The First 1000KM

Just over a week ago I hit my first 1000KM on my away to 5000KM by the end of October this year. Come to think of it, this might very well be my first thousand kilometers  I have  rode on my bike ever, at least intentionally. It could very well be that when I hit 1K mark a few summers when I was much younger. But for this sake of this post and to avoid a crazy amount of time on Google Maps, we’ll just have to say this is the first time in over ten years.

So how did it go?

Not too bad actually. I had a slower start than I would have wanted, some bad weather and a trip to L.A. slowed things down a bit in May. But June was spectacular and I managed to rack up 670 KM without too many incidents. The RidgeBack MTB I have been riding is over 17 years old and still has most of it’s original parts. For example the wheels are original and even though I have changed the tires, the aluminum had started to oxidize and even the spokes were getting a little corroded. On one ride home in May, I hit a pothole, heard a pop and wondered why the back-end started to wobble quite a bit. Turns out, 2 of the spokes had popped and another 6 where soon to go too. By the time I made it Fraser’s in Valois, the wheel looked like something out of a cartoon and when Harry the Techie grabbed the wheel, only the hub was still attached to the bike. Once the wheel was replaced, I magically found an extra 4KM/h do to the fact that brake was no longer rubbing the rim every quarter revolution. So apart from the braking effect and my inability to ever be in the right gear, the biggest drag to my improvement has literally been drag. Sitting up right on a mountain bike and riding against the prevailing wind for 25KM does very little improve your time.

Generally speaking the riding has been good, I have started commuting with John again and he’s proven to be a pretty good motivator. There is nothing worse than getting your ass kicked by a guy riding a 30-year-old bike he picked up for $10 and then proceeded to equip it with parts salvaged from the dead bikes found in the trash.  He’s been riding this fixed gear home-built special for a few years and it gave me the idea to try to rebuild an old Peugeot Cadre Allegé road bike that had been hanging from the rafters in my buddy Al’s shed for the last few years. It needed far too much work to get it working in its current  state or to rebuild with current parts. So a “Fixie Conversion” was the only logical thing to do. But I will leave the details for the next post.

 

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