A week from today, I’m heading to Moab to ride the 2006 edition of Kenny’s annual “Ride Around White Rim in One Day:” RAWROD ’06. For those who haven’t been keeping up with my blog since it began (that would be all of you, since when I started writing, the only hits I got were my own, along with a few sympathy clicks from family), it was RAWROD ’05 that woke me up to the fact that I was fat, in desperately bad condition, and needed to do something about it.

The number of people who attend this ride has exploded from the six or so the first time we did it to about forty this year.

Which brings up a question: How do you know when your annual group ride with a few close friends has gotten out of control? When you start doing t-shirts for it. (This t-shirt, by the way, will be the first place anyone will see the Fat Cyclist logo I recently had designed. Expect to see it on stuff I give away before long.)

So as I’m getting my stuff ready for the trip, I realize: this is one thing that I’m really good at. I have done so many long rides that I know pretty much exactly what to bring and what to eat for an epic ride. So here’s a little bit of actual useful knowledge. Use it to whatever degree you like.

Your Bike
Have a mechanic you trust do a serious tune-up. Tell your mechanic what you’re going to be doing, how important it is to you to not have any serious mechanicals while on the trail, that your life is in his/her hands. Have the mechanic thoroughly check the spots that, if broken mid-trail, could be especially problematic, including:

• Bottom bracket
• Hubs
• Chain
• Headset
• Frame
• Rims, rim strips and tires: Nothing is more annoying on a ride than getting a bunch of flats. If you’ve been getting a lot of flat tires on rides, like one flat every two or three rides, check (and if necessary, replace) the rim strips, and/or buy a new set of top-notch tires.
• Shifting and brakes

Then make sure you tip that mechanic well. And if your bike rides beautifully the whole time, tip him/her again when you come back.

What to Wear

Wear what you’re used to wearing. Do not ever wear new shorts, new shoes, a new jersey, or new anything on a long ride. It’s not fun to discover during a long ride that due to the abrasive nature of your jersey, your nipples are now bleeding. Yes, I have had that happen to me. It looks stupid.

Anyway, here’s the checklist of stuff you absolutely must have with you. It seems silly to have to make this list, but I’ve arrived at long rides and seen people who have forgotten one or more of these.

• Helmet
• Glasses
• Jersey (+ jacket if it’s cold)
• Shorts (+ tights if it’s cold)
• Gloves
• Socks
• Shoes
• Camelbak or water bottles: full

Your Gear
It’s not easy to find the right balance between riding light and having everything you need. Since epic rides are (rarely) about being super fast, though, it’s better to have a little too much and ride a little slow than to die in the desert. Just an opinion, mind you. Here’s a basic checklist, which would need to be adapted for terrain and climate:

• Water: 2 ounces per mile is a good rule of thumb, but can go up to 3 ounces if it’s a hot day. It’s a good idea to have water in a bottle as well as your CamelBak, so you can squirt water onto any wounds that need cleaning.
• Food: You can get by with energy bars, but it’s nice to have a real meal some time on the trail. For myself, I like chicken soup.
• Energy gels: Nothing can prevent–or bring you back from–a bonk like these. Carry more of these than you think you’ll need (at least 5), because one of your buds may need one.
• Pump: Duh. If you haven’t changed a flat in a while, check and make sure that pump works. (You can go with CO2 instead, but for a long ride, a pump is the safer bet.)
• Tubes: Two. Make sure they’re good before the trip begins (replacing one flat tube with another sucks).
• Multi-tool: There’s a million different brands, lots of them very good. Make sure you know how to use yours.
• Patch kit: Enough to change another two tires.
• Extra Chain Links: If you don’t have extra links, fixing a broken chain shortens the chain, which means you may lose a few gears.
• First aid kit
• Money: You never know what you’ll need it for (food? water? a ride?), but it doesn’t weigh much.
• Duct tape: It’s got a million uses. Wrap a couple yards around your seatpost. I promise, you will at some point use it, and when you do, you will feel incredibly smart for having that tape.
• Chamois Butter, or other chamois cream: It feels creepy (or, depending on your tendencies, strangely erotic) when you first put it on, but it prevents saddle sores in a big way.
• Sunscreen: Especially toward the beginning of the season, a full day in the sun can mean some serious reddening and suffering if you don’t slather yourself.
• Camera: If you’ve got a small one, take it.
• Map: If you don’t know the terrain.
• Lube: If you use a wax-based lube, it won’t last for the entire ride, so you’ve got to bring extra. If you use Dumonde Tech, the lube will last the whole ride, so you can forget about it.
• Extra clothing: If your ride has large changes in elevation, especially in spring or fall, keep a shell and tights with you just in case the weather turns nasty. 

Did I miss anything?

Last week, BotchedExperiment joined a group of friends I was riding with. It was a perfect day for mountain biking: 76 degrees, and the desert mountain singletrack was in that state where it’s dry enough not to stick to your tires, but hasn’t yet become dusty.

Intrigued to finally meet a guy who consistently has some of the best comments on my blog, I rode most of the way with Botched: talking with him, getting suckered by him (he briefly had me convinced that he was a convicted felon), and frequently falling off my bike for his entertainment.

Also, I noticed that Botched has a fluid, easy style on his bike. He was easily doing tight hairpin turns. He was doing little jumps off rocks. He was doing effortless wheelie drops. He was comfortably hopping sideways across gullies. And he was doing this all in such a way that made it look like he wasn’t really working—like he and his bike had just come to an agreement on what to do, and now they were doing it.

It made me think: my relationship with my bike is not quite so comfortable. I tend to whine and wheedle with my bike, begging it to please—just this once—do what I want it to. “Look,” I say to my bike (sometimes aloud, sometimes in a furtive whisper), “would it kill you to keep traction while I ride up this loose section with the waterbars and boulders? Is that really so much for me to ask of you?”

When you think about it, practically everyone has some kind of relationship with their bike, and it’s pretty easy to tell what it is just by watching them.

Master and Servant

When Bob’s on his bike, you know who’s in charge. Bob is, that’s who. Watching him approach a tricky move is vastly entertaining because you get the sense he wants to punish the bike, bash the stupid thing against the rock ledge. Show it who’s boss. Bob wrenches the handlebars side to side, lunges over rocks, lands hard. If the bike ever had a will of its own, Bob soon crushes it.

Dance Partners

Brad is the exact opposite of Bob. He rides with gravity-defying grace, not so much riding up ledges as flitting. Obstacles cease to be obstacles when Brad is nearby, and instead become props on the stage for his ballet. A tight, twisty series of turns looks like a waltz when Brad’s on his bike. Sometimes Brad leads, sometimes his bike does.

It doesn’t look as fruity as I just made it sound, though.

Enthusiastic Readers of Steven Covey Books

Rocky and his bike seem to be imbued with a “can-do” attitude. They’re highly effective. They’re both firmly in quad 1 (“This move is both Urgent and important!”), and work enthusiastically and efficiently to accomplish their primary objective: to clean the current move. Then they modestly act like it was no big deal, because modesty is a desirable attribute of highly effective people, too.

Bickering Old Married Couple

That’s Kenny. He’s on his bike so much that it’s developed aches and pains—I’ve been with him when a frame has cracked (“Oh, my aching back!”) and earlier this week I mentioned how a crank dropped off (“I think I broke my hip.”). Still, they understand each other better than anyone else ever will, and you can’t imagine them away from each other.

Indifferent Strangers

Dug doesn’t care what bike he’s on, and it shows. He barely acknowledges that the bike exists, and when asked how he likes his bike, he says, “It’s fine,” regardless of what he’s riding. The bike, for its part, does what is asked of it, sort of the same way a stranger will scoot over for another stranger on a bus, perhaps giving a mild, noncommittal smile: “Well, since we’re together for the trip, we may as well make the best of it.”

That About Does It 

Most people don’t know this, but bikes have personalities. And as everyone knows, an important part of having a personality is having moods. Usually, most bikes are in the mood to go out for a ride, which works out great, considering they’re bikes and all.

Once in a while, though, your bike wants to stay home. It can let you know that it would just rather hang out in the garage or on the rack by doing one or more of the following:

• Having a mysterious flat tire.  You know there was air in the tire when you rode yesterday, but now it’s flat. So now what are you going to do?

• Just put more air in the tire? That’s asking for trouble; the tire will probably go flat during the ride.
• Try to fix the flat? The problem is, with a flat like this, the culprit (tiny thorn or shard of glass, probably) is going to be so small that you won’t find it, and then you’ll get another flat during the ride.
• Stay home and abandon the ride? Yep.
• I am aware that I have just created a nested bullet list. I feel I should apologize.

Discombobulation

Of course, if you really want to go out riding, you’re going to ignore your bike’s petulance and head out anyway.

And that’s when the bike’s really going to make your life miserable.

I shall provide examples.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I met to go mountain biking. He showed up twenty minutes late, frustrated and out of breath. His tires had both been flat, and the kevlar bead on his tires had been surly beyond all reason about going back on the rim. Finally, though, after bullying his tires into compliance, he was ready to go.

Except his helmet had vanished.

But he came anyway.

After riding for about five minutes, his chain dropped to the inside of the cassette, jamming between the cassette and the hub. Chain suck. Bad.

We spent about five minutes coaxing the chain free. I recommended he stay off the granny gear, and we continued on.

Or rather, I should say we continued on for about twenty feet, after which his bike got chainsuck again, the likes of which I had never previously seen. Working together for twenty minutes, we were still unable to ever get the chain out.

I believed, at that moment, that the chain and hub had become bonded at the atomic level. Fused.

Eventually, we broke the chain, and — by doing a tug-of-war between the bike and chain, managed to separate the two.

And by then, I needed to get home.

Mr. Jones Does Not Admit Defeat

Last week, back in Utah, I saw another bike that was not in the mood to go out. Riding with a group of about six of us (including A-List Fat Cyclist Commenter BotchedExperiment, about whom I will talk tomorrow), Kenny was out front, as usual. Even though he was riding technical, steep singletrack on his singlespeed.

And then his left crank fell off.

No warning, no cause. It just fell off. Plop.

Of course, everyone in the group was very sympathetic and offered our support, mostly in the form of witty remarks about what a great upgrade those expensive new carbon cranks were turning out to be.

Kenny went to work, trying to figure out why the crank fell off, and how to put it back on.

No dice.

Kenny started coming up with more imaginative fixes, including:

• Hitting the (carbon fiber!) cranks with a rock.
• Wrapping tape around the crank bolt, then pounding the crank arm over it, hoping the jamming effect would make the crank stay on.
• Doing the same as above, but with grass. No, I’m not kidding.
• Just putting the crank in his jersey pocket and finishing the ride one-legged.

Here’s the thing. Kenny could have easily bailed at a number of different places. But he didn’t. Kenny was not even willing to consider letting that bike get the best of him.

Kenny even tried to put a positive spin on it: “It’s kind of fun! It makes the ride totally different!”

Uh-huh. Anything you say, Mr. Jones.

Still, he did finish the ride — in fact, there was general concern for a little while that Kenny might finish first even with just one crank.

Sure, Kenny suffered. But in the end, his bike learned a valuable lesson: Next time it wants to stay home, it’s going to need to come up with something a little more debilitating.