broken laces

We went back to Round Valley on Labor Day Monday, deciding that we would take P around our original loop: My Nemesis, Hammerhead, Nouvelle Loop, Sweet Sixteen, Sagebrush Switchbacks and the Staircase*, plus the PorcUClimb and Down Dog thrown in because why not.  It would be about sixteen miles and very familiar, with both up AND down mixed in and I was looking forward to it because it was right in my comfort zone.

Forget about comfort zone - I was a disaster from start to finish.  First of all, I forgot to unlock my front fork so when we hit our first downhill - a rocky one down to the former My Nemesis - my MTB felt really weird.  I kept looking at my front tire, thinking that it was flat, because it was behaving so strangely.  It wasn't until we paused at the top of My Nemesis that I realized my fork was locked, making for a much rougher ride than it should have been.

The next downhill, down Round Valley Express, went much better.  But when we started uphill towards Hammerhead, I was really struggling.  I couldn't shift any lower and yet I was nearly standing up on my pedals, trying to mash them around.  It felt like I was in a very high gear but I wasn't, according to the indicator on my handlebars.  At the top of Hammerhead, H took a quick look at my bike and everything seemed to be in order; in fact, I thought it was my fault, that I was shifting wrong.  So we started up PorcUclimb and then, once again, pedaling was SO HARD.  I was unable to shift any lower and yet I was struggling to turn the pedals. 

I tried playing with the shifter on the Down Dog descent and that's when I realized that even though the chain was in the smallest rings in back, my shifter wasn't moving it.  H looked at it again at the bottom of Down Dog and noticed the problem:  my shifter cable had snapped and I was stuck in the small rings.  A-ha!  It wasn't me!  But being unable to shift down meant that the climbs ahead were out of the question for me.

You can see the frayed ends of the broken cable

I was a little annoyed that I couldn't do the rest of our ride because other than the shifting issue, I felt like I was riding well.  But I sent the boys on their way and mashed my way to the Nouvelle Loop, where I could pretty much coast back down to the truck.  I spent the next hour getting changed, eating my lunch, getting an early start on my beer and watching all the MTBer/trail runner/dog walker activity in the parking lot.  Before I knew it, H and P had finished the rest of the ride and were back to join me. 

Next project: H has to fix my shifter cable before Saturday's ride.

*  Don't try to find any of these trail names on the map.  They are all private names that H and I use because we can't remember any of the actual trail names.

PS - The "broken laces" title of this post is a call-back to the "new shoes" post from a couple weeks ago.  The "new shoes" are my new tires; the "broken laces" means the snapped cable.