Preparations

Over the last few weeks everyone has been preparing for the wonderful upcoming event, the Desert Rampage. At least, everyone should have been. I'm sure half a dozen people will show up at the shop tomorrow wanting a full overhaul of their bike so that they can race on Saturday. Which is great, and I encourage you to do so if you happen to be one of those people. That is how bike shops stay in business. It just sucks for the mechanics.

Anyway, my friend Dan and I have both been preparing for this weekend, albeit in very different ways. We are both racing in new categories this year which of course means we needed (I mean, absolutely need, like our old bikes are useless) new bikes. I got mine in October. All the locals have seen it, and by now everyone knows it is a golden singlespeed.
It's mostly a low maintenance bike, and it's been about the same since then. I think I changed the bar, stem and seatpost over the winter, because I borrowed those for the initial build. I didn't need to prepare this bike hardly at all for the race.

Unfortunately for Dan, however, his frame has been out of stock for the few months. His bike just came in last week, which mean his prepartions have been building a completely new bike from scratch. He did a pretty good job building it up. It gets the silver medal for being pretty. (My bike obviously gets the gold, because, well, it is gold). This week, Dan has been busy building, testing, breaking, and warranty-ing his bike, which luckily, if not miraculously will be ride-able in two days. He's been preparing a lot, is what I'm trying to say.

Me? With no bike to prep, doesn't mean I didn't need to prepare. I did. A lot. In fact, it took about 3 weeks to prepare for the single-speed category, and I'm not sure I did a good enough job:


Growing the mandatory single speed category beard.

Good luck to everyone Saturday. Hope everyone wins their category. Unless it's single speed. In that case I hope you get 2nd.

Picture dump: