Curses

Yesterday I must have been cursed with slightly bad luck. It was almost a comedy of errors, but in the end I made it thru.

In order of appearance
A) - Missing shims/cones for Rear D - TBL hooked me up with a pair stripped of an old cantilever brake set.
B) - Had 2 people on the 2nd shift call out, 1 guy from my shift stepped up and another on 3rd came in early. Didn't have to miss the WF ride.
C) - Left bladder and brews at work only realized while at TBL. Made it back and to WF by 6:20. LUCKY! Bad traffic on 28 and other spots due to construction on 28 at willard/etc.
D) - Mechanicals Mechanicals Mechanicals on the ride. 1 Major, 2 minor. Still did 10 miles. The others probably got 11 while I fixed a new to the area riders chainline.
E) - Removed to protect the uh...well innocent.
F) - Ooops locked out the wyf last night with the security bolt...my bad.

To end this run of cursed luck I've taken the step of signing up for Curse of Dark Hollow. Relative tight budget has dictated that I pinch my pennies and keep my sanity and I opted to only sign up for the 10 miler after talk to Liz after WF last night. If it doesn't crush me or I feel I need more punishment I can go bigger for Teaberry. I'm strangely excited at the prospect of going somewhere new. To race. Thats apparently hard. Odd. And wow...the weather looks not bad for then. Keeping appropriate digits crossed.

Anyone heading up there thinking of camping Saturday to Sunday???

I'm debating hitting Raystown Lake on Monday if anyone is free.

Maintenance Success

Well I got some of the maintenance I wanted to done on the bike this week. However it has made several things very clear. The bottom bracket is DIEING. Over the last 2 months its gone from say maybe 1/16 inch in play to nearly 1/4. I may have to break down and do an emergency upgrade over the next month, though I'd prefer to avoid that with the upcoming moving/housing expenses. ugh.

I did tear down and re-grease my headset and it seems smoother and better adjusted...I think. Also did swapped out the jockey pulleys on the rear d with newly greased slightly less used ones.

And I finally found a successful method to changing out the pads on my J7's. Unfortunetely while removing the rear brake at WF last week apparently I forgot to put 1 set of the shims/washers/cupcone doo-dads into the plastic baggy and need to pickup a set tonight if possible so I can have rear brake again. It was a bit hairy for sure last week riding without them in the slightly damp conditions. Really made me get back off the saddle for sure!

Looking forward to riding a good bit tonight. Also picked up the Sierra Nevada Kellerweisse - an open fermented wheat beer that was REALLY damn good with my chili-potato last night.

Lots of Folks

Also ran into the LogPosse out at WF last night. It's been damn good to see a bunch of people I usually don't see in the last week including Arne, Nicky, (uh steve was it?), Yueqing, Chris, Denis, and Jason last Thursday.

I also realized the bike maintenance list is growing to super stupid lengths.
Chain for Wife's Bike to be installed.
New Crankset/bb, Chain, and Cogset, and pulley wheels on my bike
Relube the headset
New Pedals.
Re-true the primary wheelset and finish the old/spare wheel.
New brake pads on rear.
Change wife's stem (Shorter and with a slightly higher rise.
New Grips
New Seatbag for my bike so I don't ALWAYS have to carry the Camelback. I hate stuff tons of shit in my jersey.

3x the Fun

So last night was my third ride of the week, pushing me into the mid 30 mile range again, which for me is pretty good. As we were getting ready to roll out of the Wakefield lot a light sprinkle started and I booted the groups out of the lot 5 minutes early. The rain continued for about 20 mins lightly and by 7:30 most of it had already dried back up. I had to pass my ride over to Tom and go pick my wife up at DCA, she got back from NY a bit early.

Had a bit of an emergency in the lot prior to the ride. I went to clean and lube the chain at about 5:30'ish and when I went to spin the rear wheel.....Horrible clicking and sticking were present. WTF?!??! A quick investigation showed the issue was being caused by the rear brake. So I rip rear wheel off and unmount the caliper. Viola! Bent tension spring. Out come the pads and the spring, a few minutes of bending then the real battle begins. Re-inserting the pad. 10 Minutes later they are back in. Remount the caliper. Put the wheel back in. And after a few spins its back to not working. Time to implement my final fix for the evening. Off comes the whole rear brake system.

Wow! It was a bit hairy riding in the slightly wet conditions with no rear brake but I survived while I was out. But I definitely kept my speed down a bit.

After picking up the wife we hit Kendal Park Tavern on MacArthur Blvd and it was very good! Had a Sam Summer Ale with a lemon slice garnish and it was excellent. Gotta get a case before it's gone!

REI tomorrow to get a new set or two of organics for the rear brake.

Probably won't ride again till Thursday as my hand is bugging me a bit more than I'm comfortable with.

6 Points of Contact.

No, I'm not really talking about my technology slavish-ness (2 Work Emails, 2 Personal, Facebook, Twitter, LJ, MORE Forums, etC.

I'm actually talking about my fun little wreck at Schaeffer yesterday. Near the end of my ride I was fooling around on the stunts at the top of the white loop when I biffed and took a dumb/bad fall off the 2nd skinny set. I was riding it towards the lot and got to the logs at the end of it and whoops off I went and the bike took me for a final ride. I think I ended up getting very personal with the handle bars based on the locations of the contusions. About the 2 worst are where my thumbnail bent back about half way and my wrist took some sort of abuse, though I can't find any real marks.

I find it amusing I've managed 2 fairly good wrecks in 2 week'ish after going a long time with nothing worse than an emergency hop-off. Thats riding I guess and yesterday at least I was challenging myself. Skills riding is fun, I was just un-prepared mentally on that run. Oh well. I still got in a kick ass ride of about 15 miles around the farm. Even got to hang a bit the Yeuq, Chris, and Dennis. hahah I probably should have hung with them for the rest of the ride, but I couldn't have probably held the pace after already spending an hour and change out there already. Jeez I need to build the endurance so 20 miles isn't pushing it at all!

Afterwards I spent 45 minutes waiting to buy a power adapter for my phone at the verizon store near Agrodolce in G-town. I was ready to flip out! I will never own another phone that doesn't use mini-usb to charge!

Wakefield Thursday Night Ride hits the trails again.

Wow, for the first time in a MONTH I believe that the TNR at Wakefield actually was able to ride trails. It was a blast. I pre-rode for not quite an hour doing about 7 miles of easy spinning around the park. Did 2 repeats of the Ascent Hill and Berms in phase 3. It was a good warm up, felt pretty good but a bit tired for being at 23 miles in the past 2 days when the ride started. I lead my small casual group out to Accotink the back way so as to give my legs a chance to spin up after spending 30 mins in the lot. We rode a bunch of the trails reversed out there and damn, that was tough in a few spots. It was a nice change however, and I think the funnest part was when we did the normal entry loop at accotink in reverse, it flows even better than the normal way.

With CJ yesterday I hit nearly 33 miles for the week. NOt bad. I'm hoping to sneak out for a shorty on Saturday afterwork depending on the weather. Not sure where yet.

Also after my CJ ride yesterday I hit a new low on my weight, 190. Though last night post ride/beer/food I was back to 192. Going back thru here my previously noted weight back in January 2008 was 218! I think most of that has been in the last year and the last 10-15 has been since the end of the winter when I had plateaued at 202'ish. Now if I could add some leg muscle mass I'd be real happy.

SNOW DAY IPA rocked it last night. Nice citrus finish on it, gonna be a nice summer beer. And while it's fairly low alcohol, at not quiet 6%, it hit more like a 7%. But that may have been the dehydration :)

Age Came along. Just a few days late.

My birthday was fairly recent, it just waited a few days to reminder me that yes I am getting older.

The impact points from my stupid crash on Thursday are sore. Whats more sore are the tendons/etc from where I was forcefully unclipped from the bike. I can only assume it was due to banging around the top tube. So for now I'm medicating with advil and doing some light stretches and massaging out the kinks/etc slowly.

Went and saw Year One last night and it was pretty funny and pretty gross at many points. Oliver Platt is hilarious. And so are many of the other guests. And best yet Olivia Wilde (13 from House) is in it.

Going to spend some time today trying to think up label idea's for Snowday IPA.

Pratfall.

That should be the title of the ride I led last night at Wakefield. I went out with 3 others and did the CCT. On the first bridge out of the main WF parking lot our new group member lost it and fell on the bridge, while trying to turn a bit. And I grumbled that I should have warned everyone about that before we left. We all laughed. We ended up heading south on the CCT to 7100 and 640. About 7.8 miles out. Coming back down the big hill on the path I hit the first TINY wooden bridge and next thing I know I'm laying on my side on the ground! Ouch! A bit of an arm scrape and a sore hip later we were back on the trail. We cranked back and I was simply laughing at the absurdity of it. I think I was riding my front brake from coming down the hill when I hit the bridge. A bunch of the regulars did the PPTC road ride we chatted for a few minutes before retiring for some post ride beverage consumption while loading up the gear.

I'm pretty happy with this week of riding, a bit of 30 miles. Thats my best week in a while. Going to try and punch out some good distance on Monday. We'll see how the weather treats us.