Random Biking Notes

It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to write anything here, but I wanted to sneak a post in for April 2013, preserve my streak of blogging at least once a month.  Twitter is largely to blame for my lack of blogging, as with my current schedule, it’s much easier to fire off a quick thought in 140 characters than it is to formulate several paragraphs.

I’ve burned through another rear rim on my road bike.  I broke a spoke earlier this month, and upon removing it, I noticed that the rim was cracked in several places.  So, off to the bike shop for a new rim and wheel rebuild.  I blame the trashed rim on Baltimore County’s crappy back roads.  I think I need to put some wider tires on this bike and ride at lower pressure.  The problem is, I can’t fit fenders on this bike with anything larger than 23mm tires.  Maybe I should lose the fenders and buy another bike that I can use in bad weather.  You can never have too many bikes.

While the new wheel is on order, I pulled out my single speed bike, which I hadn’t ridden since last summer.  I used to ride fixed gear all the time, until I threw my hip out spinning downhill, and then I gave it up.  I flipped the rear wheel around to the freewheel side and have been riding the bike that way.  When I first tried that a couple years ago, I hated it because the gearing was too low to pick up any speed going downhill.  Now, I’m not as speed-obsessed as I was back then, and I don’t mind it as much.  Sometimes it’d be nice to be able to build up a little speed in traffic, but it’s a fair trade-off in exchange for the simplicity and ease of maintenance of a single speed bike.

That’s all for now.  Hopefully my next entry will come before May 31.  :-)