Bay Area Biker

Last week I took a trip up to Fairfax to ride in the incredible anomaly that is Camp Tamarancho.

Where else can you find a sign like this?

The first time I visited the park and came across this sign, I imagined it to be some kinda Br’er Rabbit psychology: park officials, figuring all mountain bikers for scofflaws, tell us to stay on the singletrack and assume we’ll instead “poach” the fire roads. Well, I discovered early on in my visits to the park that my outlandish assumption was wrong: they really do want mountain bikers to stay on the singletrack. This is true even as you ascend Iron Springs fire road into the park - when you see Alchemist Trail jut off to the left, that’s your cue to leave the fire road; it’s not made entirely obvious by the signage, but they don’t want you on the fire road beyond that point.

Here’s another sign you don’t see all that often:

Camp Tamarancho is one of the great pay-to-play parks in the Bay Area. It’s $5/day to ride, and you can also purchase annual passes. The loop plus the Alchemist out-and-back gives you 8.5 miles of technical singletrack, with many switchbacks, a few rocky sections (one of which I’ve never cleared), and a few sections that precariously skirt ravines. It’s fun in either direction, but first-timers are best off taking it clockwise.

Since I didn’t get a chance to ride this weekend (due to a variety of reasons and not excluding laziness on Sunday), and since today is a rest day in the Tour de France, I was really hoping to live vicariously through one of my buddies who did ride.

I found Kellsey on chat and asked him about his weekend mountain biking trip to Northstar at Tahoe. I was particularly interested to hear his impressions of riding with suspension, as it was to be his first ride with a suspension fork on his Karate Monkey. Up until last week, Kellsey had been a die hard rigid rider, but then this article dropped and I simultaneously sent him a craigslist posting for a good-deal used 29er fork. Those two occurrences mixed with the cold front of incredulity Kellsey had continually faced when talking to people about riding rigid at Northstar and a perfect storm formed that left Kellsey with a springy front end. He got the fork mounted on Thursday, rode it to work on Friday, and then left for the mountains on Saturday; and I was excited to hear the results.

Apparently the fork Kellsey bought was at the shelter for abandoned or unwanted bike parts because it was afraid of heights and not actually because the previous owner was moving to a smaller apartment that didn’t allow suspension forks. Despite having performed exquisitely over curbs and potholes all day Friday, somehow the fork failed during the first ride up the ski lift at Northstar, before he even got one chance to ride it down the mountain. Broken fork, blistered hands… I’m assuming it was at least pretty up there in the mountains this weekend and I’m curious to know how he spent his time on Sunday since he opted not to ride the second day, but the story will be fleshed out tonight: I offered to douse his frustrations in booze, since I feel largely responsible for having pointed him in the direction of that used fork. Kellsey heartily agreed with this plan, saying “we can drink and make the monkey rigid again.” A few minutes later he apologized for his untintentional double-entendre, but I assured him that my brain had been in bike-speak mode and that my sensibilities remained unassaulted.

This is one example of the perils of purchasing used equipment. Yet again, in some circles this will be seen as but another example of the perils of running anything more complicated than a brakeless fixie. To the latter I say, “run brakes and freewheels because it’s better, and make your bike as complicated as your pocketbook will allow,” to the former, “purchase as much new equipment as your pocketbook will allow.” When building my Niner I opted to purchase a used fork off of mtbr.com classifieds. When it showed up, there were blemishes not accounted for in the original product description/pictures. Before I mounted and rode the fork I addressed my concerns to the seller in an email, perhaps more fervently than I ought to have. The seller reassured me that my used fork functioned perfectly, and ultimately I found that to be true. In contrast, Kellsey’s used fork had no blemishes to cause him concern but turned out to be borked anyway. Tonight’s application of beer mechanics will show the two experiences to be one and the same.

I’d been holding onto this busted road frame for over four years…

…and this year I finally got around to fixing it.

WHA’HAPPENED?:

I broke the frame at the Shorewood Criterium on July 15, 2004 just about midway through that year’s Superweek race series in Wisconsin. Somehow I wiped out on my left side in a shady turn on the backside of the course. As I lay on the ground, in the middle of a pack of riders travelling ~32mph, one enterprising rider from behind, rather than fall, stop, or simply ride around me, instead rode over me, and during this maneuver my carbon driveside seatstay was snapped beneath that rider’s wheels like so many blades of grass beneath Lance Armstrong’s in stage 9 of the 2003 Tour, when he cut that switchback to avoid the fallen Beloki. I opted not to grab a pit bike and finish the race that day, but I was able to finish out Superweek that year, thanks to my supremo team manager at the time, Ponch, who rush-shipped me a replacement frame and some new bar tape. Rather than toss the busted frame into a recycle bin, though, I held onto it – the frame’s main triangle and chainstays were steel, which gave me hope that someday it could be fixed.

I continued to ride and race the replacement bike for the next couple years until it was stolen in November 2006. I had already more or less stopped racing in May of that year, which meant I was doing way more commuting than training, so I opted to replace the replacement bike with something a little more durable and versatile (my beloved Bianchi Roger), a choice which guaranteed that I wouldn’t be doing any road races for some time to come.

Finally this year I mustered enough time, money, nerve, and desire to get back on the road to give the repair of my busted old frame a shot. Had it been any other tube on the frame that was compromised, I would not have attempted to fix it myself. The seatstays were the only part I felt I could cut out and replace that didn’t absolutely require a frame jig, especially considering how beefy the chainstays were.

I ordered up some basic steel seatstays and a brake bridge from a frame supply shop, and picked up some brazing rod from the hardware store and headed over to my buddy’s shop to get to work.

HACKING AWAY:

First off, I sawzalled the lower legs of the seatstays off just below the joint where they bolted to the dropout.

Then I used cutoff wheel on my Dremel to remove the wishbone mount off of the seat tube. As careful as I thought I was being, I still managed to gouge into the seat tube during this removal. I decided that I would create a patch out of the leftover metal from the wishbone and braze that to the seat tube and then braze the new seat stays onto that patch, rather than directly to the seat tube. The gouges weren’t really that bad, and I probably could have just brazed them in, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

To prep the dropouts to accept the new seatstays, I tapped into the cutoff portion with a drill bit that matched the diameter of the seatstays, in order to create a little seat for the end of the tubes. The dropouts had a square profile, so I used a grinder to round off the corners, creating a smoother transition to the round stays.

“…JUST GONNA BRAZE ALL IT BACK TOGETHER…”:

Although the rest of the frame is TIG welded, which I have some experience with, I decided that I would braze in the new seatstays, a method with which I had no prior experience. The reasons for this were: a) I knew brazing to be slightly more forgiving of mistakes, since it was accomplished using a lower heat. b) I really don’t recall being all that talented a TIG welder. Ultimately, I figured that if I screwed up and had to cut something off and start over, then brazing was the way to go.

I formed, brazed, and filed my patch for the seat tube and then got to work on mitering the seatstays. I didn’t have access to a mitering jig, so instead I used a the Dremel and a file, freehand. With this method it’s really slow-going work; constantly checking the fit and filing a bit more. Once I’d gotten the first stay to fit perfectly, there was a lot of pressure to get the second just right. I wasn’t keeping close track of time, but I think the mitering took at least two hours. When I was comfortable with the fit, I drilled a small breather hole near each joint on both seatstays, four holes total.

At this point, I decided to go ahead and completely braze, rather than just tack, the seatstays before mitering the brake bridge, but just as I began tacking in the first seatstay, I ran out of acetylene gas. Running out of gas during welding is not quick and obvious like running out of gas in a car. It’s more of a 30min process during which you continue trying to work not wanting to believe that the flame is really getting smaller and smaller; and it’s only when your patience reaches a melting point that you realize that the metal no longer will. The gas place was already closed for the day, so I had to put the project off for another week until I could get the tank refilled, bummed because I’d hoped to do the deed in one fell swoop.

A week later I was back working on it. Got the seatstays brazed in, nice and ugly-like.

…then the brake bridge mitered…

…and brazed.

I spent the next umpteen days here and there filing down the excess material from my brazed joints; not as unpleasant an activity as I would have guessed.

PAINT IT, ALMOND:

Painting’s never been my strong suit. I’ve undertaken a number of random painting projects in my life, both rattle-can and paint gun, and I generally just don’t have the patience it takes to produce a good looking paint job. I was determined to do this one right, and after a few missteps, I think I got it.

I decided on the color at the hardware store: rattle can “Almond.” Here’s the result of two weeks, four coats, and plenty of wet-sanding:

Once painted, I realized I should have spent a little more time with a file and sand paper on the seat cluster, but it really doesn’t look that bad, especially once I got the bike built up.

FIRST RIDE, APRIL 17:

For the maiden voyage, I didn’t want to make it too easy for myself to get home in case of massive seatstay failure. With that in mind, I called up JC and asked if he wanted to head across the Golden Gate Bridge to do the Paradise Loop. It’d been years since I’d ridden a road bike, and I was surprised at how different it felt from even my ‘cross bike; much twitchier, not too graceful at sub-15mph speeds. But it felt good, very good. Five years ago I rode this bike fanatically, and after a few miles I found that the geometry was still in my muscle memory. I’d worn my best mis-matched kit that day, and when we got to Lyford’s Stone Tower I called a stop and made JC take a pic of a proud roadie reborn:

I took the bike out three more times before subjecting it to the real test: King Ridge. The last road race I’d entered was Berkeley Hills in May ’06 (I DNF’d), and almost exactly three years later I was happy to be able to return to the scene in a Grasshopper, and after that ride I’m pretty confident that this frame is (re)built to last.

Bolstered by the fact that I had had the endurance to have been able to finish and even enjoy the Kings Ridge Grasshopper road race/ride, I decided to swing to the opposite side of the racing spectrum and try my hand at a high intensity short track mountain bike event, the Summit Shorty Series.

I heard about this series from Dain Zaffke (WTB), who’d won the A class at the season opener the week prior. It sounded fun, so I loaded the S.I.R. 9 into the car and drove up to McInnis Park in San Rafael.

What a great short course! The start-finish is wide and flat fire road, that veers left onto a 35yard doubletrack climb. At the top of this, you make a sharp left and hit the first quick descent down a narrow singletrack, over a small whoop-de-do before a scrambling uphill that crests a nob and throws you back down another steep, narrow single/doubletrack. This bottoms out into a hard right-hander just behind the start/finish and after a tight left-hand switchback you’re on the backside downhill, a singletrack that runs first through some trees and then out across the open hillside. There’s some texture on this downhill that makes it a little tricky - there was one lefthander in particular that I overcooked on every lap. The downhill spits you out on a paved road, where you make a left and climb back up the hill. After a quarter-mile, the pavement turns back into dirt and there are two kickers to make sure you’re paying for it, then through a flat rocky section, down a dropoff and you’re back at the start/finish.

B class: 21 starters, 6 laps. I’d planned to sit-in the whole race, since I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to respond to the intensity. First lap, wasn’t dropped = good. Second lap, felt fine = even better. Third lap, the pace slowed so much on the paved climb that I made a move despite myself, and the move stuck = great..? I was alone off the front for a couple-few laps, riding my brains out, and… not paying enough attention to what lap I was on. So, a couple-few laps later, when a rider caught me midway up the paved climb and asked me if there was one more lap to go it reinforced my delusion that we were on lap 5 rather than 6. The big difference between me and that guy was that his legs were willing to ride as if it were last lap, whereas mine were not. He started pulling away. Going along the flat rough section just before the finish I “let” two other riders sneak by me, thinking to recover a bit and take the positions back on the “last lap.” However, there was to be no “last lap,” and as I rolled through the finish line, fourth place is what I got.

I think I’ll install a dummy rear shifter on my single for keeping track of the laps. Lap 1(click); lap 2(click)…

This past Saturday, May 9th, I rode the King Ridge leg of the Grasshopper Adventure Series; 84 miles of hard, hard riding along the gorgeous North Coast. It was my return to the world of NorCal road racing, after 3 long years away, and it was complete radness.

To illustrate how long I’ve been off the scene, or simply how bad my memory is, I was convinced that the last Grasshopper I’d ridden was King Ridge in 2005. So for the past three months that I’ve been talking about doing this ride, I couldn’t figure out what year they’d added the extra dirt section, since the only one I remembered was Willow Creek. Well it turns out it was the ~20mi shorter Fort Ross Grasshopper that I rode in 2005, not King Ridge. So it was going to be an ever harder test than my memory was leading me to believe. Fortunately, I didn’t realize this until this morning, when I finally did my research before writing this post.

This would also be the ultimate R&D for my newly resurrected road frame, onto which I recently brazed some replacement seatstays. Going in, I knew there was about a 25% chance that either my legs or those seatstays would break somewhere along the route. It’s a given that the legs would break on some uphill portion, but I could only hope that the seatstays wouldn’t fail in the middle of a 45mph+ downhill on Skaggs.

Friday night I beercarb-loaded with some buddies who weren’t riding the next day and in the morning I topped things off with a leftover burrito and a cuppa Taylor Made French Roast. I got to Occidental plenty early, dropped the $15 for entry and one-day license (license?!), got my commemorative direction card (sadly lost en route), and then I was on the bike cruising the town, looking for familiar faces. I didn’t have to go far to run into my old Mud Puppy captain, Yuri, and teammate Aren Timmel. Long time! Very good to see those guys again. As WTB’s Dain Zaffke was giving me a hard time for warming up, up rolls Jason “JC” Cardillo and proud new papa John Staroba in a borrowed 1980s Chevy stretch van, sunfade beige, complete with bolt-in moto wheel chocks and suction cup curtains that didn’t wrap all the way around. They were running a little late because JC had been pulled over not once but twice on his way up from San Francisco for having expired tags.

On the Start Line
As we were waiting to start, I went over my tactics: repeating the words “front group” over and over to myself until I no longer knew what they meant. My plan was to start near the back, let things shake out on the first climb, find a good mid-pack group, and keep the needle out of the red.

The descent out of town was thankfully sane, and it wasn’t until we were going through Cazadero that I had to put in a couple of accelerations to avoid getting gapped off the back of what I think was the main group. I was feeling very nostalgic what with the drop bars, skinny tires, riding in the pack, getting gapped, bridging the gap…

As we started climbing King Ridge Rd. the sense of my plan becamse apparent. I got stronger as the climb wore on. Up on the ridge I found myself in between groups. I could see a group of five about a half mile in front, but I sat up, took in the incredible views, and waited for the group behind to catch me. I wound up in a group of about 10, made up of JC, a couple NorCal riders (incl. Staroba), a few Gianni’s, a couple DFLs, and a couple others. Though I was content to sit at the back, worried as I was about subjecting my 50mile legs to an 84mile ride, I was still feeling pretty good by Tin Barn Rd. so I got on the front a couple times.

The descent down Skaggs Springs was unreal. I threw caution under the wheels of the belief truck, knowing that a seatstay failure at 45mph+ was no more dangerous than one at < 30mph. I rode in fourth wheel most of the way down, following a couple of Giannis and a DFL who seemed to know the descent very well. Fast, twisty, tree-shrouded descents will never ever get old.

We hit the coast and were directed left by the gentleman on the (¿Piaggio MP3?). I took a second out of being perpetually in awe of the beautiful surroundings to remind myself that we were only halfway through the ride. Checking with JC confirmed this fact.

Our group tried to form a pace line going down HWY1, but thankfully weren’t able. Kruse Rd. shook us out, and JC and I landed somewhere in the middle of the split. We crested onto Sea View with a trio of Giannis, at which point we split a can of my secret weapon. We picked up a fourth Gianni shortly before Myers Grade to become 6.

Willow Creek
After a water stop in Jenner, JC and I trudged on towards Willow Creek. In an effort to delay the onset of pain, JC procured a pinch flat on the potholes in the first mile. I waited with him while he fixed it and as we set off again we picked up another rider. As we entered the trees, it was my turn to apply a mechanical against suffering as a branch got in my front spokes and snapped a spoke (nearly two) off at the nipple. I stopped, wrapped the flailing spoke around another, opened the front brake, and pushed on.

JC was riding really strong on the lower section of the climb, and we lost our third party. We rode through a fallen tree that at first I was convinced had *just fallen as it looked impassable, but upon riding closer I saw that there was a well-worn path that weaved through. It was just like that scene in Indiana Jones 3 where he doesn’t believe the bridge is there until he throws sand on it.

The appearance of the Two Sisters triggered my inner singlespeeder and I immediately jumped off and started walking, while JC continued riding for a dozen more meters. It was at this point that I hit my groove. As I remounted at the top of the Sisters two contradictory things happened simultaneously: my stomach hit empty (no more burrito burps!) and I got another wind. I flew up the top half of the climb and picked off 6 more riders before the finish.

It was an absolutely fantastic ride; I love that loop. And it seems I can call my midpack finishes just like Di Luca can call his wins: I came in 56th o/o ~135 in just under 5 hours. And my seatstay braze job shows nary a crack! (Now to go hunt down some spokes and rebuild this front wheel before I have to return it to my buddy…)

This year I succeeded in getting my buddy Jared back on the mountain bike. It’s because of Jared that I got into mountain biking as a teenager, having always fashioned myself a BMX freestyler since early childhood. It was when he got his first mountain bike that I realized what the benefits of having big wheels and multiple gears would be to a kid like myself who lived way out in the middle of nowhere and was a few years away from legally being able to drive a car…

Jared had been “off the bike” for the better part of a decade; his last barely-ridden bike was stolen from his apartment in Phoenix some six years prior and he’d never gotten another. Since he moved back to the Bay Area last year, into my jurisdiction, I decided that he would ride again.

To accomplish the feat of getting Jared back on the trails I had to act as a sort of unsolicited-broker, first convincing him that he needed a bike, then finding just the right bike on craigslist for just the right price – a price that Jared wouldn’t balk at any more than he would balk at the idea that he was in the market for a mountain bike, since he wasn’t, necessarily.

It didn’t take long for me to find the right bike and I got a confirmation from Jared, through text message, that he would reimburse me the cost of the bike upon delivery, so long as it wasn’t purple. Done deal. In one of those miracles of timing, already having plans to drive up to Santa Rose that weekend, I was able to swing by the Alamo Square neighborhood to pick up the bike on my way out of town and deliver it to Jared straightaway.

When I got to Jared’s house I slyly parked just down the street so that I could grab the bike out of the hatchback and ride it up to him as he wrenched on a car in his driveway. I pedaled up, smiling, knowing that the steel framed, mechanically perfect, 29er singlespeed (convertible to geared) was the perfect bike with which Jared could reacquaint himself with the trails of Annadel. And I knew that he, being the mechanic that he is, would glance at the machine and instantly know and appreciate these facts as well. And I knew that S. Burma Trail in Annadel, which played host to the yardsale that I remember killed Jared’s nerve so many years ago was fearing the wrathful return of this once magnificent rider… So it was, with bells chiming and choirs singing in my head I rode up the driveway and Jared looked up, saw the bike and he said, “it’s purple.”

“It’s metallic purple-ish. More like ‘gunmetal purple,’ really,” I said, softening my pronunciation of the word ‘purple’ as best I could. “Anyway, it’s just paint – it can be repainted. I promise, if you can’t handle this ‘killer lavender,’ then I’ll come up some other weekend and rattle-can it some color you like.”

“Camo?”

“Uh, sure, that involves buying three cans of paint as opposed to one and doing a lot of masking, but yeah we can do that…”

He walked over and took the bike from me, hefted it, and threw a leg over it. I suggested he ride off a couple curbs to get a feel for the big-wheeled bike, realizing that he might not remember 26-inch wheeled bikes well enough for a comparison. He asked about the rigid steel fork and I said that if he got back into riding and found the fork to be a hindrance, then I’d broker him a good deal on a suspension fork. He expressed some concern about the singlespeed aspect, and again I told him that if he really got back into riding and wanted some gears, that the frame could be setup with gears. At last he smiled.

We rode Annadel that weekend and I was really surprised that being off the trails for the better part of ten years hadn’t much dampened his technical riding abilities. He was a bit sluggish on the climbs, but he could still rip a rocky singletrack downhill switchback, on flat pedals no less!  For his first climb back I subjected him to Two Quarry. This trail, like many in the park, is nothing like it used to be when we rode there as teenagers. It used to be a…fire road of sorts – more like a river of baby-heads and micro-glaciers, as difficult to descend as it was to ascend. Now the trail has been reformed into a beautiful twisting singletrack, comfortably rocky and still difficult enough to test one’s resolve. Jared had to walk a few of the sections, but he wasn’t deterred. I’m pretty sure it was the subsequent ride along Ridge Trail – tailor made for singlespeeding – that resealed Jared’s fate as a mountain biker. Within a month Jared began talking about getting a suspension fork and I found one in his price range, again fairly quickly.

Aside from hitting the trails at least a couple times a week, the guy even occasionally rides to work! In fact, his only one-speed complaints are about spinning out on his commute rather than about having to grind up a difficult climb in the park. However, when I break out my bicycle-kaleidoscope and I start speculating about the various ways we could get 2, 3, 8…24 speeds on his bike, he always brushes me off saying he likes the bike just the way it is. It’s great to have him back on the bike.

As I returned home from two sets of errands today, each time I found myself trying to regain entry into my apartment by using my bike lock key. Bike on shoulder, backpack brimming with groceries, my brain dictated that my fingers sort the small, odd-looking stainless steel key with the ovular black handle from the standard brass house keys and then pushed my hand towards the door. Granted my eyes recognized the mistake almost immediately, and prevented me from attempting to feed the key into the tumblers, but already precious micro-seconds had been lost.

Somehow the mistake never presents itself in reverse; I never find myself trying to unlock my u-lock with a house key. Nor have I ever mistaken my car key for anything other than the bulbous, heavy, displaced object that it is. The car key does not have a regular place in my nest of keys, but rather finds itself occasionally placed there by the parasitizing mother of necessity, and I’m wary the entire time it’s there, lest it hatch and begin ejecting the true inhabitants from the nest like some awful Cuckoo chick - I’m no unwitting songbird, ready to give my energies over to the raising of bad habits such as excess reliance on the automobile…

However, sometimes I slip up, and today - Earth Day - I nearly took the car out on my errands.

In anticipation of driving to my Wednesday night soccer league across town, I’d obtained the car from my sister (we’ve comfortably shared one vehicle for going on three years), and I figured that, since I’d have it, I might as well use it to take care of my errands as well. Fortunately my morning blog readings reminded me of the sanctity of this particular day, and I resolved to do my shopping as usual, on bicycle, and also to take the bus down to my soccer game.

Aside from just being there with the gravity, terrain, and physics against which I happily propel myself and machine (and not unleashing the pending rainstorm a day early), I wasn’t particularly rewarded by Earth for my eco-travel intentions. No, heading West on Post St. towards Masonic was still the same uphill slog into an uncanny headwind as ever, and the subsequent left turn onto Presidio Ave. chimed in with the usual ‘yes’ answer to my usual ‘can this be any harder’ query. But it was, as always, an amazing day to be on the bike and I think the fact that my mind is inclined to reach for the bike lock key is some sort of testament to the happiness I experience when unhobbling my bike for the next leg of a journey.

Someday, when and if I’m a homeowner, I think I’ll pay to have the locks in my house changed to match my bike lock, so that I can use the one strange key for all. This ought to make things ever so much easier for my brain and also shed a couple-few grams from the heft of my keychain.