Unholy Schnikes

A three day weekend of sun and high temps in December beats the ever-loving shit outta two days of cold, pissy rain and cat euthanasia.  I got to ride all three mountain type bike cycles at five different trail systems with a random group, solo, and with a now Vassago-owning Dr Mike.

A group of people I mostly didn't know were going to ride from Rocky Branch Bike Park, up to Poohstain Park, and back... and because I've wanted to do that route but didn't wanna actually figure it out by myself, I went.  

Also, any ride that lasts longer than four hours total means I get to eat guilt-free pizza.

It was quite a pleasant day, despite the early and unnecessarily cold start.  Just rolling around in random anonymity, a bunch of dudes being dude'ish and semi-schralpy...

Oh, and mebbe when you think your fork ("front fork" for listeners of the Just Riding Along podcast) is a little soft so you just stick a shock pump on there with the bike hanging on the wall and put "some more" air in there and you think it's all gonna be fine... mebbe don't.  I definitely missed the mark due to my laziness, and paid the price for my stupidity all day long.  Yeth, I did write a post recently about how great it was going to be to have a super accurate digital pump and how I was going to take full advantage of it... but lazy won.  

This time.

Christmas day, I gave myself the gift of riding the new and "improved" Winter Shart Tarck course in Rock Hill.  

The ruins of the Carhartt Manor are not part of the course but totally should be.

Mebbe I wasn't there on the best of days, what with parts of the course high up on top of a landfill on a purpose built criterium loop and 15-25 MPH winds that afternoon, but oof.

The road climbs were hard with a face full of wind, the all-weathering materials that were recently put down on the trail were pretty loose, and the two climbs outta the woods were real kicks in the dicks.  The racers are what makes racing what it is, and the course is kinda secondary (as Peter Sagan says, "race is race."), but that said, hmmmm.  My cockles are not warm at the moment, probably just as cold as Momma Bear's porridge but not one degree colder.

I headed over the Airline Bike Park on the way home with my plastic squishy bike so I could at least say I did in fact go "mountain biking" that day.  No photographic evidence but I could show you the spot where my not-drooped-enough saddle tagged me in the taint when I came up short on a double.

Mebbe my grandson was in town for a spell.  Check out my house crack in the background.  Months of the city blowing up bedrock for water improvements made me such a happy home owner.

Up not so early on Sunday and it was time to spin wrenches with Dr Mike.  He just got his Vassago Optimus frame, meaning we gotta have close to fifteen Vassagos in the Queen City at this point.

As with most bike builds, some of the hard stuff went smoothly and some of the easy stuff confounded us.  In the end, we'd built a bike that once I saw it, I was trying to figure out why I need an Optimus in my life.  Is it too much to ask to have a tugid SS, a 120mm SS, and a 140mm SS?  I bet Elon Musk has the whole set.

Currently, the Radimus is the bike I'm gonna grab most of the time I ride.  The geared bike is nice and all, but the Radimus is the most fun.  The Vertigo is still awesome for those moments when I want to hurt myself... not like I did this past August tho.  The good kinda hurt myself.

So one more week of just living in the moment, and then I guess it's time to really consider what I'm gonna do next year...

other than trying to justify buying another single speed.