Took a skid last weekend on the “road plus” machine, for reasons that now elude me but made sense at the time.
It is currently sporting oversized knobby tyres. Not as knobby as the mountain bike, but much more bristly than what is usually found on a gravel bike, and as fat as will fit. In fact, when I am climbing out of the saddle (which doesn’t happen as often as it used to) I think I can detect a very slight rubbage and make a mental note to check the inside of the chain stays for evidence. Which I then forget to do, and remember the next time I happen upon a climb steep enough to require it and short enough to make standing up on the pedals viable for any length of time.
Those big tyres make me far too confident of many things. Firstly, I can forget about my usual fear of the section of the cycleway to town which is regularly sprinkled with broken glass. These knobbies can surely roll over shattered RTD bottles without any consequences. Once in the woods, they trick me into thinking I can go as fast as I like on roads which may have deep ruts, large rocks, greasy spots and sometimes all three at once. So far I have got away with that, if you don’t count that one corner where I dropped it a few months ago. It was a slow motion crash and the only ‘damage’ was a liberal coating of mud on one side of my bars, where the tape is now a different colour.
The other thing that the big tyres induce is a tendency to wander off the planned route. On this day that meant heading off up an overgrown road just to see what was at the end of it. A long time ago a favourite trail popped out on the road, but that trail was destroyed by logging and the very nice replacement ends up in a different spot. I found the end of the road, had a brief look around, then headed off down another road I suspected would eventually become another one I use fairly often. If it did, and that was by no means a certainty, I had not been on this part of it for a very long time.
I stopped to have a look around at the spot you can see at the top of this newsletter, and reflected on the general look of the place. When we first started exploring this joint on bikes there were no trails, but most of the forestry roads looked like this. Some were even more like singletrack, and were pretty much perfection for riding on the bikes we had at the time.
While I was arranging the bike for its portrait (do you do that?) I reflected further on the bike I was on: if it was set up with flat bars it would be remarkably similar to my early mountain bikes. Ok, they didn’t have disk brakes and I wasn’t lucky enough to be wearing anything like these, but the frame of this thing is so similar to my third mountain bike it is uncanny.
That I am still into riding a bike like this on a road like this over forty years later is a thing I am very happy about.
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