When I was a junior, I used to work at a bike shop. The night before a race, after work, I would essentially completely rebuild my bike. I would completely disassemble the bike, clean every bearing with solvent and then reassemble it. It took a long time. My legs were usually pretty dead from the task. But, that was what we all did. It was like a ritual. And we didn’t race nearly as often as nowadays.

I remember Kyle Smear, owner of Bikes BiKyle, a high end shop on the Mainline in Philly and PRO bike race team director, once telling me a great story. A financial trader called him one day and want to buy a complete Campagnolo Super Record Group. But the guy wanted it completely disassembled and cleaned of all the grease. He wanted to have this Groupo in his desk draw, at hand, so he could “play” with the parts while he was trading on the phone all day. He had cone wrenches and a T wrench, ect. so he could assemble and disassemble the parts over and over again. I thought this was so great. At the time, I would of loved to have a virgin set of Campy Super Record to just mess with.

Last night I was rebuilding the hubs on my XTR wheels. The reason I continue to ride Shimano wheels mainly is because the hubs are tunable. The have free bearings and last forever. I get so tired of screwing with people’s wheels that have these “sealed bearing” that are seized after just one muddy cyclocross. Anyway, there is something to be said about rebuilding hubs. I love it. Maybe it is just because of my early racing days, but it relaxes me and makes me feel like I’ve done everything possible to make my bicycle work correctly.

I’ve even like to do it if I was racing this weekend and was just sitting at a desk fiddling.

Kyle and Rip Scott with their team.

I was so worried about my wheels yesterday, I completely missed the rest of the bike. I haven’t ridden this bicycle since the BTEPIC last October. And probably not once the year before that. Anyway, I couldn’t believe that I could own or ride a bicycle that was this worn out. Everything was toast. The chainrings, idler wheels, disc brake pads. Everything except the chain and cassette. I never have a worn out chain and rarely have bad cogs. Anyway, I need to keep up more on the mechanics, obviously. This year I’ve raced six different bikes. Road, TT, 2 cross bikes and 2 MTB bikes. I guess when you have so many different bikes you’re riding at any given time, it can sort of fall through the cracks. But, this was a fissure. Check out the picture below.

I was planning on driving to Berryman today, but now am not going to leave until early tomorrow morning. It is supposed to rain and have thunderstorms all day Saturday. A 60 mile MTB on sharp rock horse trails in the rain. I’m definitely not trained for that.

I guess I ground all the teeth off last year at Berryman.

Lower pulley.

I couldn’t help but posting this photo. I rode over to the car wash at midnight last night to spray off my MTB bike. I coated the chain with diesel and then power sprayed it. Afterwards, I went across the street to Walgreens. This was the cart of the lady behind me in the checkout line. I had often wondered who bought all that junky/trashy stuff they sell at Walgreens. And here was a cart completely full of it. Plastic everything. Even bamboo. There were tons of people shopping there buying lots. At 12:30am. Makes me want to buy the stock.