For the Fools Classic, the locals made better equipment choices than I did! |
The Fools Classic is already receding into the past—it was a week ago already—but I do want to revisit it for a moment. I was going to struggle with its many hills no matter what I was riding, but so far I have neglected to mention that I was on my road bike with standard gearing: 53/39 up front and a 12-27T cassette. This equipment choice did not go unnoticed by my fellow riders, who agreed universally that I was nuts. Compact gears—even triple cranksets and mountain bike clusters—were the order of the day. I should have taken my cyclocross bike. The rear cassette would have been the same but I would have benefited from the 46/36 crankset. I also would have appreciated the cyclocross bike’s more relaxed geometry. The Fools Classic gave me some soreness in the neck and shoulders, and that’s extraordinarily rare for me.
I noted on Tuesday that I intended to return to the Perkiomen Trail to wrap up my vacation rides, and I did so. My first experience with the trail was back in 2004, the first year I considered myself to be a true cyclist. I rode it then on my Gary Fisher Wahoo mountain bike, but I didn’t cover the entire trail. This week I rode the whole thing—plus a bit of the adjacent Schuylkill River Trail, a total of 41 miles—on my Trek X-Caliber. Had I taken the cyclocross bike on vacation, I might have used it for this ride but I was glad to have the 29er. Some of the gravel was really coarse, and the 12 percent gravel descent would have been really dicey on narrower tires.
Just in time: A place to refill the water bottle on the Perkiomen Trail. |
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