The weather dilemma

 Today presents a classic case: a significant storm has been brewing all week. The sensationalist news outlets have played up its worst potential. Where it's bad, it could be pretty bad. The organizers of the Seacoast Century bike rides on the New Hampshire shoreline have canceled the event. But I see the sun and bits of blue sky. The big stuff isn't supposed to come down for a while yet. So do I ride to work and roll the dice on conditions for the evening half of the commute?

When my commutes were less than ten miles -- sometimes a lot less -- total for the day, I would ride in all weather. I also didn't have a car, so if I didn't ride I walked. In the blizzard of 1983 in Annapolis, Maryland, I snowshoed the six or seven miles across town to work. Coworkers who had cross-country skis and lived just a few blocks from work phoned in because they had better things to do on a day when central Maryland got a visit from New England conditions. Now I live a hilly 15-ish miles from work, for a 30-mile total day. The route follows roads that aren't safe for walking, let alone skiing. If the bike option doesn't work, I'm sealed in the capsule, stuck in traffic.

When the probability of precipitation is at 50 percent or higher, but the amount is a tenth of an inch or less, and the day length doesn't crowd the evening ride, I will most likely ride. Unfortunately, sunset already puts me in twilight on the best of evenings, let alone when thickening clouds, increasing rain, and rising winds give passing motorists even more to deal with.

We've reached the part of the year in which motorists don't expect to see bikes in morning and evening rush hours. Some of them get downright resentful when presented with some idiot on a two-wheeler, obstinately defying weather and darkness when any normal, rational person would drive a car and really get in their way. How is sitting behind a fully lane-blocking vehicle for ten miles better than having to slow down a little -- maybe -- and diverting slightly -- if I'm lucky -- to pass me on a bike? We never get to have these discussions when I'm getting honked at or close-passed by someone driving a monster truck, who's sick of accommodating whacko idiots on bikes after a long summer of putting up with them. Quit already!

Malice is fairly rare, but drivers can still have trouble coping with the challenges of darkness and weather that can lead to conflicts with vulnerable road users. If everyone in a motor vehicle slowed down as much as would actually make their passage safer, they would barely travel above biking speed anyway in a good thick rainstorm in the dusk. That ain't happening.

Today's forecast with summer daylight wouldn't raise a question. I'd be suited up and out the door. We're on the fringes of the storm anyway. That's too bad in a way, because we need the rain. We don't need the wind, though. Most of the trees are still in summer green, so high winds will take more of a toll on limbs and weaker trees. And, speaking of wind, it will be a headwind on the way home.

The worst case when I drive due to weather is if the weather doesn't happen and I could have made it both ways. Worst case when I ride is that the weather doubles down and I'm plodding into the gale while getting soaked. Then add the deeper dusk of a stormy evening.

We're in the part of the year where the day gets shorter even as it is beginning. The sun rises with increasing reluctance and scurries away with increasing urgency to share its light with the bottom half of the planet. We don't have the margin for error that spring and summer lavish on us. The transportation cyclist has to decide for the entire day in just a few minutes at the start of it.

A visit from Quinn Simmons

 Because professional rider Quinn Simmons has family in the area, local riders have occasionally seen him flash by on the road or caught a familiar-looking route posted to Strava. Then, last week, we had a closer encounter.

It began on Wednesday or Thursday when a young woman arrived with a tubeless tire that wouldn't hold pressure. Steve figured out from conversation that it was Sydney, Quinn's wife. Quinn's grandparents have a place in Alton, and have apparently shopped our store before. Steve's enthusiastic welcome led to a possibility that Quinn himself might find time to stop by. He's hanging in the area before heading up to the world championships in Montreal.

Friday got off to a normal start for one of the last days of astronomical summer. Daylight still hanging just above twelve hours. The morning comes on gradually, but the middle of the day is still bright with strong sunshine. Rental bikes went out, late-summer tourists came in. Around noon, Steve settled in for a bit of lunch. About fifteen minutes into it he saw Quinn's grandparents pull into a parking space in the lot out back. He came out of the back shop as they reached the top of the stairs.

"The package is arriving," said the grandmother. At the same time, the entire Simmons family came in through the front door of the shop, having ridden in from Alton. Steve and his wife Beth welcomed them. Steve was an enthusiastic and well-informed fan. A local man, Ed, who is active with the Wolfeboro Cross Country Ski Association and who was going to travel to Montreal to watch the men's road race, happened to be in the store at the same time. Thus, a chatty and appreciative crowd filled the other side of the shop.

I had a time-sensitive job on the repair stand, and would just have been a slack-jawed yokel adding a heavy dose of awkwardness standing in the background, so I stayed in my greasy lair and enjoyed the sounds of the party. Then I had to launch a renter. Eventually the entourage filtered over to the other part of the sales floor and I got to see Quinn himself. I tried to look affable but virtuously busy. No point going over and embarrassing myself and dampening the spirits of the revelers.

Even when I raced I wasn't a well-informed fan of the sport. I wasn't even well informed about my fellow competitors. I respected the great and the near great, I just didn't keep track of them. As for the equipment they use, Quinn and the whole professional world are using tubeless tires, disc brakes, and electronic shifting on soulless carbon machines that may be lighter and more aerodynamic than any round-tubed product of a master metal fabricator, but they're sterile and vulnerable. They make sense in the racing world, but they isolate the racing world from the rest of the world by their expense.

I've said it before, mostly in jest: In the early 1970s, for $300 you could buy a bike just like the one that the winner of the Tour de France just rode, and for another $300 you could rent that rider for a one-day crit. The first part is mostly true. The second part exaggerates the low salary range for European pro riders, but for an American rider it was probably painfully close to the truth. And $300 in 1975 is equal to almost $1,900 dollars today. That seems like a lot until you price a top-tier road racing bike today and see that a piddly-ass $1,900 won't get you crap. It's a great metaphor for the wealth inequality that has surged in that same span of years. You really could buy a very respectable road bike for a few hundred (1970s) dollars. If you knew how to do your own work, you could piece together something competitive without having to buy any specific company's complete gruppo. I did, and the only things that held me back were my sporadic training and my complete lack of balls in a tight criterium. All of my bloody crashes happened in stupid ways in the outside world.

By 1979-1980, that $300 bike was a thousand dollars. I heard rumors of one amateur racer who lived in a storage unit when he wasn't on the road, living out of his car. He could afford a car? Maybe not much of a car. It's like musician economics: $10,000 instrument, $500 car. Hope you make it to the gig. A $1,200 bike in 1980 would cost about $4,500 today, still well short of the spaceships ridden in the pro ranks.

With all that separates a professional racer from a civilian now, Quinn's generosity in visiting stands out. On the one hand, cycling in the US is still such a fringe sport that a bike racer might be happy to soak up some adulation where they find it. On the other hand, he was in the final week of timing his training and honing his mind to face a pretty sadistic course against the best racers in the world. I looked at the course profile online. The spirit of Desgrange lives on in course designers everywhere. I used to think it was sad when a professional racer retired and got rid of all of their bikes. But it makes sense after putting in mind and body crushing efforts for years that a person might be happy never to throw a leg across a bike again after that. Racing at the top level is truly a great way to grind all the fun out of riding.

Modern bike technology makes a hard job easier, but only in tiny increments that get overwhelmed by the closer competition over courses that are still brutal. Racers no longer have to be smooth and accurate at shifting in friction, using levers on the downtube. Downtube shifters were preferred because the cable run was the shortest and the shifters were protected. Short cable runs meant faster response at the derailleurs. Protection meant that the controls weren't exposed to crash damage. But you had to reach down for them, and develop the precision of a classical violinist to hit the right spot consistently on the first try.

When Shimano brifters debuted in 1990, observers wondered about their vulnerability. I don't remember which of the women in the 1992 Olympic road race was featured in the television coverage, probably Inga Thompson, but she crashed and bent the right brifter. It apparently still functioned, but it demonstrated the vulnerability. Now it's all electronic, with multiple control points distributed on the handlebars. Heck, you could even have them in the saddle. Flex left glute to shift up, right glute to shift down. By 2030, racers will have a brain implant so they can shift by thinking about it. Bike shops will become authorized outpatient surgical centers to drop the wiring into the skulls of the most enthusiastic technolemmings.

"I ain't never done one of these before! You sit there and wait for the sedative to take effect while I watch this YouTube video so I know where to drill! Hey Bob! Wash your hands! I need an anesthesiologist over here!"

With all of the technology, nutrition, and logistical support, racing is still brutally hard. More is expected of the riders because these other burdens have been lifted from them. They can propel their lightweight bikes almost as fast as a responsible driver in a suburban neighborhood, but they're still doing it with a human's puny 0.25 horsepower. That's point two-five. A quarter of a horsepower. I guess the pros have managed to push that to 0.4, but that's still a tiny fraction of the average 170-200 hp of a basic family car. With the challenge of the world championship coming up, Quinn was extraordinarily kind to spend time with a few fans. We all appreciated it.

Repair or replace? Beyond mere dollars

 Every so often, we get a customer who is shocked by the price of a repair after they acted perfectly unconcerned as they piled up part and service requests at the check-in. Because a detailed estimate takes time that we typically do not charge for, it is not standard procedure unless a customer expresses misgivings when they drop a bike off.

We all ask ourselves whether to repair or replace an item when it malfunctions. As a service provider, we get asked all the time whether a bike is worth it. Or we get asked for an estimate, give it, and the customer decides on their own whether to invest.

If you pay someone else to work on your bike, you might very well spend more than you paid for it over the course of its time with you. Depending on the condition of it when you're done, someone else might start their own equation with it, based on what they pay for it, not what it was originally worth, or how long it might last with imaginative care and repair.

Last week, a customer dropped by to pick up a copy of the receipt from the repair she had commissioned for her son's bike. She was quite smiley and cheerful until the end when she turned dark and brittle and said, "This cost way more than I thought it was going to. If I'd known it was going to cost $265 I wouldn't have had it fixed. I could buy a new bike for $265."

I mentally reviewed the prices of entry-level bikes in our shop. She would not have been able to get a brand new bike shop quality bike for $265. She brought in an older Giant that her son had beaten on, the way boys do. It probably cost more than $265 when it was new. A comparable bike would cost more than $400, and probably more than $500. That comparison is tough, because the bike industry is pushing the frontiers of cheap crap on their lower end models. Direct comparison to a bike that hadn't advanced as far on the path of craptification is impossible because of how much has changed in both material quality and overall configuration. But, aiming for roughly the same niche, a replacement bike could be nudging $600, and would be less durable overall.

None of this conveys well to a customer whose brain has locked up in resentment. If I had informed her of the worst case scenario before the repair, she might have gone ahead with it or she might have made the mistake that so many consumers make when purchasing all manner of goods they need or desire. I've had to let customers decide to discard a really nice old bike that they got for twenty or fifty bucks just because they thought that more than a hundred was too much to spend based on what they paid for it. I mean a well-made bike from back when they were durable and repairable, but to the current owner just a dollar amount and an age. Likewise I have sympathetically tried to minimize the financial impact of reconditioning a less stellar specimen because the owner just really liked it.

Far more often than not, we do a quick assessment, get customer approval to install parts as necessary, and get on with fixing the damn thing as quickly as we can. In peak season, with our shriveled, elderly staff, we want to maximize productive time getting customers back on their bikes. This does lead to miscommunication like we had with our unfortunately resentful customer. On Yelp she stated that she felt ripped off.

I disagree. Inadequate communication of reasonably priced services is not a ripoff. The work was needed and well done. She gave verbal consent. The mistake was in not being super sensitive on the check-in, after we had been lulled by dozens of customers who make the same oral contract and abide calmly by the result. We have our haters, for sure. Now we have another one.

There is not a lot of nearby competition in the bike repair business. The nearest actual bike shops are across the lake -- which means around the lake by car -- or down in Rochester or Dover, roughly thirty miles or more in any direction. But there's a mobile guy who drives around in his big van. Maybe he has had better results with the time equation between diagnosis, estimate, and actual work, plus transit time. He has the advantage and disadvantage of mobility. Not a lot of storage space, though. For his sake, I hope his rig doesn't burn diesel.

Nearby competition or not, we have always relied on work quality rather than low price to keep a loyal customer base and build our reputation as problem solvers. As the bike industry has energetically added to everyone's problems, that aspect of our skill set has been harder and harder to maintain. But on the legacy stuff we are still rock solid and your ally in keeping a decent older bike going. I'm much more likely to tell someone whose bike is five years old to junk it than I am to declare that one thirty years old is hopeless. In fact, I will tell anyone who brings in a relatively new bike with multiple system failures to ditch it and look for something thirty years old in good shape. Options are dwindling as the industry kills them off, but you can still find parts to retrofit a newer bike to the older configuration. You just have to be willing to learn the skills of older riders to operate the more primitive machine. And you won't be doing trendy mountain biking or sporting the latest niche features of "category" bikes.

Another horny driver

 After a relatively placid summer on the road, I had another horny driver pass me yesterday, sounding the trumpet of doom from close behind me all the way by. As often happens, the driver actually gave me a fair amount of room. The windows were rolled up, so I don't know if anyone was also cursing me in there.

Many riders can't take the stress of riding among the megafauna. I don't prefer it, but I have no good alternatives. I'm also used to it after more than half a century of it. I started as a road rider when I was seven years old. "Transportation cycling" was how a kid got anywhere in the 1960s. Working kids carried newspapers in the galvanized metal baskets clamped on their bikes. I never had a paper route, but my brother did.

As a child I had heard of "bike paths," but never experienced one. The first designated bike path I ever saw was in the Miami, Florida, area in 1971. And it was notoriously dangerous: just a strip of tar that crossed streets and driveways right where a motorist would want to hover before entering a busy roadway. Collisions were numerous, some of them fatal. When I graduated from my innocent childhood wandering on a three-speed to more focused cycling on a ten-speed, I learned from more experienced riders to avoid the dangerous, token infrastructure.

Over the decades, offerings for cyclists have evolved. I have ridden on many forms of trail and lane. I've noticed a few things. For one, it's a tough transition when I've been riding on a segregated path suddenly to have to blend with traffic. You have to have a combat-ready attitude, whether you consciously believe it or not. Another thing you don't get on a path is the continuous draft provided by passing motor vehicles. It is much more helpful than you realize until you don't have it for mile after mile.

One quirk of rail trails is that they tend to have long straight stretches and only mild curves. Nobody wanted their train snapping quick turns. Boredom is a serious problem for the cyclist.

Other trail users are also a problem. Bike paths seldom offer as much width as a road, and people tend to ride with less alertness and discipline when they aren't flanked by large vehicles that could obliterate them in an instant. I can't imagine a world in which there is a designated, efficient bike space appended to every roadway. If cyclists are restricted to dedicated infrastructure and eventually barred from routes that don't have accommodations, transportation and travel by bike will suffer as a result.

Thinking of touring, a cyclist can ride to virtually all of the enjoyable destinations currently served by general purpose roads. The risk factor varies widely with traffic volume, filtered through local motorist attitudes. Some places seem to have a lot of bike hate. Others not so much. Where I ride on a daily basis, outright hostility is fairly low. It ramps up when I push the commute into darkness, and shows a few seasonal waves, most notably when school goes back into session. That used to bring not only direct action by motorists but an increase in broken glass. Both have diminished. I don't get three feet of passing clearance from a lot of drivers, but I see little direct aggression.

You never hear the shot that kills you. I don't assume that conditions will remain placid. Because I ride as fast as my physical condition will allow, I may blend with traffic better than I will as my powers inevitably dwindle to the point where I can do no more than poke along. The law gives me the right to poke, but the law isn't riding with me, shouldering aside any potential attackers. I'll be a sitting duck. Will I get fed by onlookers who think I'm cute or chased off because I foul the beaches? It would be unsporting to shoot me.

Tubeless tires are like cancer

 Tubeless tires are like cancer: I hope no one gets them especially anyone close to me. I hope that anyone who has them gets rid of them and never gets them again. Some lifestyle factors increase susceptibility. As someone who heals the sick among bikes, I have to figure out how to deal with the incurable cases even as I do my best to eradicate it in the patients who can be saved.

As with every other metastatic technological tumor in the bike industry, tubeless has mutated a lot since the old UST days first thrust it into the marketplace. As something that did not interest me in the least from the outset, I have tried to ignore it as much as possible, except to counsel against it at every opportunity. This I continue to do. However, some people just won't quit their vices. It makes them feel good! It's worth whatever it costs them! Shut up, we're fine, leave us alone!

What gets me are the innocent victims. They're like downwinders from old nuclear weapon testing grounds. Yay, the bomb makes us mighty and the explosions are stupendous to watch! Now the kids all have bone cancer.  Sheeyit. Riders who know no better than the latest gushing write-ups on one site or another are enveloped in the toxic cloud of misplaced confidence and addicted braggadocio. We're all doin' this stuff! Pack your nose with it! Or marinade your liver.

"Keep it up and that stuff'll kill you."

"Shut up, I can handle it."

Or maybe, "It's too late for me. I can't quit it." And the disease takes them.

Today I discovered another gap in my education when some poor idiot dragged his bike into the shop around 12:45. El Queso Grande had finished his lunch. I looked forward to starting mine. Instead, I responded to the entreaty of this vacationing mountain biker who couldn't get his rear tire to inflate properly.

"I only have a hand pump," he said. The bike had been sitting for a while, long enough for air pressure to drop on its own, as it does. The front tire bead was still seated, but the rear had broken loose at least partially. I could see smears of sealant in places on the tire sidewall and on the rim. I could hear it on the brake rotor, too. Either that or the chronic Shimano mist that afflicts some of their brake models, leading to raucous squeals. But that didn't concern him. We both theorized that, if the tire and rim setup was operable I would be able to seat the bead with the compressor.

"That's the thing about tubeless," I said. "If it's not totally perfect, you're totally fucked."

With the compressor, I got the beads to snap into place and the gauge to rise to 35 psi. Air whooshed into the rim as the tire rapidly deflated. It wasn't perfect. It was very fucked. When I pulled the bead back to look into the rim I could see that most of the rim tape had pulled away from the edges and collected in a wrinkly wad in the center channel of the rim. Not only would this never hold air, the sealant all over the well of the rim and inside the spoke holes meant that drying it sufficiently to install new tape to tubeless standards would require possibly days of drying after cleaning. Any little sealant ninjas inside the rim would attack the tape from beneath. Sealant is the biggest weakness of tubeless unless you have a solid-floor rim that doesn't depend on the glue bond of tape in a constantly wet environment.

When I showed the customer the mess, he readily agreed to have me put a tube in so he could salvage the rest of the day. I was hungry, but I was already covered with sealant, so I figured finishing the job would be better than making the guy wait while I shoved a sandwich down my gullet without even chewing it. It's just a tube job.

It was more than a tube job. The tire itself had about two ounces of sealant still in a puddle, plus another ounce or more spread all over the inside of the casing. There was also a stupendous "dead leech" of dried sealant adhering to the casing where it had sat for however many weeks or months the guy didn't ride the bike. That's another thing in the fine print about tubeless: If you're not going to be riding the bike for a few weeks, you are advised to remove the tires, and clean and dry both the tires and the rim. Hang the tires separately. When you are ready to ride again, remount the tires with fresh sealant. Hope it works. Forget just grabbing a quick ride on a nice day. Most people don't do that, which is how you get a dried lump of sealant like a dead hamster at the bottom of your tire.

I would have pictures to go with this, but my phone is too full of pictures of my cats. Every time I take a picture now, the phone barrages me for days with notifications to sign up for the cloud and put my pictures there. Actually, here's a lump from earlier this year. This one looked like cat puke.

Anyway, after I had mopped out as much sealant as I could, rinsed the casing with water, and blown it dry with compressed air, it wasn't dry, but it wasn't dripping anymore, either. I inserted the tube in the casing and began remounting the tire.

The first bead went on okay, but the second bead kept coming back off as I tried to work it on around the circumference of the rim. I finally managed to fight it all the way on. Time to inflate it. Tubeless tires make very scary noises as they seat, because the tire bead needs to snap into the little shelf designed to help underinflated tires stay on the rim as a rider goes over various lumps and bumps. Mountain bikers run the lowest pressures and go over the biggest lumps, followed by gravel riders. Roadies generally operate on the smoothest surfaces, but not always. They tend to run the highest pressures, or the least low, given that tubeless is designed around running low pressures compared to how we used to go. 

You can't go by the pressure range that the tire manufacturer puts on the sidewall. On certain rims, like those monumentally stupid hookless ones, or carbon rims in general, you'll be picking tire bits out of your eyebrows and digging carbon shrapnel out of your face if you get anywhere close to the pressure range that the tire casing itself will withstand on a hook-bead, alloy rim. Which brings us to today's new-to-me information about Stan's rims.

As I tried to seat the bead on the tire I had just mounted, I could feel the finish line and almost taste my delicious lunch, just as soon as I could get that last stubborn bit of bead to pop out to where it was supposed to be. On every other tubeless setup I had mounted -- and, much as I hate them, it has been dozens by this time -- I had done what mechanics have always done, and what the instructions often say: seat the bead by going to the top pressure and then let air out after the tire fully seats. This tire said 60 psi on the sidewall. 

Words fail to describe the blast that hit my ears as the tire let go and the tube disintegrated. The word blast takes too long to say, but bang is too insipid. It certainly got the attention of everyone in the building.

 I could hear and speak, but everything sounded like I had a plastic bucket over my head. I was ready to give up on the project, and the customer, who had been right outside the workshop when the tire blew, was also ready to surrender. But then El Queso Grande -- who had already eaten his goddamn lunch at least an hour earlier by this time -- came around the corner to ask reprovingly whether there wasn't something I could do to salvage the situation.

My first impulse was to slam the wheel repeatedly on the edge of the bench until it was a complete wreck and then hurl it out into the parking lot. But it wasn't the poor technolemming customer's fault that tubeless sucks and Stan's rims suck. What I really wanted to do was slam the designer's head against the bench a few times. Instead, I dug around for a tire. 

Around this time I found the teeny tiny print on the rim that said "do not inflate above 38 psi under any circumstances." Information that could stand to be more prominently displayed. But I guess the cool kids love to read up on this shit. Actually, when I typed "Stan's rims suck" into Google, I got lots of hits corroborating that, for a number of different reasons, including the ridiculously tiny bead area that releases tires explosively if you exceed the low low pressures they set as the maximum. They ain't kidding!

I got the tire on and started to turn toward my long-awaited lunch when El Queso Grande brought me the pedals the guy had bought while he was waiting for the tire job. One more hurdle before that sandwich. His old SPDs were pretty well graunched into the cranks, because of course they were.

So now I know about Stan's rims and their violent allergy to what should be perfectly acceptable tire pressures. Ever more appropriate that Stan's is based in Big Flats, NY. Big, explosive flats. Next time I have a patient with those rims on top of every other tubeless complication, I'll know what I should have known already from obsessive compulsive media consumption about all things bikey. This line of work doesn't pay nearly well enough to justify the need for continuing education like this. Meanwhile "safer than the road" mountain biking just sent another local rider to the hospital for more than a quick in-and-out at the ER. I haven't heard whether his collapsed lung has reinflated yet. This is an expensive damn sport.

Coming up in the near future: Riding that saves you money versus riding that costs you money.

My hearing recovered quite a bit by the end of the day, but certain pitches triggered weird harmonics and overtones. Then on the ride home the wind noise did really strange things. If I have to go to an audiologist, it is absolutely a worker's comp claim.