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Category: cycling

Group Ride at River Bends and CRPT

Published May 17, 2012

Two weeks ago while out for a quick lunchtime ride at River Bends I started thinking about how it’d be nice to have a group ride there connecting it and the Clinton River Park Trails. So, later that evening I set up a ride for the 10th. Rains forced me to postpone this a week, with today being the day for the ride.

We had a much better turnout than I expected, with a total of 17 people showing up for the ride. A couple people dropped off here and there to head home or because they’d gotten enough riding in, but most of the group stuck together until the end, returning to the River Bends parking lot just as the sun was going down.

Coupled with riding up and back from home and an early lap I ended up getting 36.52 miles in, and just a smidgen over three hours moving time. All of this and the beautiful weather made for a great evening.

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Poopy Creek

Published May 17, 2012

This is one of my least favorite parts of riding outdoors: unexpected encounters with dog poop. Not only is it feces, but being dog stuff it’s greasy and difficult to clean off. I must have picked this up somewhere at Stony Creek last night while riding. After getting in the car I thought it smelled suspiciously unclean in there, but I’d just written it off as sweaty clothes or my nose playing tricks on me.

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Deuter Race Air Lite Pack Leak and Replacement

Published May 8, 2012

When riding I almost always carry a Deuter Race Air Lite hydration pack (photo) containing stuff I may need during the ride. I’ve had the bag for less than a year and recently a leak developed at the bottom of the bladder, right at the base of the outlet’s weld. Deuter bags carry a lifetime warranty, so I submitted a warranty request.

A few days later I had a new bladder in my possession, and instead of sending the old one back Deuter just asked for a photo of the bladder and where it’s leaking. That’s what can be seen above. This leak wasn’t huge, but it was enough that with each ride the bottom of my bag would be wet, occasionally dripping on me. I was more concerned that it would grow, resulting in an unexpected failure leaving me stuck without water.

I’ve been really happy with the Deuter pack thus far, and good warranty support when it failed was a nice bonus.

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Fox Float RP23 Seal Replacement

Published May 2, 2012

This evening, as part of doing a bunch of needed maintenance on the Titus (cables, bottom bracket, shock, etc) I replaced the seals on the Fox Float RP23 rear shock. Using the ~$15 OEM seal kit this was surprisingly easy to do. I followed along with this video from Fox and the actual work took less time than watching the video.

The most difficult part was removing the bottom bushings, but this was pretty easily done by holding them using a bench vise and some neoprene to keep the parts from being marred and gently rotating them while lifting on the shock. Pressing the bushings back into place was even easier, done just using the vise jaws and some more padding.

There is still another evening’s worth of work to go on the bike before I’ll be able to put the shock back on, but everything went well enough that I expect it’ll work fine. I’m more concerned about getting all the drivetrain bits put together and working right.

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Fox Lake Road May Be Impassable

Published April 22, 2012

Yesterday’s ride took Erik, Nick, and I out west to visit an area that we’d only heard about and Erik was anxious to see, Fox Lake Road. I was not disappointed, as the segment between Honert Rd and County Line Rd. / Washburn Rd. was some nice hills in the quite-attractive Ortonville Recreation Area.

Starting out from the Clarkston Road crossing of the Paint Creek Trail we ended up around 69 miles for the day, and a moving time of just a smidge over 5.5 hours. This met my goal, but I seem to have failed to keep my heart rate high enough for some parts of the ride. For much of it (likely while climbing) I had it fairly high, but on the flatter segments (and likely longer downhills) it dropped lower than I should have kept it. Hopefully this’ll be okay… While tired I had enough energy left at the end of the ride yesterday to make a decent effort on the Miller Rd. hills, so hopefully I won’t have problems with next weekend’s 5.5 – 6 hour ride, and whatever comes after that…

Here’s two more photos from yesterday:

· Inside the Men’s changing area at Bald Mountain State Recreation Area’s Lower Trout Lake beach.
· Titus Racer X 29er laying in some leaves along Fox Lake Road when stopping to take a break.

Now, off to Stony Creek to build some single track.

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Marked Bottle

Published April 20, 2012

This evening I finally got around to marking up some of my water bottles with one-third and half marks. Since I frequently mix up two or three hours worth of sports drink stuff in them (typically from Infinit Nutrition) I like to drink half or one third of the bottle per hour. I’d previously guessed at what 1/3 and 1/2 of the volume would be, but apparently I was a bit off. The dent in the bottle must have thrown me a bit.

By the time these markings wear off I’ll likely have these levels memorized and won’t need to redo them.

(Note that this bottle contains enough mix to meet my caloric needs for three hours of riding. Despite being filled to just below the Breakaway Bicycles & Fitness logo it’ll all dissolve pretty readily in one bottle of water.)

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Nupla PA375-LESG Pulaski Axe

Published April 19, 2012

Wednesday evening UPS delivered my new Pulaski, a tool combining an axe and an adz, and commonly used in wilderness firefighting and trail construction. I’ve been borrowing one for the past year or so but I wanted my own, so I looked around and ended up picking up this one, a Nupla PA375-LESG.

Made in the US and available from Amazon for ~$53 it seemed like a pretty reasonable purchase. I particularly like the ribbed handle which should make it feel a bit more solid when used with wet hands.

I also added this photo to the Wikipedia Pulaski article because it previously didn’t have a good photo of the tool’s head; just a man swinging the tool, with the head lost in shadows.

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Boulevard Connector?

Published April 19, 2012

While out riding to Lake Orion and back on Tuesday I noticed that the construction of the connector between the Paint Creek Trail and the Kern Road safety path (near the Clarkston / Kern / PCT intersection) is nearing completion and it appears that the base of it will split into a boulevard (with a median / central reservation).

If this is the case and the extra path isn’t just for construction access it’ll be nice. This is a notoriously blind corner and coming down this path towards the PCT currently requires some careful looking and neck craning to be sure one doesn’t ride out in front of someone else. Hopefully this’ll improve the sight lines and make for a better intersection.

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Blanding’s Turtle Rescue

Published April 14, 2012

While out riding at Stony Creek today, just before finishing up a segment of single track, I came around a corner and almost hit a turtle. It was walking along the middle of some grooved, dry, sunny sandy single track, and liable to get run over. When I passed it quickly pulled its head and legs in, so after quickly stopping I was able to easily moved it off the trail, but not before taking this picture of it. On my next pass through the turtle was nowhere to be seen, so hopefully it has made its way back to a more suitable piece of land.

It turns out that this is a Blanding’s Turtle, a Michigan Protected Species. According to MSU it is categorized as S3, or “rare or uncommon in state (on the order of 21 to 100 occurrences)”.

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Large Bottle of ProLink

Published April 12, 2012

I really like ProGold’s ProLink chain lube, and I’ve been using it for a couple years. Since my smaller 4oz bottles were running out I picked up a large 16oz one and refilled the others. With the large 16oz bottle costing around $19 on Amazon I was able to refill the smaller bottles for half the price of buying new ones. This worked out pretty well, and pouring from the soda bottle-sized neck into the small squeeze bottle necks was easier than planned.

The only odd / amusing thing is that the 16oz bottle comes with a spray head. As I normally lubricate my chain one drop at a time (one drop per roller) I can’t ever see the need for dumping that much chain lube on anything in one go. Maybe if I was using it to lube industrial chains… Maybe…

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