| 2004/03/14 Bikes... | |
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2004-03-14 23:31
by Merlin
in Exercising
Current Music: Paul Van Dyk - Live at Loveparade 2003
Current Mood: Ouch, Sunburned a bit So, I picked up two abandoned bikes at work, one of which is a very nice mountain bike (dual suspension), which now gives me a total of 3 (my original mountain bike, which will probably be a road bike which just won't go as fast, a bare basic mountain bike, which will make a great burning man bike , and my new mountain bike). You can see them all here In order to beat the heat, I had planned to leave at 08:30, but I still needed to mount the speedo on the new mountain bike, as well as a stupid-ass!@#$%! bike pump which had a mount designed by an absolute idiot who wasted more than one hour of my time with something that just didn't fit together and that I ended up using superglue on.  So, I left slightly late, around 10:00 (doh!), and then came back less than 20mn later because the tubes weren't holding air properly (they did during my short test saturday, but apparently, that wasn't good enough), so I had to go home and get my old bike (double Doh). It's only around 10:30 that I left my old mountain bike (which I can now tell drags and is definitely heavier), but I still took it for 54km or 3H15mn. Good distance, not great time, since I stopped to take pictures, and had a few issues with the water level being way too high, and making the path I wanted to take, increasingly dicy  So, I have that thing where I don't like to turn around, and I was taking a path which I remember jogging on one time, and ended up with mud all the way to my lower knee because I had refused to backtrack. Well, someone smart would have learned, but here, I knew the path had to be somewhere on the other side, except that I never found it, and on my way back, drowned my front tire in mud.  Damnit, my brand new shiny cross traning shoes!!! Anyway, after reaching University Avenue, jumping a fence that was about my height (ok, that's fun, I locked the bike in the up position on one tire, escalated it, and caught a tree branch that allowed me to clear the fence, but not as much fun as trying the lift the bike over afterwards when you're by yourself, very heavy and hard...). Sure, I could have backtracked through the freeway onramp I took to get there (please, don't ask :-D), but I don't like to admit defeat :) You can find the pictures from the ride here . It was good exercise, and while I got ligthly sunburned (made it home by 13:30, which was a bit late), I found out that I could do 30 straight pushups again while stretching (yoohoo) I went to the bike shop afterwards and found out that it'll cost $200 for a full tuneup, changing the tubes with real thorn resistant ones, and changing the 24 speed shifter to a real one ($100, ouch!). I should get a killer mountain bike after that, though. |