Brews you can use

I rode the Schwinn to work today. It was a much better and less physically taxing ride than the last commute. The repacking job might have done the trick! Of course, it may have something to do with the ~27 mile brisk group ride I did on Saturday with time to recover, or that the temperature was a pleasant 20s or 30s instead of single digits with -10°F wind chill, or some benefit of the fixed gear. Y’know, little details like that….

It was an interesting adventure… The fabled mystical connection between fixed-gear cyclist and bicycle hasn’t developed yet: for the first few miles, it was more like the bike would clear its throat pointedly and try to toss me in the air when I tried to coast. That only happened about five times, then my legs relaxed a bit more, and kept moving. Since they kept moving, they kept pushing a little bit, and I made very good time home, a roughly 12 mph average speed. I wasn’t too tired, although my legs were a little shaky after a half hour of near solid spinning.

I need to get fenders on this bike before I do that again. I hadn’t needed them before, but today’s ride was a mixture of slush, puddles, and puddles of slush with occasional patches of dry pavement (or ice, which at least has the decency to stay put on the road), a lot of which wound up in a nicely-defined brown line down the seat of my pants. Of course, I had taken my spare clothes from the office home a couple weeks ago, since I hadn’t been using them. I just tried not to walk away from too many people at the office. That worked OK, but fenders are more effective

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Bike.