Sweet Pump!

It has been a little while since my last post. This is mostly because the weight of the grad school world has been crushing down on my shoulders. Bike rides had dwindled to less than one a week. Despite getting new cycling clothing from my new non-team, Don't Quit Your Day Job (photos coming soon), I thought about quitting all the time anyways. And I still do. But the real point is I'm riding my bike more again and it feels great. I got four rides in this past week. I haven't done that since the beginning of August.

Fridays are generally tough. I get up early and teach one class to a bunch of extremely unenthusiastic freshman and then I go to my office and try to read until five. Today I got sick of it in the early afternoon and decided it would be better to keep the ride streak going. So I called local fast guy Brian Eppen. I'm certainly not in shape to ride with him, but he is a very relaxed guy and I haven't seen him in awhile. Plus I knew that the Iowa state cyclocross championships were this Sunday and I was pretty sure that he would be going there to defend his title.

Sure enough, he was up for an easy spin. He suggested riding mountain bikes on some of the local "secret" trails in Iowa City. We met at the park and rolled to the woods at a leisurely pace. Brian had gears, and I was on a single-speed. The first stretch of trail we went to was new to me. It was covered in pretty yellow leaves. The singletrack was so new it was difficult to follow. It twisted and turned and had a lot of short steep climbs. This exhausted me right away. As you can imagine, my fitness is not great.

But by the second half of our first loop I was starting to get a little bit of a rhythm. I was smoother over the logs and was keeping my speed up through the turns and into the steep drops. And then I hear Brian a little up the ways talking to someone. I catch up and see Jason McCartney, hacking and coughing, in his Discovery kit. Olympian. Recent Vuelta Stage winner. New signee with the #1 ranked team in the world, CSC. This is great. I do love seeing Jason. But I was already struggling, and MC with a cold is not enough to allow me to keep up. A minute later other local fast guy Ryan Neninger rolls up to. Jason says, "Sweet, lets just roll up this way."

For the next hour and a half I struggled to follow those three. My legs and back burned as I entered the red zone for the first time since summer. The hills were so steep that I was dismounting and running up them cyclocross style (I also haven't run since the summer either). Eventually we took the path over to the other section of local, and flat, trails. This was much better.

Except that my driveside crank was loose. Shit. In my haste to meet Brian at the park I had left my allen wrenches in my road saddle pack. No one else had the right tool either. Brian did have some wrenches that we tried to make do. While the two of us were crouched around my crank trying to bunch up three small allen wrenches to tighten the large crank bolt, Jason says "Hey man, sweet pump!" I glance up at my old black Zefal frame pump velcro-strapped to my top tube. Nowhere near de rigeur for singlespeed mountain bike style. But then I look over and see an identical black Zefal pump velcro-strapped to the top tube of Jason's bike.

Pro style. That is the only way to describe it. Sure, my bike was failing me due to lack of maintenance. And my legs were burning despite the lengthy break. And I didn't ride road shoes and road pedals on my mountain bike like Jason. But I had the frame pump. And he noticed.