On The Joys of a Single Speed

Those of you have already read my post entitled “Tuesday Night Wrap-up” will already know that last week I snapped my derailleur hanger on a botched feature. For those of you to whom this means anything, I bought my current mountain bike (a 2008 Trek Fuel EX8) last year and haven’t had to adjust, tweek, or replace a SINGLE thing since then. This is almost unheard of in the world of mountain biking, where any foray onto even realtively tame single track leaves bikes dessicated and dilapidated. So point being is I guess I had this coming.

Derailleur hanger failure is common in mountain biking, and in fact it’s designed to fail in order to prevent you from snapping the far more expensive derailleur which it attaches to the bike. However, as Trek has been notorious for as of late, their parts are highly proprietary and finding a hanger for my bike proved daunting. I finally was able to order one from derailleurhanger.com (who would have thunk it?), however, it still hadn’t arrived and I really wanted to go riding Monday. So what did I do? Naturally I just jury rigged something so I could get back out on the trail. I converted the bike over to a solid single speed operation by shuffling some cogs around on the rear cassette and slapping it back on the bike.

So what of the single speed ride? Well, it was an experience to say the least. Tristan and I chose to go to Case Mountain in Manchester and, as the name implies, it truly is a mountain. It begins with a very stout climb up from the parking lot, a serious lung buster even when equipped with a full range of gears. It turns out that it’s a real death sentence with only a single gear and required me to be up out of the saddle and muscling the bike around for a solid 15 minutes. About 2 minutes into the climb I can hear the repeated screech of a rubbing rear brake disc, but I can’t stop because I’ll never get enough momentum to get started again without the risk of snapping the chain. So here I am fighting gravity with a sticky brake and far too high a gear. I finally make it to the top in record time and in a record amount of pain. Luckily for me this is the only major climb and the worst to come are just some short (albeit super-techy) inclines.

I’m bulling away on the bike the entire time trying to modulate my speed and maintain good pedal position with my single sorry gear while Tristan is struggling away with mechanical after mechanical. We some how make it back to the trailhead with all the pieces of Tristan’s bike still attached to the frame and decide that we are going to call it a day. We barrel down the steep descent, which at one point dumps me out hot on the trail of a bounding deer…my wheel mere inches from its hind legs. We finally return to the parking lot where Tristan forcefully drops his bike down to the tarmac in disgust and where I realize this may be the most pain my legs have been in since taking up the sport.

All in all a good ride.