Over the long Giving of Thanks weekend temperatures here dropped into the 20s on the American Freedom Degrees™ scale, which is like minus 3,000 in Communist. While I know this is not particularly cold to the Minnesota Humblebraggarts…
[“Even this isn’t really that cold, which is why I’m not wearing pants.”]
…it is pretty chilly for New York in early December, and so it was time for me to transition into Winter Mode:
These days for many riders “Winter Mode” means basically this:
[This is exactly what I look like when I’m blogging.]
However, I insist on doing things the old-fashioned way and riding outside. For many years, “Winter Mode” for me meant wearing long tights and booties on a skinny-tired road bike, or else driving to a trail somewhere and doing fast laps on a mountain bike, also while wearing tights. Now it usually means wearing hiking boots and sweaters and stuff and setting out on the Jones. Thusly equipped, I made for one of my favorite Semi-Secret Trails:
By the way, I was checking out the Jones site and happened to notice they’re having quite a sale:
[No, they did not ask me to mention this sale.]
At which point I had to wrestle myself to the ground to stop myself from ordering one of these:
Once I pinned myself I also reminded myself that my current Jones leaves me wanting for absolutely nothing, and that I’m still on the original tires for chrissakes:
This isn’t for lack of riding it, either. I mean yes, I spread my riding across quite a few velocipedes, but the Jones has seen plenty of use, and I wonder if it’s just really, really hard to wear out a three-inch tire. In fact all I’ve had to do in the past five years has been to replace the chain and the brake pads, so $500 off a complete bike seems like a pretty good deal for an utterly uncomplicated all-terrain bicycle that will take you to the very ends of the earth (or in my case the Semi-Secret Trails of Suburbia):
Or just get the latest articulating downcountry-upcountry-sidecountry-enduro-thingy, whatever works for you:
Meanwhile, I am now officially the cycling world’s foremost authority on the Trek Y-Foil:
So I was amused to see this “spy shot” of Colnago’s upcoming aero bike:
Apart from the fact that it looks like it’s melting, what I find noteworthy about this bike is that the Y-Foil was deemed illegal because it didn’t have a seat tube, yet apparently Colnago can produce a bike with a totally non-functional “seat tube” that is nowhere near the seatpost and clearly exists entirely to satisfy the UCI requirement that bikes have diamond-ish-shaped frames. By this logic all that should be necessary to make a Y-Foil UCI legal would be to wedge the cardboard cylinder from a roll of paper in between the seatpost and the brake and secure it with a little electrical tape.
A carrot will also do in a pinch:
Not only is it laterally stiff yet vertically compliant, but the color is perfect.
Meanwhile, in other seat tube-free news, there’s this thing:
Apparently the builder made it in his living room:
He should have called it the Rhombus-Foil.