Test, Test

After last week's throw down in Cape Elizabeth, my fork needed a bit of tlc.  The lock-out wasn't working and the fork felt a bit off.  Knowing my time constraints, I didn't delude myself into thinking I'd find the time to deal with it myself (and end up taking it to the shop anyway when I realized I couldn't fix the problem) so I dropped it at the shop late last week.

I was hitting up this weekend's race course last night and, because the gods love me, my bike was ready a couple of hours before I headed out.  A couple of calls, a supportive wife grabbing it from the shop for me, and a little last second dashing around later and I was in Rockport with Mike ready to do a few laps on the miserably wet, rooty, rocky, muddy course.

Once into the course I realized I had a new problem.  The fork was working fine but the shifting had gone haywire.  It shifted flawlessly last wednesday but apparently all of the jostling around between the shop and being jammed into two different car trunks put the final nail in my derailleur cables' coffin.  To be honest, it wasn't a bad run for the old boy.  Because I use full cable housing, I've been able to use the same cable for over two years now.

Anyway, after some trail side fiddling, I had things functioning more or less well enough that I didn't want to kill myself and we went about ripping out 3 solid laps.  Conditions were greasy and slick and those rocks and roots kept you on your toes but it's such a fun course that we didn't care.


(can somebody tell me how to format this stupid endomondo crap?)

This morning after the run with the pooch I switched out the cable (and added a link to the slightly too short chain) and quickly realized that it had been a LONG time since I'd had to change a cable on that bike because I had no f'ing idea how to fish it out of the shifter. Thankfully, SRAM has great tech vids on the web and I was fixed up lickety split. (turns out I had NEVER changed a cable on that particular shifter before because it was a process I hadn't done before)

Hopefully I'll get one more test run in before the weekend and, then on Sunday, the real season begins.  Bring it!