I love my cyclocross bike. I don't so much love cyclocross, as a sport, but I love the flexibility the bike gives me, both in terms of where and when I can ride. The frame is maybe a bit more rigid than optimal for a true gravel bike, but it suits my riding, and I've never really wanted for wider tires than my 700x33 Clement BOS tubeless setup I put on the bike in early 2017.
I've taken the bike on business trips to places that have lots of gravel. I've taken it on family vacations with a spare set of true road wheels (with boat-anchor tires). I've done single-track, snow, all sorts of inconvenient crap, and I've raced it hard. It's a great all-round platform for getting into, and back out of, trouble.
And to be honest the gravel craze has intrigued me. I don't mind gravel so much, but it's generally not my first choice. So when an opportunity came up to take an overnight business trip to DC, I figured I'd grab the ol' adventure machine and do it up right: hit all the trails I could find through Rock Creek Park, then jump over on some light single-track to the C&O Canal Trail, and then just grind gravel downhill back to the city. ~65 miles. No big deal.
But luck has not really been on my side lately, so I took a few extra precautions packing for this ride. I went for the Camelbak, which I exhausted the last time I did a metric on this bike. A Gatorade, plenty of snacks. Lights and spare battery packs, just in case. Arm warmers and gilet because the weather ALWAYS turns when I ride in DC. Tools, spare (spare) CO2 (cartridges AND inflators). First aid kit, though I nearly abandoned it in the hotel. External battery pack for the phone, in the event my route sucked and I needed to re-route.
My goal was to be at the hotel at 3, and on the bike by 3:30p. I missed that mark by just over an hour, throwing a leg over at 4:38p, and starting off to discover that my Garmin wouldn't pull the route from Strava. Reboot, start over.
My route sucked. First off, Strava AND Komoot both happily routed my bike trek through a national park trail that is bike-prohibited. So I portaged. For a whole mile. Eventually I abandoned the route and worked my way down to the bottom of the C&O Canal Trail, and out onto pavement. No worries: I'd be on softer surfaces soon enough!
Soft surfaces never came, and Beach Dr (Rd?) had been freshly repaved, so while I was making great time, I was not doing my tires any favors.
Then my stomach started to cramp badly. REALLY badly. Like can't stop or I might not start again badly. 5 miles of feeling like I was being torn apart from the inside, and then magically it just stopped. No clue, whatever: rolling on.
At 20 miles into my journey, the light on the trails got pretty dim, and the deer started coming out. They're grayer in DC than they are at home, and that makes them a bit tougher to spot. After a couple of close encounters, I saw one that really needed to move out of the way. My CX bike has exceptionally noisy brakes, so I figured a quick jab of the brakes would get his attention. Only the pavement was also a teensy bit wet, and my tires, while still full of tread, have 3 years of use. The brake instantly seized the front wheel, which washed out and put me hard on my left knee and elbow.
The deer never moved.
I rode another half a mile (after straightening my left brake hood) to a trail exit so I could see the damage, and neither was pretty. Both hits were hard enough that neither was actively bleeding, but the elbow looked like hamburger, and knee had a nice deep gash. Yay first aid kit!
Now I was determined to get this stupid ride done. I figured I'd survived the worst of it, and if my knee would hold up to the abuse, I'd just roll on. Bandaged and covered, I rolled. Slowly, though, because the light was really inconveniently dim.
So after rolling out an hour late and losing 20 minutes to portaging and another 15 minutes to cleaning and dressing my wounds, I ran out of daylight before I even got halfway finished, and before I got to the north end of the Rock Creek trail.
I knew that meant my planned foray into the connector trails would have to be abandoned for major roads, and that meant more abuse for my tires. But it got better: I ended up in hard-scrabble single-track anyway, with no discernible trail markings except blazes on the trees, which I couldn't see because my eyes were focused on not crashing over roots & loose rocks. I fought that battle for a good 15 - 20 minutes and then found myself on a huge over-grown fire-break (kinda missing the point of a fire-break, folks!). That led me squarely into people's back yards, which was also super fantastic.
So I bailed, go to the road, and my Garmin then immediately notified me that its battery was low. Cue the phone battery pack! Oh but the Garmin mount on that bike doesn't allow it to charge, so into the backpack it went, and I had to use the phone to memorize the next several miles of turns.
After 45 minutes on the roads of North Potomac and Travilah, I found the entrance to the C&O Canal Trail. I made the turn and started down the hill, and suddenly realized I was moving REALLY FAST, with only nominal effectiveness of the headlight. Just as it occurred to me that there could be a pot-hole anywhere, I hit one squarely. The bike stayed up, but she was a handful to get under control. I got the speed down and started hearing ffft-ffft-ffft-ffft with every tire rotation. Oh. Yay.
Within sight of the trail, 38.8 miles into my journey, I stopped and realized there was an awful lot of sealant on the outside of the tire, but it still had air. I rolled it to where the hole was pointed straight down, sat for a moment, and then gingerly started out onto the canal trail.
She held, so I picked up the pace gradually. The headlight was almost completely worthless. I'd mounted it under the handlebar so it wouldn't look unsightly, and the rear shift cable kept rolling it downward, pointing it pretty much right at the front tire. Because I'm an idiot, it took me 10 more miles to realize that I could remount the light on TOP of the bar, so I rode with one thumb pressed into the backside of the light housing.
Then I missed a turn and came within about 10' of riding straight into the canal.
By this point I was fully aware of how my journey was going. I was tired, I had used most of my resources, and I was very, very far from civilization. Nobody was on the trail. I was about as isolated as I've ever been on a ride.
But the front tire continued to hold *just* enough air to not repair it. Harder bumps would go straight to the rim, but there was just enough wet sandy gravel that the super low volume made the bike controllable. I just adjusted my weight as rearward as possible and got moving. I was feeling better from the crash, and the bandages were keeping most of the mud out.
18 miles later I got to my trail exit, and I pulled up to a street light just in time to see the last air leave the front tire. CO2 to the rescue, and it was on to some of the steepest climbing I'd seen all day/night.
Then the battery warning LED lit up on the headlight, and the race was on. I did have a spare, but I wanted to see if I could make it to the hotel without changing it. And I did! Literally as I was pulling in to the hotel lot, the light died. Perfect timing!
I put the bike away at 9:48p, a full 5+ hours after rolling out for a 59.6 mile journey, and stepped back out of the deck to discover that it had also just started raining, so I guess I timed that pretty well, too.
There were so many ways this ride failed, and yet there were so many ways it could have been MUCH worse. I completed it, save a few reroutes. The bike is principally intact, though it seems the Wahoo S/C sensor took a hit in the crash. My first aid kit had exactly the right supplies, and my nutrition game was on point.
And because I managed to get myself out of each predicament, I have to classify it as a pretty great ride. I'm a bike nerd, for sure, but I'm a much bigger problem-solving nerd, and I'm gonna be geeking out about that ride for a long time. I just might not be looking for any more adventures for a while.
