one of the best

pulls the plug. Seriously. That guy could write. Perfect interviews, great content. Seriously one of the best New England Bike Racer blogs out there. FB is one thing, twitter is another but they aren't the same.

This is a different medium. Different.

More it is just the emptiness. Yet another vacated internet address that may have not even been around long enough for my lazy ass to update the sidebar, maybe it is there i should check. Stick another one on the come and gone. The rise and fall. Can the best never last? Do they burn up in flames leaving the mediocre grumpy dirty old men like me writing what we've always written.

Writing about riding home tonight without knee warmers on, hair legs feeling strange in the headwind. No gloves, just arm warmers and a ss jersey. Spending 4 hours installing CS4, but not the whole thing, i just wanted Photoshop for a demo in class. I got it on there but totally spaced (until the end) on one of the biggest reasons i wanted to demo it to everyone at one. LEVELS. Don't ever touch brightness and contrast. LEVELS.

My legs felt like crap at the beginning of the ride both this morning and tonight. But oddly, once i got the crap out they stopped feeling shitty. Haven't had a day w/o saddle time since the last day of January. I'm not sure about doing doubles this weekend. Might be enough to just get a morning ride in, or sit on the trainer and just have 20 minutes of peace.

So now i'm monitoring the battery meter and waiting for the plug me in or your content is gone light. Although because of this medium, specifically the way blogger is set up, it autosaves as i write. FB? Nope, whole long post written and poof it is gone. Some emails, same, other forms? yeah you can lose it all. I'm getting older and i like the habit, the familiarity. I like the way it works here. But unlike some, or many or unlike everyone, i've kind of given up checking on stats. They've been pretty stable for a while. Or consistent. so i don't bother checking. like Fat Cyclists wrote when describing how to make it work. Pick a handful of friends and write it for them, or not *for* them but as if you were telling them. At least that is how i sort of remember what i think he said, i should check but i think i should just finish writing while i have a few minutes of quiet before the laundry spins it self out and needs to be hung up.

G-ride got me thinking, maybe there is a way to retrofit a modern fork on that Klein. I've got at least one (and i think maybe two) Judy SL forks for it, probably 1-1/8 steerer tube stuffed in that way before its time Klein steerer tube. Maybe it is possible to stuff something with more travel up front, relax the ultra steep angles on the Klein a touch and salvage a nice frame. Or i just give up mt biking and stick with cross as my dirt mistress. I don't have the time to spend driving to places to practice enough to get passably skilled at riding with what i have, i have time to ride out the door and hit the road with friends. Time is valuable, not home time needs to be economized, mt biking is not about economy of time. and hell how green is it when 95% or more of the people doing it drive to a location to do it? That and they wear weird baggy clothes and think lycra dudes are funny. And yeah, i'be being divisive. Some people don't like cyclists who divide and separate the two wheel crowds into factions. I got thinking, hell I'm riding a 1996 frame, with a handful of '96 vintage components (some newer) a fork from '99. If i think back to when my bike was "new" and imagine what it would be like if someone showed up for a mt bike ride with the gang back then in michigan on a '86 vintage mt bike...

It has me reflecting on lots of mt bike stuff right now. I like riding in the dirt. But i was not a fan ever of the real bumpy rocky stuff. Never felt it. That bombing down mt ashland after climbing for what seemed like hours on my 32 pound Raleigh Chill after class at UBI was a blast. Smooth and flowy, swoopy and fun. Sure some roots but not like the mine fields of pain here. Michigan was a mix, and i never really quite felt at place with either the hard core roadies or the super fly mt bikers, not until i started racing cross. That just felt right. I love riding on the road with friends. Mt biking? too much depends on the terrain to have fun. More or less if you can ride a cross bike on the trail, well then i'm there. Go figure. I'm not surprised.

Damn all that because of a friend pulling the damn plug. I started just a short quick post. And here i am a few minutes later with a couple extra words and me actually saying, you know? I'm skipping two rides this spring. Battenkill AND Burlingame. No silly insane over crowded ride by myself in the pretty country side of upstate new york, and no fun but totally not ridable sectioned time trial for me. I haven't really gotten any better, even the years i've spend time actually riding the mt bike. It doesn't really help me ride the sections i can never ride at Burlingame. Pre-riding confirmed that. I new the lines more or less and I still couldn't ride them, and to top it off the trail is growning rocks and roots at an alarming rate. Putting in waterbars just doesn't seem like the answer. Almost like to preserve the trail you've got to bring in soil or remove the rocks. The roots should have soil replaced around them, and the rocks. It is new england, we grow rocks here. Make rock walls along the trails to keep soil in there, gotta be an answer besides letting the rocks grow. And yes, i know. There are people who love the rocks. Dudes who float from the top of one to another (ThomP) effortlessly who probably like seeing them there.

Maybe like solobreak, i miss the days of riding mt bikes 20 years ago before all the 26x1.9 tires carved it up, now the 29er and the 26x2.25 and bigger tires are floating around making holes. here's another indication of getting old, thinking about what it was like mt biking in the early 90s. we didn't need suspension, the trails were fucking smooth and nice. As the years have progressed if you want to ride the same trails you need longer and longer suspension. We didn't NEED 120mm of travel up front in 1990.

Okay, now i'm starting to get really cantankerous.

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

wait, i don't have a lawn. Well anyway.

Gotta hang up the laundry.

heddwch
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