First, to anyone who hasn’t seen it… A photo of me at Dirty Kanza is the headliner in an Outside Magazine article: 200 Miles on 2 Wheels

Of course, my first nationally published photo is of me, looking like I’m about to pull over and burst into tears. It was a photo from early in the race, so I’m not exactly sure why I looked so concerned. I’ll take it, though. It’s otherwise a cool photo and story.

I mentioned storms and trail saturation in my previous post… following that, Mother Nature took that to the next level, and it stormed/downpoured enough that the Wolf River flooded large parts of the Wolf River Trail system that I frequently ride from my house. Flash flooding abounded…

My nicely groomed back yard before/during:

Marley appreciated the dig-ability of the soft mud once it had stopped pouring:

The entrance to the Germatown Greenline:

And, the concrete ditch you’d normally ride through to go down the Gray’s Creek trail:

That last one is the day after, as the water was receding. You can see by the mud line on the surrounding vegetation that I would have been standing under water in that spot at the crest of the flood.

The rainy days gave me a chance to finally fix my Whiskey No.7 fork. The brake mount came with a very poor finish from the factory, so it was a struggle to get the front brake adjusted correctly. The guy in their warranty department pulled a *Crank Brothers, telling me it was my job to face the post mounts on a brand new fork. So, the shop had to purchase the tool, and I had to wait until I had time to do the job. The bottom mount seemed to be the problem child… I had to remove a slightly unsettling amount of material from it in order to get proper alignment. The whole process took a little less than an hour (if I had to do it again, without meticulously double checking all of the instructions for each step as I went, it’d still be a 30ish minute process).

The small gap between the back face of the cutting guide and the knob of the cutting tool represents the amount of material that needed to be removed from the lower post in order to make it even with the upper post:

It works now, but it still chaps my ass that I have to deal with something that shouldn’t be the shop/consumer’s problem.

*”pulling a Crank Brothers” refers to how Crank Brothers’ customer service informed me that I need to disassemble every pair of new pedals that I sold and replace the tiny bit of thin, pixie-dust-esque grease that was in them from the factory with something of a higher quality. They blamed it on a problem with their manufacturer and said that they wouldn’t warranty pedals that fell apart because the grease from the factory dried up within 2 weeks of use.

Between rain storms, I did manage a good bachelorette week while Ryan and Matt were out of town. I locked my keys in my car at a going away party:

Kicked some stuff hard enough to necessitate the shaping of my ice packs to match my shins (sparring with a big dude = continuation of training in Expert Mode):

Geeked out about getting a single-stream recycling bin:

And finally got a new fork for the Cysco Hardtail:

The only downside of the new fork is that it’s white. Between the black and white fork, the ti frame, and my multi-colored I9 wheels, there are faaaaar too many colors on my bike. I can’t complain too much, though. It is a really, really nice fork that I’m very happy to have. I’m going to ride it down to the Wolf River Trails today and see if the trail looks like it will be dry enough for a 4th of July ride tomorrow.