Weirdness, Hotness, and Bikeness

Cyclocross is about the inexplicable. It's hard to explain why we do it, how we come to love something so hard, or to relate to others all the unbelievable and weird things that happen during a race. For example... I was in the shower today removing four days worth of stubble from my legs. Being a large man, and a rouleur by trade, removing the undergrowth from my Texas-sized expanse of quadriceps is a major enterprise akin to clearcutting the Amazon. Somewhere south of my gut, and north of my knee, I noticed a strange racquetball-sized black spot on my right thigh. It seems that somebody hit me, hard, on Saturday. From the looks of it, somebody on my right ate shit and their handlebar plugged me square in the thigh. I recall seeing a pretty major tire cut on my left calf after the race and thinking somebody ran into me fairly hard. Is it possible that I rode through the scene of a major crash like a Hollywood hero running through the flames of a big explosion, and that I did not remember it? I remember being near crashes, and I vaguely remember having to do this enormous bunny hop on the first lap for some reason and feeling extremely pleased about having pulled it off, but I don't remember why I was forced to do that. Could I have forgotten about somebody plowing into me on the right, and somebody else going down hard on the left and mashing into my calf?

Yes. It's entirely possible. In fact it would be typical.

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Does anybody out there have some recipes for fresh Cayenne pepper? My son got me a nice gift of cayenne pepper seeds which we saw through germination and replanting. I'm now harvesting a dozen or twenty every couple days. Along with my flourishing jalepeno bush, it's starting to cause trouble. It's not just the ass-searing farts, the bleeding gums, and the desire to put "El" in front of every remotely masculine sounding noun I speak ("have you seen el Dog? where is el Shotgun? I want another el Beer!"), it's the sheer fright of looking at a growing pile of these peppers and not knowing what the hell I'm going do with them. So somebody, either volunteer to take a healthy bowl of them off my hands, or float me some good recipes for them. Please!

I'm also accepting recommendations for medicines to cool what appears to be a permanent state of inflammation of El Culo.

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I took the Wife of Rouleur out for a mountain bike ride on her new 29'er on Sunday, along with Son of Rouleur. She has been riding my slick old Kona Cinder Cone, but this was a transformative experience for her. The bike isn't particularly special; it's a Taiwan (or Chinese mainland) Special, an SE Stout singlespeed. It's got an unremarkable spec, though it was extremely inexpensive, as is normally the case with mass produced 29'er singlespeeds.

Wife Of's All Terrain Thrill Machine

If you're thinking about taking up mountain biking, you could do a lot worse. A 29'er will generally ride more stable than a 26" wheeled bike, and it often has a fit that works well for larger riders, or newer riders used to sitting up on a hybrid or flat bar road bike.

The SE is also pretty adaptable. It comes with a derailer hanger, which I will be appending pretty soon along with some SRAM X7 components, to make this into an inexpensive 9 speed. I think she will eventually inherit one of my disc brake sets and I have a line on an inexpensive used Rock Shox Reba suspension fork. And because there was some closeout involved, and maybe some shopping from a catalog that I wouldn't ordinarily support, we're looking at maybe $700 to build a pretty damn good hardtail 29'er.

All that is cool, but it's also bike geek shit. The good thing about this bike, the real good thing, is that when we wrapped up the ride on Sunday, she said, "usually I'm tired when I finish a ride. On this bike, I feel like I could ride all day."

So we're making some dates to take some weekdays off and do a couple rides, Rosaryville first then some other beginner-to-intermediate level area, maybe Schaeffer if we can get to it before it shuts for winter. The effect of big, bump-absorbing wheels was to turn an occasional, sometime mountain biker into somebody who is looking to expand her off-road horizons. This is good for her, but I'm also glad for me because I can now share something with her that I really love doing, but which was mine alone to do in the past. If you ride an MTB, you know that sharing your ride with friends is fun; how much better is it when you can share with your wife and best friend?

The double bonus nice thing about giving somebody a bike is that it has the potential to make you as happy, as the person who receives it.