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dmazeI have come up with a reasonably nice bike. It makes me happy. I can go on longish trips with it, and perhaps the Climb to the Clouds people's assertion two years ago that a mountain bike outright takes 20% more energy to go the same distance is correct. (We were trying to account yesterday for it apparently being easier to climb on this bike, in spite of not having super-low gears for it...but that's not my point here.)
My actual question is this: how do you go on a long unsupported ride on a nice bike, and still have all of the stuff you need? With a seat bag you can carry a spare tube, tire levers, and a CO2 inflation kit; you can put two water bottles inside your frame for 2L, give or take, which goes pretty far. But for this I have no food, no lock, no maps, and only minimal tools. Right now I carry this all in a backpack, and while having 3L of instantly-accessible water is nice, my shoulders complain some about the load.
How do people go on long trips deal with this sort of problem? Credit cards and energy bars in their jersey, and hope to not get lost? Is putting a rack on my bike sacrilege, assuming it's possible?
My actual question is this: how do you go on a long unsupported ride on a nice bike, and still have all of the stuff you need? With a seat bag you can carry a spare tube, tire levers, and a CO2 inflation kit; you can put two water bottles inside your frame for 2L, give or take, which goes pretty far. But for this I have no food, no lock, no maps, and only minimal tools. Right now I carry this all in a backpack, and while having 3L of instantly-accessible water is nice, my shoulders complain some about the load.
How do people go on long trips deal with this sort of problem? Credit cards and energy bars in their jersey, and hope to not get lost? Is putting a rack on my bike sacrilege, assuming it's possible?
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Date: 2007-07-10 03:03 am (UTC)Anyway, to me it's not necessarily terrible to say that if the mob turns out to be above some critical number, to split it into hard-core and medium-core groups (or medium-core and squishy-core, if you will). It's really hard to keep 8-10 people moving, because if anyone needs to stop, then everyone should, and it's important for people to eat or stretch or whatever.
It may not be horrible socially either. The slow person might be happier in a squishy-core group anyway. Maybe it does come back to goals: can you hold together a large-ish group if some people are trying to work their way up to a century, and some are trying to see lots of pretty sights and generally enjoy themselves? (Obviously the goals can, and maybe should, be more specific than these.)
A lot of us have Eastern Mass bikemaps. Maybe it'd help if, at the meet-up point, we spent 10-15 minutes where the person who planned the route and put together the cue sheet (I guess this is always you) went over it with whoever else was interested? This might be nice even if there's no splitting up; for instance, I think the hard climb in Roslindale would've been more easily doable if we *knew* it'd be followed by 2.3 miles of Turtle Pond Parkway descent. :)