Yesterday's commute

Had a great ride home from work yesterday. It’s been a couple of weeks since I was last able to do so and it felt great. I got to test out my new light, the Marwi Titan, which gets two thumbs up and will do well to replace my burned out Marwi Pro-Elite. The last time that I used the pro-elite, one of the switches melted on me when I got home and was attempting to drain the battery. Thankfully, I had purchased the light from LL Bean so I was able to return it for a refund which in turn bought this new light. I had toyed with the idea of getting an HID light but just couldn’t rationalize the extra hundred clams especially since my schedule won’t allow any 24 hour races this year. The Titan should be prefect for me. The one thing that always bothered me about the Pro-Elite was that I never got to use both lights at once since the light output didn’t seem to change enough to make it work the decreased run time. The Titan will work better because it is a single light with three power setting (10w, 15w & 20w). I’ll most likely use the 15w most of the time, juice it up to 20w for tight single track and drop down to 10w for slow climbs. Overall, a pretty good package. Combine that with my Marwi Elite head lamp at 12w and I should be stylin.

Anyway, back on topic, during the ride home, I was chased by three dogs this time which made for some great interval work. There’s nothing like the fear of death to help you dig just that little bit deeper. For good measure at the end of the ride, I threw in a few sections of washed out dirt road and single track to spice things up. The Van Dessel with cyclocross tires did reasonably well but the ss road gearing was a touch high but mostly doable. I’ve been scoping out a way to add in a bunch of old abandoned road in the Schmid Preserve into my commute. Hopefully I’ll be able to link it all together in the next month or so. If I can, it’ll reduce my on-road miles by 4 or 5 and as a special bonus, the Schmid Preserve has some nice buff single track near the top of Mt. Hunger so if I’m feeling spry I’ll be able to dive into some of that as well. If all goes well, this could turn out to be one hell of a fun commute.



















From now on, during each commute I’m going to count the number of bungee cords that I see and report it here. I don’t know where they come from but they seem to be everywhere. Sort of like earthworms after a rain storm. When I commuted to Camden (30 miles) I would see anywhere from 5-10 on each ride and they usually were different each day. Yesterday’s count was only 1 but hey, the year is young.