The Trail of Tears

Some of my friends did Bike 180 last year. They rode 180+ days, and took pictures of it. This made for some neat year-end photo collages.

Me? I'm going to do something like that but it will be focused on my unique outlook on riding. It will be called the Trail of Tears because (1) I bitch and whine a lot; (2) I'm kinda becoming mountain bike focused; and (3) I broke some more shit on the first ride of the year.

Yep, the coming of the New Year was celebrated this morning by the spectacular fireworks-like shredding of a freewheel. Fortunately, it was only 3 miles or so, mostly uphill, to get out of Patapsco Valley State Park and over to Landing Road, which was just a mile of mostly walking back to my truck. What praytell, you ask, does a blown up freewheel look like? Why, like this of course:

The Rouleur Redesign:
The Five Piece BMX Freewheel

Mike W very kindly looped back for me and patiently led me out, taking Jelly's shortcut, which he has apparently used in the past after destroying a freewheel in similar fashion. It's good to know you're following in others' pioneering footsteps.

I'd been laughing about the freewheel for a few weeks. Seibold warned me it was a cheapass BMX freewheel, and the thing frequently froze coming out of creeks, making me feel at home with my fixed gear-riding buddies but causing some surprises as I tried to coast into Patapsco's rock fields with my feet positioned just-so. Yeah, there's nothing more surprising than an inadvertent fixed gear MTB, one that decides to become a fixie conversion mid-ride...

The other failure was the eggbeaters. Up to the point where the freewheel failed, the eggbeaters were doing what they could to destroy my confidence, shooting my feet off every couple minutes whenever I tried to really wrench on the pedals to jump or bunny hop. I'd hoped to ride them until Chris comes through with the used Times, but it's not going to happen. There were also some colossal pedal/rock strikes. Yeah, I was unglued this morning. It was shameful.

Anyhow I wrenched that off tonight, put on a White Industries freewheel, and installed my old bulletproof Shimano 520 SPDs. The Dedline is ready to rock the valley tomorrow AM.

Me? Not so much.