on knowing your biking limits

 I led my usual Sunday ride today. Some pics at the start:

Jeff P brought a gorgeous old Raleigh, in great shape:

You can see the ride page here. It might be important for the next bit.

For a number of people on the ride, it was more than they could do. Whether the distance or pace was more than they bargained for, or whether they started out at a pace they could not maintain, or for some other reason, they wound up leaving early. All apparently got home safely, which is probably the most important thing.

The ride page shows we were within the advertised range; it was not a simple case of pace-pushing.

Sometimes, we like to challenge ourselves. Sometimes, we like to try doing things that other people do easily (sometimes, these are other people we care about). Sometimes, we like to try our boundaries and test our limits.

But cycling can be a dangerous activity, and it becomes more so if we're exhausted, dehydrated, undernourished. I'm glad the people on the ride got home safely. I hope those who were overtired (or whatever) will have a care to when they test their abilities again.

The most important thing on a club ride is the safety of all the riders.

---

In other news, though, when we got to my planned stop at Sweet Gourmet, they were closed. They are closing Sundays for the summer. 

First the Blawenburg Bistro, now Sweet Gourmet. I am apparently the kiss of death for Sunday openings for my favorite stops.

The gang made do with the local bagel place.

Well, OK. No-pace ride for next week (it's already posted on the club calendar; I hope some of youse come out).

laura's goldilocks ride

 

Friend Laura OLPH, among other club members, has a bike trip to, I think, Nova Scotia scheduled for next month. One of the days of the trip has a demanding hill, the like of which is not to be found in the Hill Slugs' usual riding area... and so to train, Laura has been scheduling club rides with all of the most demanding hills she can find that are not too inconvenient to include.

Good for her, I suppose, but that's not the way this old man (I'm almost 70) wants to ride, so I've been missing from her last umpteen rides. Evidently I'm not the only one; in her listing for today's ride, she wrote:

I talked Tom Hammell into letting me lead this scenic, social ride. Compared to what I've been listing lately, this one will be relatively easy, with approximately 50 feet of elevation gain per mile. 

And in a private communication, she hinted that she was looking to ride with some of Tom's regulars. Well, that was good enough for me; I was one of the first to sign up.

Laura called it a "Goldilocks ride", with the implication that it would be "just right", and it very nearly was. The distance and climb were much more to my liking than her other recent rides, and while the day was hot and a bit muggy, it was nowhere near as awful as recent days have been.

It was, of course, Tom H's route, so there was not just one...

...but two closed roads along the way.

Certain things are dependable; one of them is that there will be a closed road, a bridge out, or a path connecting different parts of the route, on one of Tom's routes. (The roads were, of course, impassable to cars, but posed no difficulty to those of us on bikes.)

We stopped and that Brooklyn Grill in Whitehouse Station, where we ran into (club president) Mike V and his wife Deb.

(Deb at left, Mike with the red-and-white cap under the sign.) They had considered coming out, but then the ride filled, and they didn't want to ask for an indulgence. They did ride with us part of the way back, and turned off when it was convenient to do.

Go see the ride page.

Laura indicates that sanity will return at the end of August. I wait, as the Catholics say, in joyful hope.

bike-in-a-box

 About nine years ago, I built a gravel bike from parts on a Surly frame. I did a number of posts on the other blog about it:

• Some parts, and more parts;
• Getting the frame;
• Lacing the wheels, and finishing them (yes, I built the wheels);
• One, two, three, four, five posts about the actual assembly;
• And a post about my name for the bike, the Krakow Monster.

And with all that, I never really liked it all that much; some years, I put less than a hundred miles on it.

After teaching the bike course for the Princeton Adult School for a couple of semesters, it struck me that I needed to get a bike on which I could fool around with fluid disk brakes. I'd done it at Bike Mechanic School, and I'm good with the rotors and pads, but I need more work with the actual fluid.

But I don't care about the latest-and-greatest (one of my frequent rants is about how cycling should be affordable), and I figured I might be able to get a fluid disk brake bike for cheap to replace the Krakow Monster. I did a lot of shopping, both in stores and online... and I found this from BikesDirect for $899 plus shipping. It's got GRX components (including Shimano fluid disk brakes), and, frankly, the most basic everything else. 

But it comes in my size, and I'm likely going to change out parts anyway, so I pulled the trigger and ordered one. It came in the box today.

Motobecane. That was a name to conjure with among bike-y folks in the 1970's, but like Schwnn, Mongoose, and so many other names, it's been bought by financiers and slapped on cheap Chinese bikes. Here's a few pictures of the bike in the assembly process at Ramblin' Wrench World Headquarters, my garage workstand:

It came with a generic manual with almost no useful information.

And it sports a chainring guard, a dork disk to keep the chain from eating the rear wheel spokes, and a kickstand.

All of those are going to come off eventually.

Now, a bike-in-a-box is part of the reality of buying bikes in these days, but you really want someone who knows what they're doing to put it together. In the case of this bike, the front derailleur shifts, but it's noisy and will need adjustment. The stem was mounted backwards, whether for ease of shipping or because of ignorance I know not. The front brake was loose on the fork, and the pads had been closed so that the rotor would not go between, and the front wheel could not be mounted until that was addressed. The cable on the rear derailleur was routed, but not tightened at all; it needed complete setting and adjustment. Worst of all, the headset was not seated properly, and required retrofitting so that the bearings found their places and the steering was functional (it's still not ideal, but I expect to have to adjust it a few more times as I ride it a bit).

I rearranged the spacers on the steerer tube to lower the bars about 1cm, and I expected to have to change out the saddle, but the saddle is surprisingly decent (I still might change it for a Selle SMP, but it's not like it was clear from the getgo that the saddle was not going to work).

I've ridden it around the street a bit... and I really like it so far. I need to do something to that front derailleur, and I need to go over the whole business with a torque wrench. But I'm not sorry I got it. 

And it may be the cheapass rotors... but I'm not blown away by the disk brakes. But it will give me something to play with.

I haven't got a name for this one yet. I'll do obeisance to Our Lady of Ghisallo, patroness of cyclists. I have not doubt the name will come in time.

In the meantime, I've got to go look for a Shimano GRX maintenance manual. And the old Krakow Monster will go to the New Brunswick Bike Exchange to find a new home.

ride on a hot day

 You probably had the same feelings we did, when all that rain and whatnot predicted for yesterday, didn't actually appear. Instead, it was just a hot day, and you definitely could have gotten out for a ride, but by the time you decided the rain wasn't coming, it was already too hot to think straight. So you didn't get a ride in yesterday...

... and instead, you made sure you got out early today, because you knew it was going to be hot. I know, because I saw you: there were people out on their bikes before 7:00 am, when I was getting my pre-ride bagels and heading to the start at the Claremont school.

I had limited my club ride to fifteen, and then got a plaintive request to add one more (that I didn't have the heart to refuse), so I had sixteen registered... and then I had multiple cancellations this morning, mostly complaining about the heat and the distance ("I'm not doin' 40 miles in this!"). But 12 hardy riders came out (I know they're hardy, because they all actually finished, despite the unpleasant temperatures).

(I CANNOT get a good picture of Rachel, above. I have several awful pictures of her, but decency demands I keep them private.)

Four riders went off the front, and we didn't see them again until we got to the stop at Boro Bean. The rest of us kept together and kept an eye on one another, making sure nobody got too far behind (different riders were at the back at different times, suggesting that this group was decently well-matched). We went down to Princeton, through ETS, then up to Hopewell. 

At the Boro Bean:

Some of the bikes (not all ours) that were out today:

Regular readers will know I love bike pics.

And back. The ride after the stop was at a more reasonable pace, at least for the eight of us in the slower group. There were times when one or another of us was out of breath and suffering in the heat. It may be that, in deference to the heat and global warming, we may need to do shorter rides on these hot days. It's something I need to think about.

(And as I write this, there is rain, which was NOT predicted for today in this area.)

So what did you do today?

no-pace ride

 

The club has rides at different paces, and generally, you pick the ride partly based on how fast they intend to go. But maybe you've got a bike that you love (like Jeff's old 70's Puch, above), that you don't take on regular rides, because the gearing isn't ideal for it. Or you have a friend/spouse/partner who rides at a different pace, but you'd like an opportunity to ride together. Or you just want a break from pace-pushy rides. Or whatever.

A few years ago, I had this idea to do a no-pace ride: I'll post a shorter route, we'll all start together, and you go at your own pace, whether fast or slow. If you're riding with someone, you can stay with them, and if you get ahead or fall behind, no problem. I'd ride at the back and make sure nobody got dropped or too lost, and we'd all eventually make it to the stop, and then make it back to the start location,

I thought my last one was just a year or two ago, but looking into the Plain Jim archives, I see it was four years ago. Well, it's time to resurrect the idea, and I posted one for today. 

I limited it to twenty (there's an unwritten rule about club rides being limited to fifteen, but in view of the special nature of this one, with folks going off the front, I decided to flout* the rule), and it filled. When there was a late cancellation, I had another rider who had already asked to be contacted if space opened up. Apparently, some folks thought it was a good idea.

*"Flout", not "flaunt" the rule. "Flaunt" your "rizz" and "swag". Or your unfortunately outdated education, for example.

At the start:

I stayed at the back of the ride, with the folks who were just easing along, and we picked up a few didn't have the route loaded, and got separated from faster riders. And when folks thought they could catch up to a faster group, off they went.

I had planned a stop at Sweet Gourmet in Montgomery/Rocky Hill, but they were closed for the holiday weekend; instead, riders went to the nearby Terrible Service Bagels, where the service was less terrible than usual because the shop was empty. Perhaps the entire region had taken off for the holiday weekend.

And back. The Excellent Wife (TEW) came along, and had so much fun chatting with the other riders that I don't even get a date credit for this one. She, and several other riders, mentioned what a great time they had today.

The no-pace ride isn't for everybody... but it's just the thing for some of us. I'm going to try to remember to continue scheduling them. Maybe you'll come out? Maybe you can bring that gorgeous-but-neglected bike you've got...