Life on Overdrive

Everything is happening, but I still manage to ride. I have been maximizing my fun factor by not taking cameras and rarely writing about riding but alas I am a liar.

I got two very similar rides in at Dupont this weekend from Fawn Lake and both rides consisted of two people. Two people make for an excellent ride at Dupont as you can minimize your stopping time because as I have said many times before it’s the transitions that count in this forest.

I would love to put Saturday and Monday’s ride routes down but I really don’t feel it is worth it. Each day, we rode all around up and down.

Saturday’s goal was to avoid all the traffic at the park and hit some of the last few “trails” that I have never set rubber on. Mission accomplished including a really fast run down Rocky Ridge that might have been faster had I not been worrying about the 80 billion trail users out for the day.

Grassy Meadows is my number one priority lately.

We also managed to pick the exact same lunch spot as PAS had picked for their long ride. A pump track makes a great lunch spot and man this pump track is going to make you work for your lunch. Saturday was good with no mechanicals.

Monday was an interesting day to say the least. Joe and I hit up the mountains and made another decent sized ride with a time constraint that I thought would be completely blown when I had a new-to-me mechanical.

I was showing Joe the kids loop since he is looking into bringing his son up sometime soon. I was on the really skinny, skinny’s when I tried to negotiate a tight turn onto the not so skinny skinny’s. My front wheel just barely slipped off the wood structure and I heard paaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnngggggggggg!!! I knew it wasn’t good but when I saw my rotor I almost passed out. When the wheel slipped the first thing to catch all my weight was the front rotor and it was bent at a 45 degree angle.

Never being one to let things like this get me down. I laughed, showed Joe and he laughed until he realized he had to help me get this situation resolved so we could finish the ride as we didn’t have any maps with us.

I gimped the bike out to the parking lot and started trying to bend the rotor. I caressed it, took my shirt off and yanked on it, put my knees on the tire and bore all my weight down and got nothing, nada, nunca. I stood on the rotor with all my 195 lbs, nothing. My worst fear was the rotor breaking causing some sort of medical trauma to myself so I went and found a BIG rock. I Put my shirt over the rotor and beat the shit out of it. I got it close but it still wouldn’t turn well when happiness in the form of mountain bikes on a truck pulled into the lot.

I asked some strangers if they had some pliers, the nice stranger obliged with an 8 inch handled adjustable wrench. Perfect I said as they watched in horror as I applied to tool to my rotor. A salvaged rotor is what I ended up with which was quite remarkable considering it looked more like a soup spoon twenty minutes ago.

With a new found happiness we finished the ride in glorious style. Another highlight from the day was seeing two fellow bikers at the Corn Mill Shoals little river crossing. Two guys were putting their shoes on as I lined up. One of the fellows glanced at me and realized I would probably be stopping so he didn’t bother to move his bike out of the line. As crossed the halfway point the fellow frantically hauled his bike out of the way.

To cap things off, when I got back to the truck my window on my hatchback looked funny. I popped it open and realized the bolt that holds the upper right side was broken. So the hydraulic pushed the window out of place on the right side. After five minutes of wresting with the thing I got it locked back down. Crisis numero Dos averted for the day.