A New Wheel and a Good Crash
A plan long in coming finally bore fruit last night, as I stayed up until 1am rebuilding my rear wheel using the existing DT Swiss 240S singlespeed rear hub (a very light hub), new DT Swiss Supercomp 2.0/1.7/1.8 triple butted spokes with alloy nipples, and a Stan's NoTubes ZTR 355 29er rim. After a little refreshing of the wheel building process from Sheldon Brown's website, the whole thing came together remarkably smoothly. Well, I did end up fishing 5 nipples out of the rim. Grrr... I used the NoTubes yellow nylon tape without the rubber rim strip and the Olympic valve stem to seal it all up. A brand new Maxxis Crossmark tire seated and sealed quite nicely after dropping a couple ounces of Stan's tire sealant in it. Pop! Pop! The tire seated in the bead quite audibly. I put 40 PSI of air in it and let it sit overnight and it was still nice and hard in the morning. Whoop! It was a really fun project and I was very happy with the final results.
This morning, after getting maybe 5 hours of sleep (lights out at 3am, up at 8am, with poor quality sleep thanks to a cold I came down with Friday night) I got up and readied everything for an outing at the Frederick Watershed with Mike and Tris. We got rolling on the trail at maybe 10:45am and did a short approximately 14 mile ride. I was surprised by how out of shape I was, but not unhappy with the speed I was able to keep up while on the move, and quite happy with my confidence and handling skills. The new Crossmark showed itself to have a good amount of traction, but the trails were mostly tacky, and just about any tire would have fared well. It seemed to be a fast roller, despite having mounted it backwards (oops). I was running the tire with 28 PSI, something I would never have contemplated while using tubes. 35 would have been the minimum I would use in the Shed with tubes. The tubeless setup showed it's merit, as I felt the tire hit the rim twice with no ill effect, after mis-timing some hops.
In the last mile or two of the ride, I decided to get a little jump off a rock on the right side of the trail. A pretty small drop really. I'm not entirely certain what happened. Tris was behind me and said my rear tire landed first, as it should. What I think happened is that the trail bent to the left there and I needed to be going that direction immediately after coming down from the drop, and had my tire turned a bit in that direction. Unfortunately I didn't adequately gauge the firmness of the trail where I was to land, and my front tire went into some soft clay type mud, which for some reason crossed up my front wheel and effectively stopped forward motion immediately. Except for me hitting the ground of course. It happened so fast I'm not certain of anything, except that my face and chest hit the ground pretty hard. It happened so fast I apparently didn't even have time to take my hands off the bars, and somehow the impact with the ground sprained the last two fingers of both hands. I got off light really -- a little bloody scrape on my nose from my shades, the lightly sprained fingers, and small scrapes on my right forearm and left shin. Oh, right, and lightly bruised ribs high up in my chest. At least I hope they're lightly bruised; I probably won't know until I try to get out of bed in the morning.
In spite of that, I had a really fun time today. I was riding aggressively and well, I was with two really good friends, the temperature wasn't bad at all (not much wind helped), I had a great new extremely light wheel, and my low back (SI joint/sacrum problems apparently) was much better than it had been in a week and a half -- life was good to me today. Now, to get over this cold and really start training for the season ahead.
