Ride On! part III

For the past few weeks we've had a fair bit of rain and storms (ocasional snow/hail). Not to be deterred by a little moisture, I managed to hit the hills once again during a three-hour break from this dour weather.

This particular ride that I went on (we'll just call it the Water Tower Ride) is about thirteen miles round trip with a vertical gain that tops 1000ft and my fastest time being just over an hour. I started out not really knowing whether I would go the complete distance or not - spring conditioning is a real drag. I ask you to remember the bit about days and days of continuously rainy/snowy weather.

So I get to the top of the climb (about six miles in) and it looks something like a swamp. However, I take a little look around (elevation = 5600 ft, so you can see the entire valley from up there on a clear day) and notice that the tiny break in the clouds seems to be following me up the canyon. This bit of reassurance, fueled by Massive Attack's 'Radiation Ruling the Nation' pumping through my earphones, meant that there was no turning back. (Massive Attack fan note: Had it been 'Backward Sucking', well, my day would have been a lot less muddy)

So I plunged into the mud-madness like a good sport. I made it about another mile in and my chain derailed from all the mud that was packed in my hubs, bottom-bracket, and tires. I managed to 'wash' the vital parts of my bike off in one of the larger puddles on the trail so I could carry on. This is one of the few times that having SPD pedals works to your extreme disadvantage since the old shoes are caked full of mud and won't snap back in without some real work. When I finally made the hair-raising decent (back down the 1000ft, only this time on a bit of single track that is about six inches wide in places and covered with loose rocks and skirts a nice cliff) and came out on the Jordan River Parkway Trail, I looked like a real mud-baby. The total trip time ended up being about three hours of mud-heaven including repairs, picture taking, climatic observation, and general marvelling.

Fortunately, there weren't any wrecks, and it was so thick that I couldn't really get going fast enough to flip it all over my back. Unfortunately, it took me two days to clean my bike and I had to rebuild my front hub and will need to rebuild my bottom-bracket - which I didn't realize until it seized up on me in the middle of another ride a few days later. The things we do for fun...