The Ride Before the Ride

The Pasadena Bike Tour starts at 6am so I woke up early this morning to do a 6am ride, just to see what the weather's like then. Fortunately we're having a heat wave so the weather was perfect. Unfortunately, my quick 10-mile ride turned into a 15-mile ride because of a fire in nearby Sylmar which, once again, closed off part of my route so I had to turn around. Oh well:


Another reason to do a short ride was to check out my bike after its tune up at Izzy Cycles. Good thing I did. One of the things I asked was that they look into problems I was having shifting down into a couple of gears in back (sorry, I'm still a noob at these things). They fixed that but did they have to maladjust the front derailleur to do it? When I picked up my bike I also picked up a Crank Brothers M-10 multi-tool for the bike. Good thing I did. Right off the bat I found the chain rubbing up against the derailleur and I couldn't shift enough to fix it. Hop off the bike, break out the M-10, adjust the derailleur (I knew those screws adjusted it somehow but I forgot exactly what), then hop back on. All was well until I went down my first hill and shifted up to the big chainring and found that that rubbed the derailleur, too. Hop off the bike, adjust the other screw (now I know what they both do), then hop back on. Maybe it's not that big a deal but I have to wonder if it's like Van Halen and brown M&Ms: if they actually made the derailleur adjustment worse, what else did they do or not do?

Picked up my packet for the bike tour. I even geeked out and bought a special jersey and socks for the event. Sorry, couldn't help myself. However, the fires in the area have people concerned so we received an email from race officials saying that the race is still on but that they will send out email in the morning with the latest status. I'm making sure I have everything ready before I head off to bed early for my 4am wake-up.

I am going to try and take pictures with my iPhone during the ride, which means live updating. If I do, you will be able to find them here.