Do you want to be in good shape, or do you want to be a bike racer?

 Trainee David has signed up for delayed entry recruitment into the Navy. He'll be a senior in high school this year, but decided he'd like not just a job, but an adventure. So now he's learning a lot about how he measures up to other recruits, and about military organization.

Here's a kid who can hold his own on a sponsored junior team, who has been racing since he was 12. He's not a star, but he's a solid team rider, following a disciplined and supervised training program to compete in bicycle racing. He prefers cyclocross, but he's done quite a bit of road racing and has raced mountain bikes as well to round out his experience. But he falls short in PT tests because of his complete lack of upper body strength.

Climbing specialists, time trialers and competitors in long road races end up with shoulders like a cat. No need for brawny arms and broad shoulders when you're trying to reduce frontal area and put maximum power to the legs.

When I dabbled in racing, off-season training meant something off the bike. Some people speed skated. Some people weight trained. Some people did that weird cross-country skiing thing where you could actually ski uphill. Only a few people that I knew of could or would go to a warm place where they could stay on the bike all year. Others experimented with new indoor training devices like the RacerMate. And I mean the original RacerMate, with no electronic devices, just a couple of squirrel cage fans that provided resistance against a roller that pressed on the rear tire when your bike was clamped in a stand. It was the original wind trainer.

It wasn't supposed to be good for you to do just the one thing. Obsessive training has become more commonplace these days, but you can mess yourself up pretty well if all you ever do is ride in some form or another.

David has gotten a few pointers from our resident climber/former ropes course builder/former power lifter and trainer Sam. As a teenager, he can command his body to do something different and see immediate improvement. He's already gone from "Oh my god, pushups are hard!" to counting off by the dozen. And he was already working on core strength as part of his cycling regimen.

Never an obsessive trainer, I would usually lose interest in the bike racing season right after the district championships. I would still "train" as an excuse to go on long rides almost every day, but I didn't really enjoy most of the actual racing. Throwing elbows with a bunch of testosterone-saturated lunatics didn't appeal to me that much. I just liked having a nice bike and riding kind of fast. But if you say you're a competitive athlete it sounds a little less wimpy and aimless. Or so I hoped, anyway.

Riding around the countryside fit in with a generally exploratory curiosity. That led me to backpacking, rock climbing, various boats propelled with paddles, and cross-country skiing, which led to New England. In any season, a wanderer can find a way to find out "what's over there?" by a human powered means. Faced with the example of my parents, who lived normal, productive adult lives in modern civilization, and therefore got fat and spent much of the time unhappy about it, I figured that no matter what happened I wanted to stay in motion. Civilized society wants you to throw yourself into deterioration for the sake of the economy. Embrace that decay! Whoever works the longest hours wins! Your life should destroy you either because it makes you sit at a desk too much or beats you to death with grueling toil. Either way, if you're not well on the way to disability by the time you're in your 40s you've been slacking off.

As I paid attention to other responsibilities, my activity had dwindled to mostly just bike commuting. The kayaks hung from the rafters, ready to be lowered onto the car, but never used. They became dance halls for mice. Once in a while we might use them. For a while it wasn't too bad, but then came the day when they suddenly seemed a lot heavier than they used to be. Use it or lose it. I looked in the mirror and saw those cat shoulders. That warning propelled me back to the free weights and exercises to see how little I could get away with and still regain the ability to lift and lug things.

Cross-country skiing no longer provides. When we had the shop at Jackson Ski Touring, I made sure that everyone who wanted to get out got to tag out during the best part of the day to taste what we were selling and keep enthusiasm high. The shop opened right onto the groomed track, so transitions were instantaneous. This is not true in Wolfe City. We are operating with minimal staff, and the nearest trail access is still a short drive from the shop. Tag outs are rare, and temperature conditions make night skiing after work treacherous as things freeze up after sundown. In the morning, it's hard to get organized and get to town early enough for a meaningful workout before shop hours. So I basically just get fat and irritable. I even wrote a song about it called "Snacking out of boredom and depression." We'll see if minimal indoor training keeps me more or less together for the eventual return of spring.

When gentle exploration seemed like a good example to set, it felt more worthwhile. Now it seems like the time would have been better spent on direct political activism and preparing for the bloody time that will follow the collapse of civilization when that political activism failed anyway. Oh well. Live and learn.

The Fart Strip on Route 28

 A few years ago, NHDOT installed a rumble strip on the center line of Route 28. Any time motor vehicle tires hit it, a sharp, buzz-saw noise warned drivers that they were straying out of their lane. After the initial shock wore off, riders learned to like the sound, because it audibly indicated that a driver had moved over to give us room. The only remaining drawback for a transient rider was the collection of rainwater, which would then blow up in a gritty mist as vehicles passed during and after rainfall, but what can you do? At least they left the shoulder alone.

This summer, they repaved a long stretch, from about the Ossipee town line all the way in to where Center Street starts to look more like a street than a road. In the process, they obliterated the old rumble strip. I knew it was controversial with residents. It was audible miles away, let alone for people with houses right on Route 28 or in the neighborhoods close by. Maybe they'd done away with it.

They took so long to stripe the new blacktop that I started to think they would have to repave it again before they got around to painting it. A frugal Yankee, I also expected that they would cut their rumble strip, if any, before painting the centerline. Why waste paint if you're just going to cut it away? So, when they finally put the lines down, I took it to mean there would be no rumble strip. But no: the very next day they cut the rumble strip. Your tax dollars at work! I did realize that the line gave the strip cutters an exact guide, so it served a purpose, but it still seemed extravagant. I had recently returned from a brief and hectic road trip to the south on roads where the stripes were pale ghosts of their former selves, barely discernible in the night. To waste a bright yellow centerline seemed decadent.

They cut the rumble strip during the day while I was at work, so I didn't experience it until I was headed home. The first thing I noticed was all the residual grit. The crew had run a sweeper, which left occasional mounds of debris on the shoulder, but it also left quite a bit of stuff in the strip itself, where conscientious motorists could fling it into the air as they gave me the requisite space. And the strip itself was eerily silent. I attributed it to the clogging action of the leftover grit. But the next day, with much of the grit now distributed across the margins of the road and any hapless cyclists who had been riding by, the strip was still curiously quiet. Passing vehicles delivered a noise like a low fart.

As humorous as a fart strip is, it does not provide the audible alert that the old shrill screamer did. But I'm not complaining. I'm sure that humans and animals alike will rest easier with the milder noise.

 I have yet to drive 28 with the fart strip. The weather was fine for my first week back from my highway haul, and I was just as happy to spend the days out of the car, even though I was pretty depleted by the end of it. The jobs that had piled up while I was away were all the kind of frustrating and unsatisfying problems of finicky technological horseshit that leave me tired from all the various treasure hunts attendant to them. When something does work, it seldom conveys a triumphant confidence that it will stay that way. And since absolutely none of it attracts me, I can't even admire it. I climb gratefully aboard my steel bike with friction shifting and (OMG!) a triple crank, and plod home.

The Elm Street bridge opened late Monday afternoon. From my house I heard the work site go quiet, so I slipped over through the woods to a vantage point above the intersection. There it was, clear and deserted. I kept expecting an accident as motorists going by suddenly jammed on the brakes because they noticed that they didn't have to keep going miles out of their way. It would have been ironic if they'd caused a pileup and blocked the bridge.

The Woman with Exploding Nipples

 It could happen to anyone with a low-spoke-count, highly tensioned wheel with trendy alloy nipples. They start popping without warning. This customer had come in a couple of times already for single incidents of nipple failure.

This rear wheel had 27 spokes: nine on the left side, 18 on the right. The rims were a little deep, but not hard to work with. Weird-looking wheels are part of what makes a bike look modern.

To begin, I had to remove the tire. Because it wasn't a punctured tire, I went to remove it without tools. When I pushed down on the wheel to work the bead around, another nipple exploded. I called the customer to let her know we were going to do a complete nipple transplant, not just an individual replacement.

On the stand, two more nipples popped when I put a wrench on them to start loosening them. This wheel had been a real time bomb. Imagine ripping down a bumpy descent when one spoke after another detaches from the rim.

Fortunately, the diameter and thread on the bladed spokes matched the DT brass nipples I was planning to use. And the low spoke count made the swap less time consuming. I would never ride a low-count wheel myself, but I appreciate the time I save on jobs like this.

This has also been the Summer of Forgotten Through Axles. We've had several in a row. A rider calls up and asks if we have through axles in stock. We explain that there are different kinds (of course). They're not sure of the brand and type. We figure it out. We had one kicking around from a previous customer's special order that they then declined to pick up. We've accumulated one or two more, to try to cover some of the possibilities.

Next up on the list of modern problems, a mother and daughter had to forgo their bike ride because they had forgotten the keys to their ebikes, turning them into nothing more than immensely heavy regular pedal bikes. You can just ride them that way. It's a common claim in the advertising. But who would? No one, actually, unless they get caught out with a dead battery and have no one to call to pick them up.

Problems like this are right up there with forgetting the charger for your shifters. If you have electronic derailleurs and a dead battery, you got nothin'. 

There's still plenty of good old abuse and neglect to keep us busy. I figured out that the handlebar tape on these bars was about 15 years old when I removed it the other day.

The bars themselves were old enough and had been through enough rough use that I recommended replacement. The last bars I saw that had that much salt and oxidation encrusting them had been on a bike that had lived in Singapore for a year or two. Those bars were so deteriorated that I could poke a screwdriver right through them. These bars were nowhere near that level of deterioration, but still a risk according to most manufacturer recommendations. Better to be safe. It also gave us a good opportunity to put on a much shorter stem for the new rider of the bike.

Accidents will happen. One of the local ebike aficionados took a digger on their chunky steed. The owner called to see if we would work on it. To make it easier, he had contacted the president of the company that made the bike to hook us up with a direct pipeline to parts and advice. With clout like that, ebike ownership is smooth sailing indeed. When a bike weighs upwards of 60 pounds, it hits the ground with more force than a bike weighing less than 30. It also hits a rider with more force, should you happen to get on the wrong side of things as they're going every which way. The rider was apparently not hurt badly enough to be worth mentioning, so that's good. I was just musing about it as I looked at what was scuffed and tweaked.

The trickiest part will be replacing the battery case, which is cleverly inserted into the welded rear rack on this Pedego bike. It has thick cabling inserted into it, and has an irregular shape that does not appear to slide easily out of either end of the framework of the rack. The screws that hold it in place broke loose when the bike crashed, because they were never designed to restrain such a heavy piece of equipment in an impact at an angle. The good news is that the owner of the bike doesn't need it fixed instantaneously. We can put it off for at least a week or two before getting mired in its complexities.

Old reliable no more

Shifting problems barely existed before the invention of indexed shifting. Now they're a regular annoyance for riders in all categories.

In my private war to eliminate 4-millimeter shift housing, inline cable adjusters have been a reliable ally. But the bike industry has finally figured out how to mess that up.

For years, 4mm housing used thick-walled ferrules that made the ends fit into the 5mm cable stops commonly in use. Because of this, it was easy to substitute 5mm housing to reduce friction in a system that was getting erratic.

Because mechanical indexed shifting relies on perfect cable tension, shifting systems included fine tuners in the form of barrel adjusters somewhere in the cable run for all rear -- and most front -- derailleurs. Lately, barrel adjusters have become a necessity for front shifting because the indexing requires higher tension than you can get just by pulling on the cable as hard as you can when you hook it up.

At the same time as shifting systems have evolved a need for super high tension, the trend to run all the cables inside the frame has led to systems that can only use 4mm housing, because the cable stops are holes built into the frame and do not accommodate -- or need -- a ferrule. However, with inline adjusters I could reduce the 4mm section to the bare minimum needed to enter the frame, and put 5mm from the shifter to the adjuster. With ferrules on the housing, 4mm could go in one end, and 5mm in the other. So the bike industry introduced 4mm adjusters that take naked housing with no ferrule. But they still made the 5mm adjusters as they did before. I could sub in a whole new adjuster.

Not anymore. The last 5mm adjusters I ordered in blissful confidence were sized for 5mm housing without ferrules.

Linear-wire shift housing has always needed a strong ferrule on each end to keep the stiff wires from poking through under the pressure of the shift cable tightening. We used to see ferrule failure a lot in the cheesy plastic ferrules on 4mm housing. The extruding wires would burrow into the shifter, making shifting maddeningly inconsistent, and sometimes even damaging the mechanism. That has gradually faded away as we see more metal 4mm ferrules and perhaps some reformulated plastic that is less prone to punch through. But that does not do away with the problem of drag from the skinny housing. The skinny housing is often applied over thicker cables with coatings that are supposed to make them slide better, but usually end up turning into lint in there.

The answer has always been 5mm housing and a 1.1mm stainless slick shift wire with no coatings of any kind. That's it. No secret formulas, no chemical agents, just the largest available housing with the skinniest available cable. And now you can't have it. As cassettes get more crowded and spacing between cogs gets smaller, smaller deviations make a noticeable difference. The bike industry once again makes riding less convenient and more expensive.

The road less traveled, more traveled

The work crew on the Elm Street bridge shows up earlier now, but not consistently. Wednesday I got through, but they were on site on Thursday morning, so I sprinted on toward the Pine River State Forest without hesitation.

This was only my second time through since the end of the 1990s, but it already felt familiar again. Still under-gunned on the spindly bike, I was making the best of it when a voice behind me startled me. A mountain biker on modern equipment announced that he was passing. We exchanged pleasant greetings as I pulled aside to let him go. He vanished quickly.

On the other side of the bridge, I took the low road and geared down early. The trail hit its first steep climb and I didn't even try to stay on. It leveled out a bit above that before hitting the real climb. Ahead of me on that, I saw the mountain biker on foot, pushing his own bike. I was actually gaining on him. But he hit the crest first. He was long gone by the time I reached the top about 30 seconds later. Mountain bike plus gravity equals speed.

The enemy of traction

A Long Haul Trucker might handle the trail better, particularly in the 54cm that I would ride, with its 26-inch wheels. The Trucker has a more laid-back head angle and no toe overlap, so it's less easily disrupted by the uneven surface. It's funny how small a rock can create a big jolt, like when you're digging a hole in the glacial soil around here and the shovel clanks with a wrist-numbing impact against what has to be a huge ledge, only to disclose a rock smaller than a lime. But I've said before that the Cross Check is very good at a lot of things, and was never meant for rough trails. It gets by.

These forest excursions are putting a hurt on my Diadoras. My regular kicks are fairly smooth soled, meant for the finer things in life. With this in mind, for Friday morning I put an old pair of mountain bike shoes in the woodshed. Because it would take only a minute or two to check the bridge, I figured I could start in my Diadoras and nip back for the more rugged footwear if the news was bad. And it was.

These date from the twilight of the toeclip era, so they have a tapered toe and a streamlined sole without a bulky rand. They don't protect as well from lateral rock strikes, but they slip into the strap easily and feel more secure when snugged in.

The sole has outlined areas to cut out for an SPD-style cleat. I never cut them out, but one broke loose and fell out on its own. I had to replace it with the screw-in cover that came on later models much more adapted to step-in pedals, assuming that the rider would go that route.

The plate protrudes slightly. It's a little bit slick to walk on, and pushes my toe uncomfortably into the clip after a while. But the shoes are a better choice than beating up the Diadoras, and they were surprisingly satisfactory on the road portion. Without that unfortunate damage to the sole I would have used them more consistently. Good luck finding anything well adapted to toeclip use anymore.

I've written before about the advantages of the humble and discarded toeclip. To recap briefly: clips and straps allow a rider to be connected with varying degrees of firmness. Fully tightened, straps transmit the most power. Straps loosened still provide some security and power transfer while permitting easier escape. A clip and strap system accommodates a variety of footwear. It is less convenient to get in and out of than flats or a step-in system, but neither of those provides the intermediate levels of connection, and step-ins only work well with their intended shoes.

The road less traveled is becoming a trade route. But in the evenings I still get to breeze through Elm Street, more or less.

Where they've dug out the rusted expansion joint, the trench is so deep and wide that you have to climb down through it. The surface with the rebar sticking up provides sketchy footing. But who's complaining, when no one is supposed to be going through there anyway? It's on me to leave no trace.

Another day, another bike I'd never heard of

It was too new for Classic Rendezvous, but still from the "screwed and glued" aluminum era. Its worn decals seemed to say Prism, but a web search on Prism bikes, bicycles, cycles turned up nothing that resembled it.

Little letters on the frame and fork said SR Litage. That seeming subtitle brought up the bike and its kin from the late 1980s.

 Componentry said early 1990s to me. Later the owner told me she got this one in 1993. That headset looks particularly annoying to adjust and keep set. Crap like that is a large part of what made threadless headsets seem like a good idea. I was glad that the bike wasn't in for a full tune. It only had a shifter problem with the 8-speed Campagnolo Ergopower brifters. They were jammed.

The bike had a weird mix of parts: Campy drive train and rear hub, Shimano Ultegra brakes from back when they still said "600," and that Mavic headset. ITM bars. The rear brake cable enters the frame, but the housing is continuous. Shift cables are external. Shift housing stops are mounted to downtube shifter bosses.

I figured that the shifters had jammed because the index springs had broken and fragments had wedged in the ratchet rings. I detached the cables from the derailleurs to see if I could free anything up. The shifters then pulled the cable perfectly well, with no crunching or excessive play. Maybe the derailleurs themselves were stuck.

Nope. I could move them easily by hand.

I reconnected the cables and everything worked perfectly. So I test rode the bike. It didn't want to shift to the big ring. Then it dropped the chain inside, where it stuck behind the tabs on the inner ring. I carried the bike back inside to pull the crank and extricate the chain. This led me to discover that the bottom bracket was unscrewing itself. An early cartridge model, as it migrated to the right it pulled the left side in after it. The cartridge never felt loose as the crank migrated sideways away from the front derailleur.

It hadn't gone far enough inside to pull the left crank arm against the chainstay on the way around.

An exploded view in one of our old Campy parts catalogs showed the Athena bottom bracket with what look like serrated washers that are supposed to go in the cups on either side. I would presume that these are supposed to enhance the grip of these unflanged cups against the cartridge with the bearings in it so that they can be securely torqued into the bottom bracket shell. The axle also measured shorter than the triple crank supposedly requires, but the chain line was almost too far out, even with the BB restored to its proper position. I torqued it as securely as I could. The only way to get those missing washers would be with a time machine.

In eternity, all nows are equal. Every moment exists and could be reached if we were not stuck experiencing time in a linear flow. I think of this every time I look through our old Quality catalogs at all the componentry I wish I'd stocked up on.

If I had needed to open up the shifters I would have removed them from their clamps and worked on them off the bike rather than unwrap the bars and lose the vintage Celeste green cork wrap. Even if it didn't have aggressive adhesive backing, so I could get it off without shredding it, it never lines up exactly the same. The shifters seemed miraculously cured, as if they were only trying to get the rider to bring the bike in to have the bottom bracket apprehended before it escaped completely. If they malfunction again, we do keep index springs on hand. Campy being Campy, they still use the same springs in the same basic design.

The cyclist advantage, sort of

The Elm Street bridge project has developed complications.

The Little Dig is going to last longer than expected. No word yet on whether it will also go way over budget. As a taxpayer in a poor rural town I certainly hope we're getting the bulk of the money from a federal program that spreads the load over millions of people across the country, any one of whom would be grateful to find a passable bridge should they ever drive through here.

The bridge remains usable for a cyclist, as long as you can get yourself over the gap.

Try that with your 70-pound ebike.

I was in a bit of a panic because the news of the delay came a day or two after I informed the Board of Selectmen and the state department of environmental services that the work crew appeared to be doing little to control debris. The shore beneath the bridge was covered with concrete dust and chunks of broken concrete, some of them fairly large. As I said in my notes to the town government and the state agency, I don't know whether this is considered an official problem. I just wanted to know, as a resident and a member of the town's conservation commission, whether the job was meeting applicable regulations to protect the river. The work site is also immediately above where I test the river every two weeks for a local environmental organization. If I had done anything to delay the reopening of the bridge, I could be sure that my house would be set on fire within a day or two. Imagine my relief when I found out that the problem was in the bridge, not from some frog-kissing do-gooder making a fuss about some artificial rocks landing among the wildflowers.

I did not have that assurance when I set out on Friday morning and discovered that the work crew had started much earlier than they've been showing up. On Thursday I had driven the dirt route through the Pine River State Forest to Granite, just to check it out. It's 17.7 miles as opposed to the usual 14 and change. It also includes a couple of stiff climbs on soft dirt and gravel, well rumpled by speeding motorists who have been using it during the bridge closure. It was still a shorter and better option than the Big Zig. Metaphorically I turned up my collar and slunk past Elm Street, hoping that no one noticed me.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there's another option in the PRSF as well: a snow machine trail. Because the junction is probably less than a mile into the dirt section, I figured it would save me some time even if I had to walk for half of it. Because there was still a gate and a trail sign, I figured it was okay that I hadn't brought my machete.

The road to Granite

The trail to adventure

  

The trail started out promisingly enough. The Cross Check isn't a great technical trail bike, being a tad steep and short for the real rough stuff, but that's not its main mission. It's a bike that will get you through a short stretch of the rough to connect to faster traveling surfaces.

Because I would only have to do this route on the morning half of a commute, most of it is downhill anyway. The surface is packed sand, held in place by some hardy grass -- except where it isn't. The ruts on the flatter bits and mild slopes were soft enough to make the bike wallow a little. On steeper slopes, the glacial till emerged: various-sized rocks, mostly rounded. Some larger embedded boulders or bits of ledge would have been no challenge for a mountain bike, even one from ancient times, with a rigid frame and fork and 26X2-ish tires. And, with gravity on my side, I just had to find the sweet speed to flow through it with only a few sudden swerves and dabs when the front tire dropped into a soft spot.

The river looked cool and peaceful.

On the other side of the river, the trail split. I remembered the old route that climbed up onto the esker behind the gravel pit there. I could hear the machinery of the pit. The trail had been rerouted along the base of the esker. Bearing in mind that I was already running behind schedule, I debated whether to take the easier new route. Snow machine riders are just out to have fun. They aren't on a schedule to get to a specific destination. This new section could meander all over the place, and maybe never emerge where the old route did. I needed to come out where the trail used to come out, so I could get onto Duncan Lake Road and out to Route 16 near Route 28. As bad as the old trail looked -- and it looked really bad -- I had to go that way.

The grade was a lot steeper and longer than I remembered. But then I remembered that I had almost always ridden the trail the other way, so I was descending this hell run. I do not know anyone who could have -- or would have -- ridden this climb. I dismounted and trudged over the washed out mess of rocks, overhung with tree branches. Even the fairly level top of the esker was hard to ride because of fallen trees and limbs, and slick rocks from the previous day's rain showers and the unending humidity of this summer.

The new route rejoined at the descent. The trail wasn't much better than the abandoned route, because the till underlies everything and emerges wherever the surface is disturbed.

At the bottom of this descent the trail joins a dirt road. On a mountain bike, take a left to stay on the technical trail. On the adventure commute, take a right to get to Duncan Lake Road.

 Back on the regular route it was the usual hammer to get to work. The total was just over 16 miles, and did cut out the unnecessary elevation gain going up to Granite and coming back down again, so it saved more than a mile and a half, and probably at least 15 minutes.

Elapsed time depends on how the motor is feeling that day. You don't use a bike for transportation in a rural area unless you really like riding. I love not having a car in Wolfeboro, but I work harder than the average person to get there. It certainly won't work for everyone. But as long as it works for me I'm saving a parking space for someone who needs it.