 227g, while old LX is 209. (XT is a higher-level line of components, so should typically weigh less than LX, and in general newer parts should be a little better than old ones.) The left crank does have a bigger job in the new design than the old one had: it maintains the preload on the BB bearings, so its joint slides for adjustment and then tightens in place. (The old design has the preload factory-adjusted in a single-piece BB component, and the crank arms just bolt on.)

In the end, it looks great and should work well. I am left with a bit of skepticism about the preload mechanism, though. The left crank is supposed to be periodically re-tightened, which makes it more fussy than the old design. I think I would hesitate to put this on my road bike, but the older designs are going out of production. Along the way I found I have a problem with the old-design (Octalink) left crank on Slushbike, though I think it will last a while. This has me a bit soured on the Shimano BBs at the moment. I've admired the Campagnolo "Ultra-torque" design, and at the moment it looks like the best to me. But Campagnolo isn't making triple cranks these days, so I can't use one. (Instead they're working on electronic shifting - ugh!)

Happy Holidays!

I hope you enjoyed your holidays. We had a good time, as you can see here with E sledding at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Thanks to my brother C and his kids for building a great set of runs and jumps!