When All Else Fails, Run Away, and Live to Fight Another Day

Today, I diagnosed what I will guess was half of my FD problem: the little screw that holds the shifter cable in place was partly stripped, giving it just enough purchase to shift once or twice in the workstand, but nothing more.  I showed it to Jon, who agreed that was probably at least a good part of the problem, and we replaced it with a new one, complete with proper threads.

I popped the new screw on, tensioned the cable (first in the wrong ring, which was silly), and screwed it down tight.  Then I fiddled with my limit screws for a moment, lubed my chain (again), and tried shifting: voila!  Back and forth it went, from small ring to big ring and big ring to small ring, a dozen times and change.

Excellent!  I thought.  Then I did a little jig, and proudly (if stupidly) announced that I'd fixed my front derailleur.

Well ... as they say, pride goeth before getting stuck in a big gear again.

Off I went to play at Eva Bandman Park, which is quite near work.  Halfway there, I was feeling a little frisky and caught sight of a bunny -- err, another guy on a shiny road bike -- so I popped into the big ring and gave chase.  I was gaining ground when he turned around in the driveway to Eva Bandman.  Since I had reached my destination, I called off the hunt, swung into the drive, hit my left shifter and ......

Nothing.

Hm.

I figured perhaps I'd just hosed up the shift.  Maybe, I reasoned, I'm out of practice.  Never mind that downtube shifters are about as uncomplicated as it gets, cycling-wise, and that I was able to shift from small ring to big ring and back with no problem from the moment I bought QS.  You know how it is.  Reality is blasted inconvenient sometimes.

So I clicked my shifter back into place, circled in the parking lot, and rolled back up the drive to the starting-lane entrance.  There, I did a bunch of laps while fiddling with my shifter.  I'm sure that some of the folks hanging out in the parking lot were wondering what, exactly, I was doing up there, riding back and forth like a madman.  I was embarassed and pretended I was scoping out the course (which was somewhat true, but I wasn't feeling quite up to attacking the 2013 World Cup course with 53x23 as my easiest gear).  And, of course, I did a few bike-handling drills (bunny hops, serpentines, little sprints) just to make it look good.  They probably just assumed I was drunk.  Or crazy.  Maybe both.

I realized, as I was riding around and around that narrow strip of pavement, that the FD was moving some -- it's just that there wasn't quite enough tension on the cable to get it back to the small ring from the big one, once I'd shifted over.  I suspect I may simply not have tightened it down far enough, or perhaps it came out of its surprisingly-complex little track, or something along those lines.  For all that, it may just be that the limit stops are all wrong, and I just need to fiddle with the screws a bit more.  Preferably this will involve acquiring new screws somehow, as mine are looking rough -- the winter has not been good to them.

I returned to the shop in good spirits, having had a nice, quick little ride in the broad sunshine, and decided not to fiddle any further with the derailleur for the day.  I decided to file it under 'Lost the Battle, but Will Win the War.'  After all, FDs can be replaced, if all else fails.

Having decided to forego the FD for the time being, I spent half an hour wrestling my seatpost (next step? ammonia, per Sheldon Brown).  I suspect the mechanic may be as much of a problem as the seatpost and/or the seat tube -- I still lack full use of my right shoulder, in particular such uses as lifting and twisting, both of which are generally involved in removing a difficult seatpost.  Likewise, even under normal circumstances, I possess all the massive, staggering upper-body strength of an anemic 8-year old boy (8-year-old girls are often stronger than 8-year-old boys, since girls mature faster -- that or else my horseback-riding friends when I was a kid were simply shirking their destinies as future female caber-tossers).

At any rate, I'm consulting the immortal Saint Sheldon on front derailleurs.  On Friday, when I'm back in the shop, I'll give fixing it another crack (tomorrow I plan to clean the house a bit more, tool around on the bike, and maybe go to one of these budge meeting thingies that they're talking about on the LBC listserv).  I got a bit closer today.  If, between the seatpost and the derailleur, I can get QS entirely humming by end of day Friday, I do hope to play on the 'cross course a little this week ... though maybe, instead, I'll just finish putting Swift back together (It turns out we have Travel Agents, which are the one bit I plan to add to make the road-style brake levers work with Swift's v-brakes) and give him a cruise around the course instead.  I'd like to finish Swift anyway, in hopes of coaxing DD out for a ride with the LBC on Saturday morning (one I can do even if I can't get out of my big ring, and which it wouldn't hurt me to do in the big ring).

The neat part, of course, is that I've come just a bit closer to being able to maintain my classic Shimano 600 FD.  Note, of course, that I did not say 'FDs' in general -- before working on mine, I looked at every single bike in the repair bay and realized that not one of their FDs even resembled the 600 -- and few of them resembled each-other.

Considering that, even a few months ago, I was mortally afraid of more than glancing at my derailleurs (I had this notion that they were something like ghosts and might vanish in a cloud of vapor if you looked at them too directly), I can at least consider today's efforts to be a partial triumph.

The silver lining, I suppose, in this slightly-annoying cloud, is that it won't kill me to ride bigger gears for a while.  The body adapts, and the great part is this: if you get used to spinning a fairly big gear while riding on the flat and climbing, once you have smaller gears again, you can ride those that much more easily (as I learned this weekend).  The trick is to avoid mashing whenever possible, since it's ineffective, bad for your knees, and looks silly (and I feel justified in saying this, as a former all-mashing-all-the-time cyclist who is very grateful to still have very good knees).

So that's it for now.

In the Battle of the Wrench, QS is winning right now, but I'm confident that -- in time -- I will come out ahead.

On Being 'That Guy'

I think I wrote recently about my decision to try to give drivers the benefit of the doubt more often.  It's mostly working, though I still have moments of random irateness when someone pulls a truly bone-headed move immediately in front of me and cranks my adrenaline levels through the roof (I have found I am not quite as sweet-natured when I'm in survival mode -- I actually flipped a guy off last Thursday, when the weather was really terrible, for telling me to get in the bike lane when the bike lane was literally impassable ... felt bad about it later, because A) he probably thought he was giving me sound advice, not just being an ass-hat and B) it was rude and flat-out uncharitable).

Oddly enough, I've found that my efforts to consider drivers' actions in a more charitable light has made me consider my own actions a little more critically.  That is, since I am granted fairly-frequent opportunities to try to consider other possible motivations for a given driver's actions than 'Wow, what a bike-hating jackass!', I suddenly find myself wondering what my motivations might appear to be.

This is pretty new for me.  I have Asperger's Syndrome, which basically means that I'm pretty smart but have limited insight into the minds of other people.  Considering others' motives is a pretty big deal for me; considering that other people might be considering my motives is huge.

Last night, I had a great opportunity to practice this skill: I was being a bone-head and ran a red light.

Now, I do understand that for some cyclists -- and, indeed, for many bike couriers -- running red lights is a matter of course.  For my own part, however, I feel that if I want to be treated like a member of the confraternity of valid road users, I have to play by the rules.

Thus, I was pretty ticked at myself, even though I didn't intend to run the light.  In fact, I was even more ticked at myself than I might otherwise have been, because not only was I a champion ass-hat for one highly-visible moment, I was a champion ass-hat because I was being thoughtless and not really paying attention.

My mind, at the moment this incident transpired, was on my legs.  I was hammering down a long flat, enjoying the feel of a good sprint near the end of a good day on the bike.  I was thinking about pedaling circles -- which, admittedly, is generally a good thing to think about -- even though I knew the light in question was coming up and that I should probably get a sense of whether or not I ought to slow the heck down (in fact, the correct answer at this particular light is always 'slow the heck down,' because the yellow phase is ridiculously short and the intersection involved is somewhat epic).  I was feeling strong, and I didn't want to interrupt my flow and fall out of 'the zone.'

So instead I glanced up, saw the light had -- at some unknown point -- turned yellow, and gunned it.

Had I been feeling fresher and rocking a bigger gear, I probably could've made it.  I mention this only because the fact that I'd made the light before under similar circumstances had a great deal to do with my less-than-brilliant decision.  I wasn't thinking about the fact that, while I was making pretty good time, I was already off my 'daily time-trial' record by a couple of minutes, indicating that I wasn't quite as fast as I wanted to be.

As my front tire touched the white line, the light flipped from yellow to red.  I thought for a split second about throwing out a full-on emergency stop, but I had already committed a great deal of momentum to getting through that light, so I hammered on through.  I shouldn't have done it.  I should have stopped and waited, like I usually do.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a fellow in a truck shouted something out his window at me as he passed a little bit later.  Honestly, he was within his rights: I'm assuming he shouted because he was still buzzing with post-almost-hitting-a-cyclist adrenaline, though I should observe that he must've reacted right quick, as I wasn't even aware of his presence for a good sixth of a mile or so.

At the next light, I sat immediately behind him, debating whether or not I should roll up and apologize.  I couldn't actually muster the courage.  I was really disappointed in myself already, and I didn't want to roll the dice on having to hear an anti-bike tirade, if he turned out to be one of those guys.  I am not a patient person when I'm mad at myself, and that kind of situation requires an armload of patience.  I'm not proud of my decision not to say anything, but given the circumstances, I think it was the right one.

As I finished my ride -- cranking hard up Southern Parkway and Bluegrass to the weird five-way intersection that marks the start of my 'cool-down lap' -- I contemplated the possible consequences of my actions.

Like the fact that the truck-driving guy probably wouldn't have noticed me at all if I'd managed to stop, but now associates the experience with all the negative stuff he's already heard about cyclists.  Like the fact that the human mind more readily recalls unpleasant experiences than pleasant ones, which probably means he already has at least one or two 'bad cyclist' stories under his belt (even I have some of those).

Like the fact that I wasn't mentally-present enough to make the right call when I saw that the light had turned yellow.

Like the fact that, for all that I try not to be 'That Guy,' I'm going to make bone-headed mistakes now and then, just like good drivers do, now and then.

I'm still pissed at myself.  I take a certain satisfaction in playing by the rules, and I don't like it when I break one, no matter what the reason.  I'm not too keen on the fact that -- for even a minute -- I valued my momentum and my 'zone' over safety and the good-faith agreement by which all road-users abide.

I spent this morning trying to make amends while out on my daily mail rounds.  Extremely-conscientious stopping on cold, wet roads is probably a good penance for running a light on a fast, dry road, when stopping would've been easy.

At any rate, it seems that it's going around right now.  Maybe I can blame the late-winter blahs?

Maybe not.  Maybe I'll just try to be more careful in the future, because I know almost no-one remembers a good cyclist, but everyone remembers a bad one.