Blah Blah Blah Cold Blah Blah Wheels

This post was supposed to start out with me ranting about how the cold has been sapping my motivation to go on any sort of ride, what with spending between 5 and 10 minutes judging how cold it is, equipping enough cold weather gear to keep me just warm enough to be comfortable, but not be too warm, then feeling like I'm pedaling through corn syrup because of the cold.

Miserable, eh?

But, this is Flagstaff. The past few days, the temperature has risen about 25 degrees, with today being the nicest day in more than a month. So I got off work early to do a little riding around. I'll take it.

But I've still been riding despite the cold. Friday, TC and I caught a sunset:


In other news, I decided that Tri has been so good to me this past year, I decided to rebuild his wheels with new rims. The wheels I got for Tri were the cheapest ones I could find, since I built him on a pretty tight budget.The rims are intended to be road rims, not mountain bike rims, and are a bit narrower than I'd like, as well as the braking surface isn't even, so the brakes are very grabby and unpredictable. (Someday I may even upgrade to disc brakes...) I figured all that and nearly 1,000 miles of pretty rough riding warranted some attention:

Yeah. Really rough riding.

The plan was to lace some Sun Rhino Lite rims to the existing hubs. That was before I discovered how badly chewed up the cones in the hubs were. Then I found out that no one has any replacement cones for those hubs.

Ahh, plans. They never pan out.

So, instead of rebuilt wheels, Tri is getting brand new wheels, hand built by myself. A pair of Shimano XT hubs is on order from Absolute. I have to thank Exe for helping make that decision easier to make. Hopefully the new wheels will be built up and ready to roll this weekend. Then, all I need are some dry trails to test it out on.

Do I wait for spring, or hitch a ride to Sedona? Decisions, decisions...

Mileage: 14.5