Stupid Hurts

So after spending all night up stressing over the quality of my work, I neglected to find out if the newspaper even ran my photos from “The Ride Of Silence.” Plus I am pretty sure that I wrote my phone number down incorrectly on the contact sheet I filled out. I also found out I missed a chance to be on the front page of the newspaper by taking “ride you bike to work day” off from work.

Actually last week kept me pretty busy. The latter part of my week was spent out at lake McMurty riding the mountain bike trails and testing out snack foods for work. Me and one of my co-workers spent several days out riding the trails, jumping creeks and bouncing off trees so we could report our findings to the trail committee. Honestly the effort kicked my ass. I remember standing in the shop on Saturday thing to myself, ” my left leg hurts and my right leg in numb.” When my co-worker walks up and ask me if I am riding, I responded, “of course.”

During the course of our trips out to the lake I have pulled upwards 15 ticks off of my legs. To make matter worse, when I unlaced my shoes I found about 6 ticks on the tongue underneath the laces. Needless to say I just left those shoes outside.

A bit back when I was working at the health fair trying to promote “ride your bicycle to work month” I was asked about several of the mountain bike trails in town. Unfortunately being a resolute roadie I could offer little more information about the trails then a few of the names. After my boss heard me recommend that a lady take her kids down one of the most difficult trails in town she suggested that I actually get out and ride on the trails before I start giving bad advice. She then proceeded to tell me horror stories about people who have crashed and broken, bones, bicycles, or worse riding down the trail I had just sent an unsuspecting family down.

I tried to use the defense that I don’t own a mountain bike to get out of riding the trails and being expected to compete in the winter trail races. My boss reminded me that I work at a bicycle shop and that I should “figure something out.”

Since we all know I can’t reject a challenge I begged everyone else at the shop to borrow one of their bikes. Unfortunately most of the guys I work with ride $1000 plus dollar mountain bikes and don’t like to let anyone else throw a leg over them. Not that I can blame them or anything but it did make my task a little more difficult. Then last week one of the guys offered to sell me his beater. Aside from a horrible paint job this bike had mostly high end parts on it, luckily thats what happens when you buy from ex-racers. So I took his beater and a frame I got from another guy and started to build myself an opus.
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The frame I got had its own interesting story. It is a race frame that belonged to his dad before he left the sport. So here I am with an ex-racer frame and a bike full of racer parts for a little less than I could have purchased a new sport level mountain bike for. For the most part it all went together without a hitch, aside from the headache of cutting new cable housing it has been a pretty straight forward process.

Tomorrow or sometime this weekend I should have time to get out and ride it and enjoy myself in the dirt.