Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Millennials Love This Tire Inflation Hack!

How many times have you attempted to inflate your rear tire only to sever your hand at the wrist?  Never?  Well Bicycling's got you covered anyway:

Evidently this is enough of a problem that they went through the trouble of making a video about it, and the solution apparently is to harness the awesome power of opposable thumbs:


Next up from Bicycling: How to lube your chain without getting your tongue caught in your drivetrain.

Of course I realize that as an old fuddy-duddy my insistence that impaling yourself on your cassette is a non-existent problem could be entirely due to the fact that I am totally out of touch.  See, now that everyone's riding gravel bikes with 10-52 cassettes and deep-section cray-bone rims there's now only like two millimeters of clearance between the valve stem and the low gear so maybe it is a real issue.  Also, one can't be expected to pay attention to proper valve orientation during inflation when one is so preoccupied with making sure the #whatpressureyourunning is accurate to the .000000th PSI.  It's not like the old days where you had a 19-tooth low gear and a rim with the depth of a fingernail and you just kept inflating your 21mm tire until the pump head blew off by iteslf.

Speaking of being out of it, despite a biblical streak of rainy weather I attempted to participate in a bicycle race on Saturday morning.  Since it was already raining when I woke up at an hour so grotesquely early I won't even share it I decided to spare the Renovo the indignity of getting dirty and instead rode my Milwaukee, even though it is outfitted for leisurely mixed-terrain rambling and not high-speed park-Fredding:


As I rolled down to the park in the rain I couldn't shake the feeling that my heart simply wasn't in it, and as the race began it became immediately clear that my legs weren't either, and I became detached from the pack as quickly and expeditiously as a bicycle pump head being flicked off the valve by a pair of thumbs in a Bicycling magazine instructional video.

Then I went to retrieve my bag, only to find it had been befouled from above by a bird:


By way of penance (and because it was still barely 6am) I figured I'd head over the GWB for some Fred mileage, but by the time I reached 125th Street I was more or less soaked through and the idea of heading anywhere but home was profoundly unsavory.  So I limped home wet and defeated, and in a way I suppose it was punishment from the Great Lobster On High for so flippantly writing about quitting bike races last week:


Though in fairness to myself at no point did I consider pulling a Siskevicius and riding eight laps in Central Park by myself.

Then on Sunday I did decide to head over the GWB to River Road, which turned out to be an incredibly stupid idea since it was the day of the Gran Fondo New York, aka "Attack of the Freds":


As the curator of a local cycling blog I should have known that, but those green jerseys have become so ubiquitous I now seem to automatically tune them out.  Therefore, I only realized it was going on when I was already on River Road and I saw signs informing me it was closed for a bicycle race.  Naturally I ignored these signs, but then a police officer fired up the ol' megaphone and told me the road was closed "unless you're in the race:"


For a moment I considered telling him I was in the race, but it seemed silly to run afoul of the law just for the sake of riding a road I've traveled roughly eleventy billion times before.  So I turned around and made my way back home via the High Bridge, thus capping off a weekend of extremely poor cycling decisions.

Finally, as you may or may not have seen, Outside got lots of ridicule for this tweet:

Naturally people were indignant over the notion that nobody's heard of Marianne Vos, but the fact is that most people haven't heard of Marianne Vos...or Peter Sagan, or really any current top-level cyclist for that matter.  Maybe they've heard of Chris Froome because he won the Tour de France and he's been in the news a lot for the salbutamol or the somnambulism or whatever, but that's about it.

So it doesn't seem so ridiculous to me, but what do I know, apart from everything?

from Bike Snob NYC https://ift.tt/2rYXJtK
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