Hi, my name is Adrian and I'm...interested in gravel racing. It feels kinda good to get it off my chest, but it still feels so dirty to write.
I still love the road, and I still don't fully trust dirt, but the fact is that every time I ride my CX bike on groomed trails and gravel, I have more fun than just about any other time on a bike. And I did a couple of CX races at the end of the 2019 season that back up both sides of my conflicting opinions on the matter.
On Saturday, December 7, I raced a 4/5 event on mostly grass with huge long straights and came from just about DFL (34th) to 5th, about 8 seconds from the leaders. The course catered to my strengths and wasn't sloppy wet. The very next day I made it about 8 minutes into a 4/5 race before the front wheel washed out on icy grass and I broke a rib. AGAIN (that's 3 now!).
So...I kinda still hate 'cross, but I kinda really want to use my endurance fitness and put it toward something more adventurous than just a frenetic peloton.
That said, I'm probably also going to be chasing the same goals I chased last year: the VA Cycling BAR. I managed to lock up the Cat 3 Omnium, but missing the 2019 Cat 3 BAR by 0.5 points really stuck in my craw. Because chasing that damned goal took a lot of the joy out of this sport, and I was really looking forward to dropping that level of intensity and focus for 2020.
Gravel might give me that chance.
So my thought is pretty simple: go after the BAR, and if things aren't looking hot after the first couple of events, shift the focus to gravel, drop crits, and start running again. That way maybe I end up wanting to do a tri (gross) or I actually end up looking forward to a season of CX. And since it's a condensed season, that might have appeal to my better half, too.
Meanwhile I gotta get this rib to fully heal and find my next unicorn: an ideal gravel wheelset for my QR CX bike.
Lots of excitement planned for the year! I hope I can find time to actually enjoy all of it!
Friday, January 17, 2020
Wednesday, October 02, 2019
Adventure, defined
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.
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.
Thursday, August 01, 2019
Infernal machine
Last year I picked up a used 2016 Swift Neurogen frameset. This thing is mean as hell and dead sexy, and it flat f*ing flies down the road. I got it used from a guy who raced pro triathlons, and who ran with endorsement from a producer of sugary energy drinks. There were problems from the get-go:
But I put that thing together and got out on the road pretty quickly, and for a lot less money than I'd expected. I solved most of the problems without too much fuss, although it took MONTHS to finally get the new headset to stop getting wobbly. I ended up drilling out both stem bolts and replacing them with electric-box bolts (you know: the kind that aren't technically "load-bearing" at all), and TBH the skis aren't that far off for me.
But I've never fully solved for the cable guides. One major design flaw in that bike is that all the guides enter the top tube via a shared access panel a couple inches behind the stem. That happens to be just about the exact spot where sweat drops from my chin, and I'm guessing that's also true of the former owner.
He was courteous enough to provide me with a spare access panel cover, but it's really just 4 vertical entry holes in a custom-shaped rubber plug: anything that hits it will pool in the stops and wick down into the guides. And boy howdy has it wicked.
After the first couple of rides, I completely lost the rear brake. I squeeze, it engages, and that's it. No release at all. Then I lost the front shifter to the opposite issue: no moving to the big ring.
At first I figured I'd just go 1x up front, but after a couple of dropped chains I decided to get this crap under control.
I pulled all the cables and, well, there's not much that you can fit into internal cable guides. So I used the cables themselves as floss, which freed up a bunch of gunk--enough to get the bike back on the road...for another month or so.
Round 2 involved pipe cleaners! My kids have lots of pipe cleaners for arts & crafts, so I jammed a few up and removed a whole lot more gunk from both ends of the brake cable housing, but still nothing was long enough to go all the way through.
Round 3 saw the introduction of "safe" cleaners like SimpleGreen, but we're at a point now where I'm having to replace the rear brake cable every 3 rides, and the front shifter almost as frequently. Then in my last TT I started to lose the rear shifter, having to shift down-twice-up-once to climb. These cables have less than 300 miles on them, pulling year-old 22-speed SRAM Force derailleurs.
So I'm at a bit of a loss on how to proceed. I punted and just bought a box of internal brake & shifter cables, but I really have no interest in recabling the bike every other ride (especially not that infernal TRP TTV rear brake). Last night I installed a power meter crankset, and when replacing the bottom bracket shell noticed that there are 2 access ports inside the frame to the internal guides. I cannot possibly imagine that they could be used to actually replace the guides, since they'd have to be fed up the downtube and then bent beyond their limits to fish under the bottom bracket, but I *can* access them.
Do I drill out the stops under the access panel and run full-length outers through the frame? That will work for the brake, but the shifters might be a bit more problematic--the front doesn't have a visible stop at all: only the exposed cable exits from a *very* small hole. But do the shifters matter? I could go eTap for that, but at incredible cost, which wouldn't make a huge amount of sense for a bike that only gets ~900 miles/year.
Will running outers through the frame cause rattling to the point where I'll end up throwing the bike off a bridge?
It does me a frustrate.
- both stem bolts were so rusted they broke off inside the stem
- the headset bearing was so fouled I could never get the bottom piece off the fork
- the skis are still perma-glued into their original position and will never come off or move
- the internal cable guides were fouled with sugary drinks & sweat
- and of course the usual visual blemishes from wear & tear
But I put that thing together and got out on the road pretty quickly, and for a lot less money than I'd expected. I solved most of the problems without too much fuss, although it took MONTHS to finally get the new headset to stop getting wobbly. I ended up drilling out both stem bolts and replacing them with electric-box bolts (you know: the kind that aren't technically "load-bearing" at all), and TBH the skis aren't that far off for me.
But I've never fully solved for the cable guides. One major design flaw in that bike is that all the guides enter the top tube via a shared access panel a couple inches behind the stem. That happens to be just about the exact spot where sweat drops from my chin, and I'm guessing that's also true of the former owner.
He was courteous enough to provide me with a spare access panel cover, but it's really just 4 vertical entry holes in a custom-shaped rubber plug: anything that hits it will pool in the stops and wick down into the guides. And boy howdy has it wicked.
After the first couple of rides, I completely lost the rear brake. I squeeze, it engages, and that's it. No release at all. Then I lost the front shifter to the opposite issue: no moving to the big ring.
At first I figured I'd just go 1x up front, but after a couple of dropped chains I decided to get this crap under control.
I pulled all the cables and, well, there's not much that you can fit into internal cable guides. So I used the cables themselves as floss, which freed up a bunch of gunk--enough to get the bike back on the road...for another month or so.
Round 2 involved pipe cleaners! My kids have lots of pipe cleaners for arts & crafts, so I jammed a few up and removed a whole lot more gunk from both ends of the brake cable housing, but still nothing was long enough to go all the way through.
Round 3 saw the introduction of "safe" cleaners like SimpleGreen, but we're at a point now where I'm having to replace the rear brake cable every 3 rides, and the front shifter almost as frequently. Then in my last TT I started to lose the rear shifter, having to shift down-twice-up-once to climb. These cables have less than 300 miles on them, pulling year-old 22-speed SRAM Force derailleurs.
So I'm at a bit of a loss on how to proceed. I punted and just bought a box of internal brake & shifter cables, but I really have no interest in recabling the bike every other ride (especially not that infernal TRP TTV rear brake). Last night I installed a power meter crankset, and when replacing the bottom bracket shell noticed that there are 2 access ports inside the frame to the internal guides. I cannot possibly imagine that they could be used to actually replace the guides, since they'd have to be fed up the downtube and then bent beyond their limits to fish under the bottom bracket, but I *can* access them.
Do I drill out the stops under the access panel and run full-length outers through the frame? That will work for the brake, but the shifters might be a bit more problematic--the front doesn't have a visible stop at all: only the exposed cable exits from a *very* small hole. But do the shifters matter? I could go eTap for that, but at incredible cost, which wouldn't make a huge amount of sense for a bike that only gets ~900 miles/year.
Will running outers through the frame cause rattling to the point where I'll end up throwing the bike off a bridge?
It does me a frustrate.
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