It must be time for Unbound Gravel again because here come the complaints:
Yes, that’s right, Unbound riders are outraged that they’re not allowed to cut or mutilate their race numbers because it will cause them “significant aero losses:”
So you bought a plastic wind tunnel-sculpted gravel bike for your corporate sufferfest and now you have to put an unsightly placard on the front of it, boo fucking hoo.
No doubt the real reason for the whining is that the elite riders get slightly cooler number plates:
Awww, too bad, you paid a bunch of money and now you have to ride around with a big dorky number plate that tells everyone else you’re one of the sucky riders. But hey, look on the bright side, at least you don’t have to wear a helmet cover and like sixteen reams’ worth of paper numbers like in the Five Boro Bike Tour:
[Dork-O-Rama]
Of course, regardless of how distastefully un-aero the numbers may be, this obviously makes no difference if everyone else in your category is also using the same number plate. This is why bike racing and sporting contests in general have, you know, like rules and stuff. This is like complaining about the gravel because it creates too much rolling resistance, or complaining about the mud because it makes their bikes function less smoothly–oh, wait, right, they did that already:
OK, so let’s review the history of Dirty Kanza Unbound Gravel:
- First they changed the original name of the race because it was offensive to Native Americans even though the Native Americans themselves liked the name and asked them to keep it
- Then the race was muddy which made it extra hard but not in a photogenic way so much as an “I ruined my carbon bike” way and so people complained about that
- Now they’re complaining that the numbers aren’t aero enough
Jesus, at this point just change the name of the thing to the Super-Inclusive And Equitable Gravel-Themed Tickle Fight and do the whole race on Zwift.
Speaking of tears, the ‘Noner very nearly brought me to them this past weekend:
After spending lots of time on the bike I had it running nicely as of last week. However, I’ve never been one to quit while I was ahead (if I were I’d have ended this blog fourteen years ago), and so I decided to service the rear hub:
This was going smoothly until I had pretty much every mishap it’s possible to have with pawls and springs short of shooting one of them into my own eye–and yes, this included spending lots of time looking for a “lost” spring only to find that I’d inadvertently merged it with another so that it with another so that it looked for all the world like a single spring. (Of course this came after actually losing a spring on the floor and crawling around on the floor in desperate search of it like I was in a biopic about a famous person with a horrible drug problem.) Then it took me like fifteen days to get the things back into the hub shell (in retrospect I should have just tied some dental floss around them or something to hold them down, but you don’t think clearly when you’re in the throes of withdrawal and/or a hub overhaul), and when I finally did get the hub back together again I discovered it ran only slightly less roughly than it had before I started.
Even so, it’s an improvement, and there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing you’ve addressed everything:
By the way, in the background of the above photo you’ll note the mist-enshrouded Palisades, which you can also see here in clearer conditions:
This is more or less directly across the river from where I snapped the above photo, and just ahead of me you’ll note the bushy tail of a squirrel:
Lucky for him I wasn’t rolling on the Squirrel Slicers:
If you’re a traditionalist, you might find the above configuration offensive, for it lacks the elegance of, say, a leather saddle or a classic Campagnolo component group. However, context is everything, and I’d argue that the visual impact of those things on a titanium-and-crabon LeMond are far, far worse:
How did they even get the downtube shifters on there?
I guess where there’s a will there’s a way.
