I'm still working my way back from some health issues. The good news is the treatment that I'm on is working and I am riding better than I did a few weeks ago. I still don't know when I will be back to 100% but at least things are going in the right direction.
This week I had planned on just doing a local ride by myself but got an invite to an off the books ride from Pete. He had planned the first 20 or so miles to be relatively flat before heading into the hills so that I might join the group for part of the ride which I appreciated. I was a little nervous about being able keep up with them but figured I could always bail if I wasn't up to it.
At the start of the ride almost all of the insane posse showed up. We even had an appearance from Bob who had his own health issues and like me is working his way back to being 100%. Unfortunately as we started the ride Bob found that his bike would not shift so he had to bail on the ride. So although Bob may not be broken any more his bike which had been ignored for 4 months was.
He wrote later that is was a problem with dead batteries in his shifters. I know some people might take a problem like this to point out that there is no reason to use electronic shifting as the old system using cables work just fine. However everybody that I know that has electronic shifting says how much better it is. The real problem is that people just have to get use to adding a few extra checks to their pre ride routine to make sure the electronic shifters are charged and working. It's not like cable shifters are immune from problems. I can think of a number of times when cable shifters or derailleurs have broken at the beginning or during a ride.
Back to the actual ride. I felt good for the first 15 miles of the ride and didn't really struggle to keep up although to be honest it was a relatively slow pace. I think it was just because we were all just catching up with each other and so we took our time. I will say Pete put a interesting route together through with a lot of neighborhood roads and we even had to go on some dirt to get between streets that weren't connected. The only thing the route was missing was the normal bridge out otherwise it was a perfect ride for me. At mile 15 I still felt okay but needed to slow down a little so I let the group go and did another 7 miles on my own. I ended up with 22 miles, 800 ft of climbing at a 13.3 mph pace. Not my longest, fastest or hilliest ride but it was more then I was able to do a couple of months ago so it felt good and makes me believe that I should be able to get back to my normal rides in another month or so.
This weeks ride also gave me a chance to try out the new bike rack. I actually haven't had to use my bike rack since the end of November as I have only been doing rides from my house. 21 year ago when I got the Baja I made a custom bike rack to fit into the bed.
The rack is just a piece of cherry wood with some a couple of fork mounts and wheel carriers bolted to it. It has served me well over 21 years and taken me and others on my rides and bike trips. About 7 years ago I had to add a 15mm thru axle mount for my mountain bike. Bike technology is constantly evolving not only do most new bikes have electronic shifting but most now have thru axles. And unlike the old standard skewers there is difference sizes of thru axles. This isn't a problem for me at the moment as both my road bikes still have skewers. However some other people that I ride with have thru axle bikes that I might need to carry in the Baja. For this reason I decided to upgrade my rack.
I took the same piece of cherry wood and made a few changes. The first one to create a dado and add a T-Track to the rack. This would allow me to adjust the positions of the fork and wheel mounts on the rack.
The next changes was the addition of a new fork mount from
MUQZI. This fork mount comes with different adapters so it can handle the old skewer mount bikes as well as most thru axle bikes. After that all I did was just put a new finish on the rack and put the old wheel and fork mounts back on.
