It’s that time of the year when the sun sets earlier, the temps slowly start to drop and the focus changes from bike rides to other activities.  Mia and I have both signed up for November half marathons.  That means it’s time to cut back on the pedaling a bit and start getting serious about running for awhile.

The last hurrah of the cycling season was supposed to be doing a 4-person team at the Oregon24 this weekend.  Due to all the wildfires raging across Oregon though the race was postponed to October 2017.  We had the option to defer to 2018 too, which is what we all decided.  All 4 of us had conflicts with the October date.

Even though the rainy season hasn’t come yet, reality is that it is just around the corner.  With some luck that will mean snow in the higher elevations by late this year.  Dean’s in-laws own a house right on the start of Lolo Pass Rd.  I hope to do some fat biking with Dean using their house as a base of operations.  My understanding is that Lolo is a snowmobile super highway which in my mind means good fat biking too.  My point being that I used some of my weekend to get the spare (original) wheelset from the Trek Farley setup with the 4.7″ Bontrager tires.  They just need some sealant, rotors and a cassette and we will be good to go once the snow flies.

It’s been a little mellow around Rhodes HQ the past few weekends.  Mia was gone to NH for a quick trip then I headed up to do the St. Helens Epic two days after she returned.  So the past few weekends have been about spending some time together.  It was our anniversary last weekend too.  The highlight was that we “almost” bought an RV, but decided to not pull the trigger quite yet.  The time just isn’t right now.  The unit drove nice and had just about everything that we could possibly want in our first RV.  Heck I don’t think there is anything that stood out as a con when looking it over.  8-12 more months from now though and we should be just about ready to pull the trigger.  I keep thinking that the 24 hour race being postponed was actually a good thing.  Next year we might be rolling in style.

The nice part about this time of year is more mountain biking.  Yes I said up above that riding was tailing off a bit, but that doesn’t mean I’m stopping.  Today 4 of us headed up to Stub Stewart for some fat tire fun.  Weather was substantially cooler than it has been lately, which was wicked nice.  We tooled around for almost 2.5 hours and I brought the Farley for a little bit of a challenge.  I wanted to also bed in the new brakes and rotors.  I got a great deal on some XTR brakes from Universal Cycles.  To get all bike nerdy on you, they dropped over 1/2 pound off the bike compared to the stock Avid DB3 brakes.  I much prefer Shimano brakes over Sram anyways so the decision wasn’t hard to make.

That’s about it for now.

Thanks,

-Pete