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. 