Clowning Around In Austin

[ornoth_cycling]

Damn, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Since my last ride in Pittsburgh on December 21th, I’ve boxed my bike up for shipping; moved from Pittsburgh to Austin, Texas; brought it to a new bike shop for some long-overdue work; was told that the frame was cracked and that I should talk to the manufacturer about a replacement; and finally pulled out my long-forgotten folding bike in order to toodle around and begin exploring my new town.

Downtown Austin

Is this goodbye?

Clown bike at the boat launch

Mountainclimb Drive, less than a klick from home

So let’s get you caught up. But fair warning: I’m going to leave you on a cliffhanger for a week or two while the cracked frame / replacement story plays out.

Let’s think back to December 2022…

Disassembling and boxing up my beloved 2013 Specialized Roubaix for the first time went well, thanks to instructional videos on YouTube and Pittsburgh shop BikeTek, who gifted me a sturdy bike box that was plenty roomy for my oversized 61cm frame.

Things were good but not 100% happy three weeks later when I unboxed the bike in Austin. The only obvious damage – probably by me – was a torn electronic shifter cable.

I could have ordered a replacement and fixed that myself. But I also wasn’t sure I’d be able to correctly re-attach my rear derailleur. And everything I touched needed a deep cleaning and new grease. And the old girl hadn’t had a thorough tune-up since spring 2018. Plus I had struggled for years with my chain skipping due to worn chainrings… So I decided to bring it to Trek Research (on Friday the 13th, ominously) for a complete tear-down and rebuild. A snafu ordering parts added more time off the bike, although I was too busy unpacking and setting up our new home to have ridden much anyways.

Two weeks after I brought it in, the shop finally got around to looking at my bike, then called me to let me know that the bike frame had a crack in the drive-side chainstay, and was essentially unrideable. They suspended work and charged me for nothing except a couple parts I still wanted. But I wasn’t getting a working bike back. After over a month off the bike – and despite my excitement about riding in Austin – I was out of commission for the foreseeable future.

My options weren’t great. I wasn’t going to continue riding a cracked frame, knowing that it could shatter underneath me at any moment. I could’ve had a third-party repair the crack, although carbon repairs are sketchy. Or I could trash the lot and start looking for a whole new bike, which would be both time-consuming and expensive.

However, my first step was obvious: talk to the manufacturer (Specialized) to see what they could do for me. After all, they have both a lifetime warranty and a replacement assistance program. So on January 28th I dropped my baby off at the Specialized Austin showroom and waited for them to get back to me. I’ll pick that thread up again in my next blogpo, after the warranty claim has played itself out. But in the meantime…

That was just a couple days before a big ice storm hit, which I posted about separately, here. When we recovered from the storm, I hadn’t ridden for 45 days. I haven’t spent that long off the bike since my mother’s hospitalization and passing six years ago. I was beyond stir-crazy, and it was time to take a radical step.

On February 4th I went out to the garage and opened up the big blue plastic suitcase. It was time to do the unthinkable: pull my folding Bike Friday Pocket Rocket out and put it back together. I’m not sure when it was last used; it was definitely prior to 2011.

The next day I took my clown bike out for a short 14km shakedown ride around the neighborhood. Neither the brakes nor the shifting (nor my legs) worked very well, but it was a heart-warming 23°C in February and my first frickin’ bike ride in nearly two months! I followed that up with a 30km ride to downtown Austin and back. And after taking it in to have the shifting re-indexed, I’ve done additional rides as weather has permitted. It feels really strange having power meter pedals on a bike with 20-inch wheels! And we won’t talk about my fitness after two months off the bike!

And that’s kinda where things stand at the moment, but stay tuned…

My first Austin blogpost was supposed to include my impressions and experiences after a month or two of riding in Austin, but I think that needs to be deferred until I can do some real riding… and not just on my folding clown bike! And when my primary bike situation gets resolved, I’m sure that too will warrant its own, separate post. So I guess you can look forward to some interesting updates over the next month or two!