I’m on the road driving to the Berryman Epic MTB race. It is around 60 miles long and is in the Mark Twain National Forest, south of St. Louis an hour. It’s the start of the Ozarks, so the terrain is undulating and the scenery is great.

Yesterday was not user friendly for me. I have two MTB bikes, but both are questionable for this race. This race is mainly on rocky singletrack. Horse rocky singletrack. I’ve race the race twice before and have flatted a total of 5 times, maybe more, in two races. As soon as you put a tube in a tire here, you are done. You have to be riding tubeless with lots of sealant.

Andy Caron from Sram hooked me up with a Sid. I had to wait around all morning before it showed. It was supposed to be here yesterday, but the UPS plane broke down in St. Louis. Go figure. So, this morning, I was scrambling trying to put the new fork on, only partially successful. I’m about ready to do some wrenching in the back of the van now.

I was mounting two beefier Specialized tires on my 29’r last night. One had two holes in the sidewall. I’m not sure if it was from shipping or a manufacturing error. I tried to get them to seal with latex, but that didn’t work. So I took it off and patched it. That was a hassle.

I stripped the bolt in my rear derailleur on the 26 inch MTB. What else? My disc brake is a side mount and the RockShox is a front mount, so I had to come up with an adapter. It seemed like everything that could have went wrong did.

All this on top of catching 3 kittens, washing them and throwing them into the back bathroom. Again.

Okay, it is a nice drive, through Columbia MO and then diagonal down to Cuba and Steelville. Hopefully we’ll get there early enough to get beat up a little.

These were bigger than pin holes.

New RockShox Sid, sort of installed.