DSG holding on for a third day

Now comes the hard part.

I can say that I have now spent more time blogging about DSG and rebuilding my bike than the amount of time I was actually out on the trail... errrr mudslide. These photos convinced me to dig a little deeper than I had originally planned.

That's my Crank Brothers bottom bracket soaking in gear oil. It'll get me through till I get something else. I've got stuff coming from Will at Bolt Brothers and Alex at MTBTandems.com to get my shit straight again. I've yet to pull the headset apart and the hubs, but hopefully by the weekend everything will be as good as new'ish.

I mentioned my friend Charlie yesterday. Now I've got time for the full story.

While I was pushing my bike somewhere out there in the time machine black hole vortex known as "Lap 2" I looked back at my rear wheel to see if it was due for some more scraping. I noticed a 3" earthworm doing his thing (as Jamie Pillsbury would call it) hanging out on my rear caliper. He was not the first worm I had seen clinging to my bike for a free ride, but he did have the best location. Most of them were on my tires or jammed in my stays where they were facing possible death by mangling, mashing, or flinging. This brilliant spineless creature had taken up residence in a happy place where the only true risk was that he might fall from his precipitous precipice and get turned into two worms by my spinning rotor, which I'm sure might actually be a good thing if you're the multi-tasking type of worm.

Anyways...

I decided if he was still there the next time I was looking my bike over in an effort to determine if it were time to pull some mud off I would name him Charlie. Sure enough my determined megadrile was still chilling like a segemented villian, so I named him Charlie, and from that point on we were friends. I looked down every so often and talked to him. "We're gonna get through this Charlie" and "Hang in there little buddy"... this was the kind of distraction I needed at the time as there was no one in sight to share my misery with.

No sooner than I really felt like we had some kind of bonding experience developing I looked down to see that Charlie had thrown in the towel. He, like many others, would not complete his lap at DSG today. He had given up on the hope of one day crossing the finish line instead being satisfied with just being a plain old earthworm.

Charlie: R.I.P. (Rest in Puddle)