Muddy Days – Musings from a Fair Weathered Weekend
Andrew and I are planning to ride 200 miles across Missouri on the Katy Trail in the spring (on our tandem of course). With that plan in mind, we started training about a month ago – which mostly consists of butt conditioning. Since we live in the Midwest (granted it is at least the southern most part of the Midwest) we have cold winters, and I’m a big baby when it comes to the cold. I arbitrarily decided it needs to be above 50F (10C) before I will consider riding outside. All this means is that we’ve been spending most of our weekends inside on the trainer – the most BORING way to train. Last weekend it was finally warm enough AND most of the snow had melted so the roads were actually clear and safe for us to ride. So naturally we jumped at the opportunity and rode outside. Being the bike novices that we are, on Saturday we decided it would be fine to ride down to River Market (about 5 mi ride one way) in our normal clothes and meet up with some friends for brunch. The ride was great – it was so nice to get outside; but as I hinted at before, the snow had been melting, and it hadn’t dawned on us till it was too late that melted snow translates to road gunk, and road gunk translates to a muddy disaster. My theory is that A) our tandem wheels are so wide (1.95in) that they have more surface area to pick up mud and B) our wheels are so small that they spin faster, meaning they can throw the mud farther. Andrew’s front side was covered in mud, and my backside was in my opinion worse (especially since it essentially looked like I crapped my pants). Needless to say we decided then and there our next purchase for the bike would be fenders.
Side note: if you find yourself covered in mud, don’t do what we did and try and clean it off. Step one of mud cleaning is to let it dry so you can SCRAPE it off…. my shirts a little less white, but I did manage to get the mud off mine and Andrew’s pants.
Sunday, the weather was just as nice and because we have come to despise the trainer we decided we would ride outside again, this time wearing bike clothes that we didn’t care if they got muddy! We did an out and back along Southwest Boulevard for 17ish miles total. For those of you not familiar with the area, Southwest Boulevard is a more industrial type road running parallel with the interstate, but it has 2 lanes and a bike lane each direction, with limited lights – so its a fairly easy ride. Today’s ride we got much much much muddier. At one point in time we were stopped by a train, and another cyclist caught up to us and the first thing he said was “you know fenders do wonders”. He was pristine – with his bright orange jacket… and we were COVERED in mud, in a very comical way.
Something else that doesn’t usually happen on a trainer, when we were about 3 miles from home we had our very first flat tire on the tandem. Wah wah. AND it was the back, harder to change tire. It wasn’t even an exciting flat, which I guess is a good thing; the puncture was caused by a sharp rock – which was pretty easy for us to patch later. When all is said and done, it was a pretty good time for us to get a flat, we were prepared, the weather was wonderful, and we weren’t in any real rush – but we do probably need to practice getting that back tire on and off. After we got home we gave Twolula (our recently chosen name for the tandem) a very thorough bath and bought ourselves some new tires and those much needed fenders. Our tires were too big for any fenders (max fender width = 1.9in), so we had to buy skinnier tires if we wanted fenders and after two days of mud we wanted fenders- guess we have trainer tires now. In case you’re wondering – all the effort associated with the muddy ride is still in my opinion very much worth it – the trainer is just too boring! (if anyone has tips for making trainer rides more enjoyable please share!!!)
Hopefully we’ll get a full dry nice weather weekend in before April so that we can have a practice bike-camp-bike trip before we set out for 5 days of it….
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