Posts Tagged ‘clipless pedals’
Fat Tires
The weather was nice when we set out on a bike ride yesterday around 12:30. That niceness didn’t last. On the plus side, Cyndie’s brother, Ben, offered me a chance to ride his fat bike, so mine didn’t get all muddy.
It was my first time riding on the gigantic tires. The first thing I noticed was that my legs made contact with the frame around the wide back tire while we were cruising down the asphalt on the way to the gravel road that cuts into the woods.
Before I expand on my experience riding the big beast on the “intermediate” level off-road trails, there is a story about the pedals. I ride clipless pedals (the complicated descriptor for pedals that click onto a cleat in my shoe and keep my feet fixed in place while riding). Ben’s bike had standard flat pedals.
Knowing this in advance, I decided I would take the pedals off my road bike before coming up, so I could swap out the ones on Ben’s bike. The problem with that last-minute plan came about when I couldn’t get the pedal on the right side of the bike to budge. It was frozen solidly in place.
Several times, I took a break from futile attempts to loosen the pedal and let some penetrating oil soak in while I made other preparations for departure. Finally, I went inside, showered, and then drove the packed car out of the garage, ready to head out after making one last try on that stubborn pedal. The wrench slipped and my left hand slammed into the teeth of the big chainring. It cut deepest in two specific places on my thumb, filling the nasty gashes with dirty chain grease.
I rushed back to the house to wash out the cuts as best I could tolerate and then had to go find Cyndie for assistance in bandaging it up. Frustrated and angry with myself, I packed up the pedal wrench and drove off, leaving the road bike behind with one pedal on and one pedal off.
I held my wounded left hand up in the air for most of the two-and-a-half-hour drive north.
Yesterday morning, Paul and I decided to simply try swapping the pedals from my off-road bike for the ones on Ben’s bike. Both sets came off with ease. Problem solved. Oh, how I wish I hadn’t wasted one second struggling to take the pedals off my road bike.
My thumb wishes that even more.
So, now I had my clipless pedals on Ben’s fat bike and I was ready to try it out. The frame is taller than I want, but I can straddle the cross tube because it slants down just enough. It took me two tries to get the seat lowered to the right height, and then I was ready to go.
After the opportunity of riding my bike on similar trails the day before, I had a good reference for comparison between the two. The fat bike felt like a truck compared to the nimbleness of my old-style bike.
The shifters are different enough that I needed to think much more consciously about gear changes, rarely with the precise timing preferred. That wasn’t as much a problem as the basic difference of frame geometry and tire size. It felt like the bike took longer to make it around corners. Sure, the big front tire rolled over hazards easier, but it never felt like the back tire did.
Final verdict: I’m not sold. I think it would make a nice bike for riding on packed snow, but for the rough trails through the woods in summer, I prefer the much skinnier tires on my mountain bike.
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Close Calls
For the most part, my week of biking and camping was perfect. Weather was good, trails and roads were great, and my body delivered everything I asked of it. I was in the company of really great companions who fed my soul and entertained my brain.
However, my performance wasn’t entirely without incident.
The first occasion happened when I was cruising the trail with Rich and Steve on the day we coincidentally chose to wear our blue sleeveless jerseys. While some cat-callers threw out a moniker with the word “smurf” in it, Rich anointed us the “Blue Man Crew.”
There are many driveways and a few roads that the trail crosses, and at each one there is a stop sign. We are supposed to stop at each one, but in the rural setting there is very little traffic present. Instead of stopping, we would most often yield, pausing to look for cars.
After miles of no traffic, we arrived at one where a large truck had just crossed our trail and was waiting to turn onto the adjacent highway. We were talking and Rich had pulled out his water bottle as we approached. Suddenly I spotted a pickup truck pulling up behind the larger truck.
In a split second decision, I raised my hand in a wave and rolled through between the two vehicles, but Rich and Steve abruptly hit their brakes. I figured the pickup couldn’t go anywhere with the larger truck stopped in front of it. The other two made the proper decision, but paid a price when their rapid deceleration led to their bikes tangling and a spoke on Rich’s front wheel getting bent.
Our behavior seemed to rile the driver of the pickup truck, as he then raced around the large truck and cut across it in a right turn, racing his engine as he sped off.
Thinking that the spoke was broken, we gingerly made our way to the day’s destination, worried about a risk the wheel might collapse. Luckily, it wasn’t a broken spoke after all. Mike, our trusty Penn Cycle mechanic supporting the trip, was able to straighten it out and true the wheel, good as new.
The second close call happened at the end of the week as we pulled back into the town of Brainerd. I was in a small group of riders who were all seeking the best route to the fair grounds. We crossed a street at an intersection with cars waiting their turn.
Folks announced their intentions with calls of “Slowing!” and “Stopping!” I twisted my right foot out of the clipless pedal in preparation of stopping, and then got caught with my weight on the other foot. I followed their calls with one of my own.
“Falling.”
I came out of it with nothing more than a bruised hip, forearm and ego.
Just another close call.
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Relative Something 