Saturday, March 10, 2012

Some stuff

Went on a hard ride yesterday. It was dense with climbing. Among Bill, Mark, and Tony, I was the slow guy. I hate that. My goal is to be able to stay within reach of these guys on climbs by the end of the summer. Track of the ride is here.

A while back I carried on about my high-value, all-purpose WTB cx tires. I still dig em, but the rear smoothed out pretty quickly. I swapped today. Put a new one on the front and put the front one on the rear.


Nice treehouse.

And I cleaned the gunk off the main trail/CX bike. It was pretty caked up after the last couple weeks of trail riding through the slow thaw on the HD trails.

Before.

After.
I ordered a gallon of Boeshield on Thursday night. Should be here any day. It was $100 shipped for 128 oz. Compared to about $7-8 retail for 4oz, that pencils out favorably. I should be set for a year or so on the lube front.


Speaking of the HD trails, I took my favorite trail ride this morning. It's a Highdrive ride that is optimized for coasting the trails. Picture above shows the track. The red bubble thing is at the entrance to the trails. It's pretty much all downhill on swoopy fun single track down to the bottom.

And when I do the guilt-version of the ride, I pop out on 14th and laze it out up hill on roads. Sweetness. When I do the guilt-free version, I ride the trails back up.

Dig it:



That spot at about mile 5 is where it's riding home. If that isn't great, I don't know what is. (Thanks Kurt). The track is here. Aside from my commute, I've probably ridden that route more than any other over the last 6 years or so.


This afternoon Glen took me on a short trail ride above the Fish Lake Trail. Pretty nice little loop with some perfectly technical bits. "Perfectly technical" means that it's a bit tricky at moderate speeds. So it interesting, but not in violation of the blood clot riding law. And as Glen noted, "if you fall, you could land on a pointy rock, but you'll probably just land on the soft forest floor."


This little log structure was tucked away back there. Kind of cool.
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5 comments:

  1. Fred BlasdelMarch 10, 2012 at 8:38:00 PM PST

    What manner of applicator dinguses are you gonna fill from your gallon jug?

    ReplyDelete
  2. John SpeareMarch 10, 2012 at 10:24:00 PM PST

    Fred: the dingus plan at the moment is to fill up an existing empty 4oz T-9 bottle. I sense that you may have more brilliantly simple idea?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mike JenkinsMarch 11, 2012 at 8:00:00 AM PDT

    Try not to leave your gallon of T-9 anyplace where it will get cold. I left mine in the garage during the winter and the wax precipitated out of solution. I was able to get some of it back into solution by warming the jug in a hot water bath, but there was still considerable residue left on the bottom.

    I dispense the stuff using a 4 oz needle tip squeeze bottle.

    ReplyDelete
  4. mechBgonMarch 11, 2012 at 1:45:00 PM PDT

    I like your style on that ride, it takes some mental toughness to go do dead-end climbs. You might want to upload your rides to Strava.com (free account is plenty) and then you can compare your climb to your previous ones. I find that motivational when I'm riding solo and need a reason to keep my effort level up.

    Example: comparing my various trips up Jamieson to the T intersection.

    http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff237/mechBgon/Rides/strava_1.png

    ReplyDelete
  5. John SpeareMarch 11, 2012 at 6:13:00 PM PDT

    Mike: thank you! This would've lived in my garage all winter. Now, I'll keep it indoors. Maybe in bed with us, just to be extra careful.

    Tom: it's not mental toughness. It's peer pressure. I'd never do a dead-end climb on my own.

    ReplyDelete