Hum a few bars and I'll wing it

I used this past weekend as kind of a reset.  I was "living la vida bachelor," but I decided to take it relatively easy.  I spent Saturday standing around outside watching a bunch of cyclo-rossers ride their bikes around in the grass between tapes and farm animals.  It was a great excuse to be outside without a rake or a leaf blower or some other yard utensil.  I've ridden a decent amount over the past few weeks, and voluntarily taking a day off the bike was much buenos.

When I got home, I was greeted by something extra special on my porch.

My Oddity Lowrizer bar had arrived.  I was tingling with excite when I got the delivery notification whilst loafing in a vineyard next to a goat, worrying that some porch pirate was going to make off with something they wouldn't even understand.  Obviously, I went immediately to getting them installed after five or six weeks of...

Regardless of my excite, I had small plans for my Sunday Funday, being that I lost most of a day of productivity to race spectation.  Leaves don't mulch themselves, groceries don't magically appear in the fridge, Boppit doesn't check outta boarding and Uber home, and sundrious other ignored duties that needed to be handled before heading back to work on Monday.

Still, I got out for an in town ramble ramble to two local trails on a regrettable 32 X 20 gear (because Pisgah bike is Pisgah bike) on a windy AF day.  Ten something miles around the airport over to the Airline Bike Park to hit all the new new that I haven't seen since before the park officially opened.  Then six something miles with big ol' jet airliners flying overhead over to Southwest District Park.

This stone flyover bridge is so dope it don't even know.

Of course, I didn't set the brake levers where they needed to be the night before.  I also never addressed my saddle height that I kinda messed up by 5mm the last time I rebuilt my droooper.  Also also, the saddle still needed the nose bumped up... which I think I've told myself to do something about since... September something something,

Meatplow V.generic because I didn't wanna tie this bar to any one bike.  All single speed mountain bikes are Meatplows of one kind or another, and this bar will be around for awhile.  I ended up deciding on the Lowrizer with only 45mm of rise even tho I fell in love with Boyes's bar which was the Oddmone' with 70mm of rise... because our bikes were apples and oranges.  He also had loads of spacers on a totally different frame with a stem that was boner long but the bars had way more sweep...

I had multiple emails and then a phone call with Burnsy before settling where we did.  I have 35mm of spacers to play with, and if I went with the 70mm of rise, there would be no way to get lower than full stem slamnation.  Also, trying to work around leaving the steer tube long enough to not kill a future resale, making room for the entire EDC tool, and also not having 35mm of spacers ABOVE the stem.

The other "oddity" I had to cope with was that although I planned on not riding with a Wahoo data acquisition device on my mountain bikes for awhile, I knew I'd eventually have to find a work around for the 22mm bars.  Since I wasn't all that familiar with the roads I'd be taking to put this in town roll-around into action, I decided to see if the 22mm-31.8mm shims I found would work in reality.

Short answer, yeth.

Now what?

Dunno.

I was gonna ride the geared bike a whole bunch just to cleanse my cycling palate, but now that I got my new bars and I wanna dial my position in but my new Industry Nine wheels aren't here and my old ones are back on the geared bike and riding with these Shimano XT wheels is noticeably a different experience but I'm fortunate to have them because of the way the "industry" is working right now and I still wanna think about getting a shorter 35mm stem but not until I ride these bars a bunch...

At least when I got home Sunday evening, I did take the time to dial in my saddle in all X, Y, and Zs, and my brake levers are close to perfect although...

"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." ~ football coach guy 

Catch most excellence.