"There is no bright side" ~ Jesus

I'm getting ahead of myself.  I have to.  I'm preparing for the Pisgah 111/55.5K weekend and the Trans-Sylvania Epic at the same time.  There's just not enough time between the two events to get everything done, and like some old person once told me when he saw me whip out a book and read a page in an elevator, "Gotta make hay while the sun shines."

I don't know who all is racing in the single speed field.  Unlike the male and female categories that got press released all over the web, no such information has been released for the all important top notch single speeders. I do know for a fact that The Angry Singlespeeder, or as I've come to call him, The Angry, is coming.

The Angry... like Jerry the Only AKA The Only.

Anyways.

He wanted some advice from me regarding bike set up, being that I'm a four year veteran of the race (although nobody approached me to do an episode in the Repeat Riders Series).

Some of you might have read my Dirt Rag article regarding giving out gear advice... something about Joe VS The Volcano... my memory is fuzzy.

It's not that I don't want to give up what little knowledge I've stored in my brain to a rider who is stronger, younger, more talented and better exposed...

It's just what works for me works for me for my own stupid reasons.  Something like this:

Yes, it's missing a part, but you get the picture.  This would be my Enduro™ specific rig for Stage Three of the Trans-Sylvania Epic, the Galbraith Gap Enduro™.
Why a specific (rigid?) bike for one day of racing, mostly downhill, that won't really change the overall standings much if any?

I'm lazy.

Last year, I flatted my front tire on the second stage and had to run most of it.  The rest of the day, my front tire was inflated to basketball pressures.  The same thing happened to me the first year on the more Super D style stage.  I hate flats.  I hate them more on short timed sections where stopping to fix a flat would just suck balls.

So what's the secret?

1,064.5 grams of rubber.  I don't remember what this tire is even called at this point.  I acquired it some time ago through the Maxxis Crash Test Dummy Program.

All I know is that it's stupid heavy and has a thick casing with gnovelty sized knobs.  I also put a 2.4 Ardent on the rear because I just don't want to flat AT ALL on day three.  The bike is still geared at 32X19 so I don't have to break the single speeder stage racing rule (or what should at least be a rule) of not changing gears all week... although the bigger tire essentially changes the gear inches.

Whatever.

All this work to create a machine for one day's worth of racing sounds the opposite of lazy.  I assure you, it's not.  This is organized laziness.  Although Chris M is bringing "our" air compressor (no confirmation as to whether or not he is bringing "our" beer), I don't want to waste my down time trying to swap tires for one day of racing.  That time is better spent sitting in a creek or on the porch doing as little as possible, and I plan on doing as much little as possible as possible.

And of course the other advantage of bring the Dickstickel Meatplow V.6 is that a spare bike is a spare everything.  I've never had to use any parts of my spare bike, but others have pilfered it throughout the week in the past.

Parts = beer.

It's also one fewer day that I will have to wash my bike.

So The Angry has chosen his setup for TSE, and most of it is probably going to be okay, except for where he's entirely wrong.  He'll probably beat me anyways, but that's just me being an optimist.