Spring finally showed up at the end of last week:
Only for summer to immediately elbow it out of the way, inspiring me to head over to the other side of the river on Saturday for a good old-fashioned road ride:
I chose the right day, too, because had I waited until Sunday I would have run right into the GFNY, which as always I completely forgot about:
Wait, does this mean River Road is open again?
Either way, this is already one of the Fredliest cycling corridors in North America if not the world, and on the day before a Gran Fondo the Fred Factor was frothy to say the least, with teams forming pacelines and the air resonant with the raspy sound of overly loud cheap freehubs laced into $3,000+ wheelsets. (The current business model for wheels seems to be a cheap hub, a plastic rim, and a four-digit price tag because “ceramic bearings,” which in practice are pretty much the same skateboard wheel bearings as every other wheel, only they can charge you a lot more money for them. I really don’t know how people can stand the horrible sound of today’s freehubs, though I guess it drowns out the ticking sound of their press-fit bottom brackets.)
As always on this corridor there were also plenty of triathletes, armed to the teeth (or technically the perineum) with their trademark “butt rockets:”
It may look like simple hydration, but quick tap of the electronic “blip” on the handlebar releases the CO2, which in turn launches the incendiary “water bottle” projectile. The tip-off that this is a high-tech weapons delivery system and not simply a hydration-and-flat-fix solution is that there is no such thing as a triathlete who can repair a flat. Fortunately, it’s extremely unusual to see one of these actually go off, since 99% of the time the triathlete will crash while attempting to press the “launch” button.
As for me, I was the hairy-legged guy on the old road bike with a triple and mountain bike pedals that everyone else was passing:
The bike is now running beautifully, all thanks to Ben’s Cycle, who had exactly the spare part I needed to rehabilitate the wheels:
As a middle-aged guy with all the bikes I could possibly dream of and more you’d think it would take more to excite me than a fix for my cheap Craigslist bike, but you’d be absolutely wrong, and the utter joy I felt when I threaded them on and confirmed they fit was all out of proportion to their diminutive size and cost. Of course, in purchasing these I did violate my oath to not spend any money on this bike; however, when you consider the alternative–that being wasting an otherwise perfectly good set of wheels–I maintain doing so was ethically sound.
What amazes me even more than how easily pleased I am is how utterly stupid I was to be riding around on the wheels in the first place. Not only were both original plastic preload adjuster thingies cracked, but when I went to grease the front hub the front one fell apart immediately:
Keep in mind the axle of this hub basically works like a headset, and without the preload thingy the effect is the same as removing a threadless stem. So if this had come apart while I was riding the wheel would have easily shifted far enough over to lock it up, throwing me over the bars and to my fate.
Wasn’t it only January when I was analyzing a similar crash and taking inventory of all the things I could have done to avoid it?
Some people never learn.