Day of the flats
After a considerable gap, I rode another 200k today (the traditional run up to Ripplebrook (& Pipeline Road so I could do a Bybee start)) but was much delayed by a collection of flats; three of ‘em, enough to run through both my spare tubes and end up limping home on the first tube, which at least was enough of a slow leak so I could go 8 miles before having to stop and pump it up again.
Annoyingly, the first two flats slowed me down enough so I ran into the weekend storm in Barton instead of Oregon City, which meant that I didn’t see the giant pothole on Washington St, which popped my second spare tube and dented the front rim.
Ugh.
But, other than that the play was excellent; the first 98 miles of the loop only had scattered showers and a couple of times the sun actually flirted with burning through the clouds before the next band of stormclouds swept over. And it seems like I’ve not last as much of my fitness as I thought; despite horrific headwinds (and a flat) I still made it down to Ripplebrook in 4h30, and back into Estacada from the Pipeline Road turnaround in 1h45 (including one flat) – if I hadn’t spent half an hour at Ripplebrook, had the third flat, or gotten monsooned on I might have been able to make in back in under 9 hours.
Though I really need to braze canti posts onto the seatstays on this bicycle; the caliper brake I’ve got on the rear wheel right now doesn’t do much in the department of stopping when it’s wet – when I descended River Road towards the Trolley Trail, the brakes didn’t on the ramp down to 99e and the only thing stopping me from doing a cyclocross dismount and two-foot stop was that the light turned green just as I unclipped for my panic stop (maybe I should take one of the spare Mafac Racers I’ve got and centerpull the rear wheel as a temporary fix?)
Oh, yeah, and this loop puts me over 10 Mm of completed permanents for the year (despite having 4 months of not being motivated to ride at all – I was hoping for 16 Mm for the year, but I’ll be happy to get 12 Mm now.)
Comments
Well, there are a few reasons in favor of throwing linear pull brakes on the mlcm:
- I have the canti posts
- and linear-pull brakes
As well as a few reasons against disc brakes:
- I don’t have the brakes
- I don’t have the hubs
Being poor makes linear pull brakes seem much more appealing just on the basis that I have the parts on hand.
Point. No need for new hubs, either.
You’re being much more sanguine about the whole thing than I was, the time I nearly went into traffic downhill in the rain.
Comments are closed
What a sucky mass of flats.
Woot, mini-floor-drive pump!
If you have to braze canti-posts on, why not just go with some Avid BB-7s?
I mean, my biases are those of someone for whom it doesn’t take much rain at all to make rim brakes of whatever sort stop working, but disc really does work better, and you do all these long downhills in the damp.