The bicycling year in review (executive summary)
- ~9500 miles ridden (and ~60 miles climbed,) including
- 6 loops > 150 miles,
- 16 loops > 100 miles, and
- 13 loops > 60 miles.
- 3-4 chains worn to destruction,
- as well as one cassette, and
- 1 tire.
The mlcm went from a 1×8 drivetrain to a 2×9, and it also grew a front rack and was converted from downtube shifters to brifters. The trek was also converted to brifters, and went briefly to 2×9 (using a pair of castoff 9-speed chains and the worn 9-speed cassette from the mlcm) and then went down to 2×8 (via a shiftmate) when the worn 9-speed drivetrain became unusably worn.
I tried out a pair of Challenge Parigi-Roubaix tires, which aren’t any faster than my traditional Nashbar tires, but which roll forever compared to them. Alas, the price I paid for this was lots of flats (3 of them in under 400 miles) so I’ve pulled them from the bicycle and stored them away for summertime.
Both bicycles got wired rear lights, so now I don’t need to mess around with battery lights at all when I’m riding at night (except that I do keep one battery light on the trek so I can have a flashy light as well as my regular steady taillight) and I mounted a dummy axle to the rear of the trek so I can haul other bicycles in an amazingly shimmy-inducing fashion.
The list of things that didn’t work is very small.
- The battery in the Garmin 205 I use as a cycle computer wore down to the point where it wouldn’t hold a charge longer than 10 hours, so I ripped it out and replaced it with an ebayed cellphone battery. Which gives me 13 hours :-(
- I put 175mm cranks onto the mlcm to see how they would work, but had to pull them off within 500 miles because my legs felt like they wanted to die if I did loops longer than > 30 miles (I did an R300+R200 in a three day period, and just didn’t want to even think of riding the bike after that. Ripping off the new cranks and moving the compact double crankrings to my old mystery low-tread Sugino crankset fixed that wagon.)
- The pedal thread in the NDS crank on that Sugino crankset stripped out, and I had to replace that crank with the one that used to be on the Trek before I xtracycled it.
- I found a few design problems with my prototype Big Rando Bag so I had to pull it from the bicycle for repairs in November (replaced by a bigger Porteur-Randonneur bag for the time being.)
Perhaps next year will work out as well as this year did. Maybe I’ll even find a way to get my yearly milage up over 10k miles?