Crash & Burn

Brizn @ The Watershed May 11th 2008

Originally uploaded by jcrashmore

I can’t believe I’m saying this but I had a great ride at the shed this morning. Brizn and I met up this morning to squeeze in a ride this morning before the family stuff started up. We did a short but very enjoyable loop at the shed. It really was the first time in a very long time that I had an enjoyable ride there. I can only hope this means my watershed curse has ended!

I actually found todays loop to be a good mix of rocks, roots and just plain old single track. Perhaps I was in a more positive state of mind for this mornings ride. In any event I’m ready to start giving this place another go.

May 4th At Schaefer Farms

Originally uploaded by jcrashmore

Did my favorite loop around Schaefer this morn on the If. I love this bike on this type of terrain. It’s a real joy to ride on this fast flowy type of stuff. Always makes for a great ride. Weather was awesome trails were killer couldn’t ask for a better day to ride. Missed out on the group mini epic that was planned as I couldn’t devote that much time to ride today. I need to get out with the gang soon though. I needed to adjust my king hubs when I got home which didn’t take anytime at all. I still really dig these wheels.

Now I’m off to play with the new Canon Xsi and Tamron lens I picked up. I think we’re headed out to harpers ferry to shoot some photos.

Hope responded to my email and it looks like they’re going to take care of my hub I don’t tend to get too upset over occasional equipment failures when the company stands by their product and makes good on it. As I mentioned up until yesterday this hub performed great. It’s only after repeated failures ie my pile of broken crank brothers pedals do I start to get really upset.

I put the Blur back into service last night and will just ride that around until I get the wheel rebuilt.

CrackedHopePro3

Originally uploaded by jcrashmore

Today’s ride was cut pretty short due to my first serious mechanical of the season. While powering up a rocky little climb at Fairland my rear hub (Hope Pro II XC) made a horrible snapping/cracking noise. At first I thought something had slipped internally or something but upon closer inspection I found the hub had a crack almost the entire length of the body running side to side. I managed to very carefully ride out on the paved trail. Once home I took the tension off the spokes so as to not stress them any more than needed as I’d like to reuse them. I’ve already fired off an email to hope and I’m hopeful (no pun intended) that they will stand by their hub. It’s only a bit over one season old so it should not have failed like this. There’s nothing funky with how the wheel was built etc. Just standard 32 3x. It’s been a good hub up until today. We’ll see how they repsond to my issue.

Did an excellent road ride with my long time riding buddy Pete and a few other folks. We did the covered bridge ride in Frederick. As the name implies it kinda wanders to a bunch of the covered bridges around our area. We did around 43 miles at a casual pace and managed to avoid the forcasted raid. It was kinda windy and a little chilly but was still a great day to be out. My legs needed the miles.

I’ve been playing with some geotagging via topofusion the results of which can be found here

http://www.mtb-blog.com/rides/CoveredBridges/

Speed etc seem to be slightly off with this software but the photos and maps are good.

You can also check out the loop via google earth if you have it installed.

http://www.mtb-blog.com/rides/CoveredBridges/coveredbridges041308.kmz