The most eventful thing for me took place Monday evening. I was rapidly pedaling over the Longfellow Bridge on a very bumpy ride home, and all of a sudden my rear wheel completely locked up and I skidded to a stop. On closer inspection, the chain had jumped off: it was locked between the rear cog and hub. After some struggling, I managed to dislodge it; two links (and inch’s worth) were crushed and twisted. I rode home irrespectively; it was very bumpy every time  the broken links went over the cog.

I tried throwing on a spare, narrow-width chain I had lying around. No dice- the cog was for wide chains only. I didn’t have enough slack in the old chain to just remove the bad links. Furthermore, you shouldn’t break a chain any old place; my chain had a three-piece master link, which is composed of two plates and a clip which locks them together. This is the only place one should break a chain (when I practiced, I alternately used a flathead screwdriver or a needlenose pliers to widen apart the two arms of the clip), and the clip is reusable.

Since my favorite Open bike is closed for a few weeks, I went to my second favorite: Broadway Bicycle School. (I give little to no business to other, unnamed Cambridge-area bike shops, as they are obnoxious and terrible for many reasons.) They sold me a new chain, which was laterally stiffer, and therefore better suited for a fixed gear.

I went home and used my super-cheap chain tool to cut the chain to length (once you reduce the chain to the proper length, you can use the master link to close it). The tool failed miserably. It got jammed at the start of the job, and the pin that drives out the link simply mushroomed to the point of utter uselessness. I threw away the tool, and over the last two days, found myself in Broadway bikes asking them to take off successively more lengths (using a quality chain tool) until it was done correctly. They were very helpful in the initial explanation, and also didn’t mind the few seconds it took to break the chain for me.

This evening I got the chain on, and discovered a number of things. First, the back tire, which I hadn’t examined, was more than bald in one place; this heavy-duty tire had worn through its many layers in the skid (from 20 mph to zero in about 6 seconds). That’ll have to go. Second, the wheel was very wobbly, and always landed in the same spot when I let it run freely.

This inspired me to use all my drive-chain knowledge. I oiled the (brand new chain). I adjusted the chain tension. I made sure the bolts and washers were tightened down on the rear axle (they weren’t! A few weeks ago, I had them split in half because they were loose and had too much force placed on them). I adjusted the chainring bolts to get an even chain tension (that helped – my chainring actually has gotten straighter over time; perhaps I’m just getting better at this!). The result: everything runs pretty smoothly, although I’m still concerned the rear  hub or bottom bracket are damaged; at low rpms, there is still a wobble, although the chain runs quieter and there is less wobble at high speeds.

So, tension your chain sufficiently and save yourself at least $60 in new parts, possibly a lot more.

I wish I had a camera so I could show the various damage. Then again, I’d just as soon forget.

Back to the cycle.

As an aside, why can’t the Nvidia linux driver do Twinview for my two graphics card (Nvidia 6500 and 8500GT)? Windows can!

• Start at Central Park north. Bike west to Riverside, then south along 11th Avenue, 9th Avenue, and on over the Brooklyn Bridge.
• Bike West, South and East to Prospect Park. This was the first rest stop (15 miles).
• Next, we went west through Sunset Park, and then east and south through Bay Ridge (along the Belt Parkway), Sheepshead Bay and on to Marine Park, which was the second rest stop (30 miles).
• We went south over the Gil Hodges Bridge into Far Rockaway, and then north again over the Cross Bay Bridge. We continued in a pretty straight shot all the way up to Kissena Park and the Velodrome in Queens. This had the 3rd rest stop (60 miles).
• We hooked east into Queens through Cunningham park (a little path through the woods!) and then west again along Jamaica Bay and the Grand Central Parkway (we were passing all the cars stuck in traffic), and then past La Guardia airport and on to Astoria Park. The fourth rest stop was there (80 miles).
• Finally, we went over the Triborough bridge. This was a huge bottleneck because every route, all 5000 people, went over the bridge, and it has a half-dozen stairs on the bridge itself. We got off the bridge and I got a flat. It took 45 minutes and 3 tubes to fix it.
• Back on the road, we did the last loop through the South Bronx, east to Soundview Park, then a quick north and west shot adjacent to the Bronx Park (past the Bronx Zoo and Botanical Gardens), and then into Van Cortlandt Park. The last rest stop was here (mile 96).
• Finally, we went south through Manhattan over the Broadway Bridge and then through the Harlem River path and along streets back to the starting point. We were welcomed back by cheering women holding signs (mile 104).

I had been really anxious about the ride, since, as faithful readers will know, I had only done 65 miles prior. Furthermore, I had anxiety about my bike, since my choices were between the much lighter fixed gear I have been riding exclusively for months, or the much heavier 10-speed. My decision was clinched when I said, “the fixed gear hurts when I start and stop a lot and on hills.” Chris said, “You’re going to feel a heavy bike on hills and when you have to start a lot.” So, I did it fixed. I had to draft Chris a bunch, particularly along the water when we were going up hills with a headwind. However, my biggest problems from the training, fatigue and knee pain, did not come to pass; I could rest during while drafting, took more breaks, ate a ton at each stop, and drank much more water (actually sports drink) than usual.

Quite fun: two days hence, the only memories I have of it are good ones. Next year in Jerusalem!

My original plan was to go out on route 28 south to Bridgewater, make a right on route 104, and come back on route 138. Simple, right? Read the last sentence of the last paragraph. As soon as I got to Roxbury, I made a wrong turn down Washington Street, which took my right through Jamaica Plain (I didn’t object when I realized my error, because I was curious to experience the ride I had done earlier in the season). I figured as well that I could rejoin one of my two routes, which I managed to do somewhere south of Readville by just following the road to the Neponset Valley Parkway and then to Blue Hill Ave. From there it was a terribly boring straight shot south through various suburban towns. This route would have been awful were it not for the fact that I did the ride on Labor Day – it is your typical suburban speedway, main arterial. On a fixed gear, this was a somewhat demanding route of rolling hills, but certainly not as bad as the western route in Concord and Carlisle I am used to (although much longer!)

Eventually, I started seeing east-west roads with names I kind of recognized. I was feeling a little tired in the legs at this point, as I was approaching 2 hours without a break. Eager to get to my halfway point of Bridgewater, and not wanting to miss my turn because of fatigue, I saw route 106 (not 104!), which goes to West Bridgewater, and took it. I wasn’t quite sure of the geography, and I couldn’t recall whether I was supposed to cross I-495 (I had begun to see signs for it), so it seemed completely plausible. I was wrong; during a later break I talked to my sister in New York, and she located route 104, which did indeed exist. I see I cut out 8 miles from the route with this mistake, although looking more closely at the map, my devotion to route 104 would have probably led me far, far astray, since 104 does not meet 138. (If you’re following at home, look up Bridgewater, MA or Taunton, MA for what I mean.)

On route 106, I stopped at Montreal French Fries (at 10 am on Labor Day). It said open, but the proprietor had no real interest in serving me. I really just wanted him to fill my water bottle, but I bought a pickle and ended up getting no water. I rode on.

I made a left at West Bridgwater onto route 28 to head back home. This took my through the depressed-looking town of Brockton. Eventually, feeling crummy about shortening my ride (it was quite obvious when I hit 28 that this was not the correct way, but I didn’t want to ride south to Bridgewater and back just to say I had done it), I took a detour on route 37 to go to Braintree.

Continuing my penance, I decided I wanted to go down to the water, so I kept going east and north to reach the coast. This took me through a massive traffic circle and almost onto route 3 (a freeway!), but I persevered and eventually found my way to Bridge Street and the water. However, not all was peaches and cream, because the coast here is not flat; it is coves. This means that the road goes up hills, and down hills.  I went from standing up on my seat to brake the bike, to standing up on my seat to haul up hill. Eventually, the road seemed to be meandering away and I capitulated, and headed back to Bridge Street. I declined fresh tomatoes from two adorable little girls selling them in front of their house, to a cry of “why not!”. Across the street, a scene straight out of the 1950s gave me three little kids peering, huge smiles on their faces, through a screen at the scene of the girls hawking their wares.

Bridge Street took me to an impressive bridge that rattled like crazy and went past a decommissioned World War II warship. I followed the charmingly-named Southern Artery road to Sea Street and the Wollaston Beach Reservation. I did get my beach for the second time in the weekend, and it was glorious.

Eventually, this took me to another bridge, this one somewhat less friendly that the others to which I have become accustomed; I basically ended up riding in the middle of a real highway, straight into a cloverleaf that had the ramp for I-93. After regrouping for a moment, I darted across the highway and onto Neponset and then Dorchester Ave straight into Boston, and home.

This was a hell of a ride. It got a little lonesome, but the adventure towards the end made up for all that. I knew I was getting famished, however, when I started to have an inner monologue of “all I really want now is…” followed by absurd things like “to jump in the water” or “to eat forever”, when all I really wanted was to get off the bike.

This ride was also about 65 miles (more hills, fewer stops and starts, less knee pain, faster icing of the knees), also 4.5 hours of biking, also about 14.5 mph.

• Down the Hudson Bike Path
• Over the Brooklyn Bridge
• Straight through downtown Brooklyn to 4th Avenue. At this point, I had intended to shoot over to Prospect Park, but when I got to the turning point, I remembered what a trek it was, so I just opted to ride where the getting was good.
• I turned at the Prospect Expressway. 4th Avenue took an abrupt decline in quality here, so I took this opportunity to make the left turn I had wanted to make earlier.
• I followed 20th Street and East 4th to Church, at which point I made a left and got on Ocean Parkway.
• I rode Ocean all the way to the Beach on the separate bike path. The big problem with this is the poor timing of the lights; I hit almost every single one. Furthermore, cars that don’t make it across the parkway stop right in the bike lane, so it’s got a lot of dodging. Even worse, my knees got murdered on the fixed gear from the starting and stopping. Also, the pathway gets pretty chopped up from tree roots (to the point where there is a jump somewhere around Avenue J, I think!), so it’s hazardous, even.
• I took the Boardwalk, Oriental (on a little detour), Shore, and Emmons east. This portion of the ride was the most spectacular. It was a sunny, late summer day and I was just riding right along side the beach and the ocean, with a cool breeze. As I felt in Red Hook, this was a more bucolic corner of the city, with beach bums you might find in California.
• Right before the Belt Parkway, a separated bike path begins at Brigham Street. I followed this along the highway to Flatbush Avenue and the Marine Parkway Bridge.
• Off the bridge, I went right to get to the western tip of Far Rockaway, Breezy Point. I ate lunch at a coffee shop once I got into the little town of Breezy Point.
• I rode back east again after lunch and came over the Cross Bay Bridge. On the right, I watched a seemingly tiny A train (?) of 4 cars shuttle over its own dedicated bridge across the bay. Again, quite a beautiful sight.
• Once on the other side of the bridge, there is a bike lane, and about halfway across the island (isthmus?), a separated bike lane starts on the western side of the street.
• Over another bridge. I went on the west side on the sidewalk, but I would recommend crossing back over and going on the bike lane in the street. On the sidewalks there is a weird double-fence thing that I don’t understand dividing it into two narrow walking paths. The outer path was lined — this was a summer weekday — with people fishing over the edge of the bridge. The inner path was deserted and was like my own harrowing bike lane.
• Over the bridge, the traffic explodes into a huge 8- or 10-lane road. I crossed back to the correct side of the street, but my nerves were overloaded once I got past the Belt Parkway and Conduit Avenue. Instead, I took a left at Pitkin Avenue, along which the A and the C trains run a little further down.
• I discovered the East Brooklyn Industrial Park further down this road, and eventually Pitkin merged into East New York Avenue. After one block I made a right up the hill on Ralph Avenue and got on a dedicated bike path along Eastern Parkway. My misery from Ocean Parkway with lots of stops was repeated, but to a slightly lesser degree.
• I made it to the Grand Army Plaza. At this point, I knew I was about 12 miles from home, so I did a victory lap around Prospect Park (love it!), and then rode up Vanderbilt Avenue and Bergen Street to get back to downtown Brooklyn, over the bridge, up the West Side and home.

Total distance was about 65 miles, done in 4 1/2 hours of riding time, for an average speed of 14.5 mph. I’ll see a lot of this again (or at least the going-out part) when I do the Century ride on Sunday.

I have an excellent downtown route. Yesterday I made it to 25th & Lex from my house on the Upper West Side in 19 minutes, stopping only a handful of times. I go down Columbus Avenue to 77th Street, where I make a left and get into the park. I then take 7th Avenue south through Times Square (shitty, but I want to stay near Broadway. It’s really not so bad: it takes maybe 3 minutes to get through) — it would be awesome to go from 59th to Times Square on Broadway instead, but note that you’ll have to avoid the pedestrian plaza by getting on 7th at 46th or 45th.  At 42nd, I go left and get back on Broadway. Then at Herald’s Square, I go down the extended sidewalk on 6th, cross 34th on the east side of the street and then ride in the gutter against 6th avenue traffic to get back on Broadway.  Then it’s smooth sailing again down to 26th, where I make a left, go to Lex, make a right, and done!

The beautiful part of this route is that at no point are you really being overtaken by cars. The Columbus Avenue section is downhill, so I can keep a pretty good pace. The 7th Avenue section has proven quite empty (since 7th starts below the park!), so most of the time I have the road all to myself. Broadway is shunned like the plague these days and has a separated bike line – you have to be more wary of pedestrians walking wherever they damn well please.

I’m at school in Midtown on the east side, and live on the Upper West Side, so my natural route to school is to go through Central Park, down 7th Avenue through Times Square, down Broadway, and then cut east a few blocks at Madison Square. This is a pretty nice route, as the street portion of the ride is through low-volume areas, some even with good bike lanes. (However, the separated path in the 30’s is unusable, since it is basically an extension of the sidewalk.)

The trip back home is not so easy. The 40’s and 50s on almost every single uptown avenue are terrifying. I have ridden on 3rd, 6th, Madison, and 8th, and every ride has near misses. I will give Park a try today, I think, although the lack of staggered lights makes me nervous. Also, 2-way traffic means lots of people zooming across my lane without looking for bikes.

My question is, is there are a way not to risk death on the way home without diverting to the Hudson River Bikeway (an exhausting diversion)?

1. The Ashuwillticook Rail Trail was beautiful. It runs along the water, not very close to the road, not many road crossings. My only wish was that it had a swimming hole, too.

2. When I got my fixed gear back last month, I just went out around Boston in any old direction. At the time, I couldn’t even find all the roads on the map. However, when I went to Jamaica Plain a few weeks ago, I was able to place everything much better. I still am not sure of the second half of the ride (starting with Stony Brook and going until Boston College), but here’s the route anyway (with notes to jog my memory). It was hot. It was on big roads. There isn’t much to recommend it; I probably should have stuck with my original plan to go on Jamaica Way.

3. This isn’t a single route, I just wanted to reflect on how lovely it is to ride around Cambridge and Boston, especially late at night. At least half a dozen times I have taken the bike out after midnight and ridden the nearly empty streets of Cambridge and of Boston. As much as I don’t like nighttime activities in general, these have a special charm; after a certain hour, you get to see such interesting characters with their guard down. Some favorite roads and places are Broadway and Cambridge Street, Cambridgeport (which always confuses me) and Downtown and the Financial District.  For a while, Beacon Street just out of Inman Square was cursed; before my bike got its spiffy upgrades, I consistently lost my chain at the top of the hill there. During the daytime, I am a fan of the Somerville Community Path east of Davis Square, which is the extension of the Minuteman Route.

Recall that the role of the chainring is transfer energy from your feet (by way of the pedals and crank) to the chain and eventually to the back tire. Because every ounce of energy your feet put into the pedals is meant to be transferred into the chain, getting very low resistance makes a huge difference in the feel and performance of the bike. When there is too much slack in the chain (low tension) or the chain binds at any point  (high tension), that is energy that should be going from your feet to the wheels, but is instead being dissipated by inefficiency in the system.

As Sheldon Brown’s article indicates, there are two steps to attaching the chainring. The first is to get it straight so that there is no binding at any point. The second is to tighten it down so that position is held. A third step is to fix the chain tension. The way you the first step is to use the chain itself to both detect points of binding, and then to have it correct them, as well.

To detect points of binding, you do as Brown describes; put the back wheel and chain on at a good tension. When I did it, I didn’t even move the back wheel; I left it at the same tension (with no visible sag) as when I ride. It is imperative that the chainring bolts be only finger tight at this point: tight enough that it’s held securely, but loose enough that it can shift under force. To feel the tension, you rotate the cranks a little at a time, and squeeze the chain together. Note also that you should use grease (like the kind you use on the wheel hubs) on the bolts so that a tight seal is formed and the bolts hold better under force and vibration.

Go around once to get a feel for what a high and low tension feels like. Then seek out a high tension point in the chain (when the give is least). Strike the chain with a tool (I used a heavy allen wrench). This action will force the chainring to resettle slightly; this point will no longer be one of high tension. Repeat this step until the chain tension is very consistent the entire way around.

The second major step is to tighten the bolts. This is not a complicated operation. I like Sheldon Brown’s method: start on the bolt across from the crank arm, and then rotate in a single direction (I seemed to naturally want to do counter-clockwise), tightening every other bolt until you come back to where you started. Good practice probably dictates that you tighten them only a little at a time; I went around the set twice to get them to a good tightness.

The final step once the chainring is fully tightened is to increase the chain tension. Because the high tension points were the limiting factor in the wheel tension before, you should now tighten it up a little more. My technique for tightening the chain is also mostly from Sheldon Brown, but I’ll embellish his explanation a little more. The idea is that you want to shimmy the wheel back into the dropouts so the the tension on the chain doesn’t pull the whole thing back before you can tighten down the nuts on the axle. This is done by tightening one axle nut down, and then loosening the other, pulling it back, and tightening it.

I start on the non-drive side (presumably because it’s easier for the tensioned side to follow, not lead). This one is easier to pull back for me. Since I have the bike upside down, this is on the right side; I wrap my left fingers around the excess axle bolt length (there’s about 1/3 inch that extends past the frame and nut), and brace it with my thumb against the back of the dropout (this is underhand, since it’s hard to reach with a wrench when you do this overhand). I come around with the wrench and tighten the bolt.

On the other side, I switch hands. Since it takes more force on this side to get the tension to where you want it, positioning is key. I do the same as with the other side, not worrying too much about whether the wheel is straight or not (it shouldn’t be too far off, though), but just trying to pull it as much as I can. Once it is right, though I fiddle with the non-drive bolt to get the wheel perfectly straight.

Now I could appreciate just what a difference this work made. Previously, setting the crank spenning and letting it ride until friction stopped it was a pretty quick game. The pedals generally stopped in a single position, which was a point of chain binding. Now, the crank and wheel rotate long past that initial time and come to rest at a random point. Going out on the road gives the feel of the pedals pushing back much harder to the point that I scarcely feel I am working at lower RPM. I haven’t yet vanquished the sound (it seems like at this tension, the chain itself is making a lot of noise in the rear sprocket; I may have the chain too tight after all).