The Fainting Bike

I did something tonight I have never done in 3500 miles of riding Broken Spoke. Something pretty dumb.

I typically ride along one stretch of road on the middle chain ring and tonight when I got to a small hill I realized I was still on the big ring. I click the shifter (brifter) and tick, tick ,tick. What the? (Sometimes when up shifting the chain will overshoot and fall off the big ring. Sometimes when downshifting the chain is slow to drop to the next ring. It's not an adjustment thing, it's just a finicky POS setup that sometimes has issues.) I look down and click the shifter again, tick, tick, tick and jump. The chain jumps clear off the small ring. Crap.

Now normally if the chain falls off I'd just stop the bike and fix it. Not tonight. I was being stubborn in trying to get the chain to shift and since the whole reason for wanting to down shift in the first place was the hill I was starting to climb, I didn't realize how fast I slowed down. And subsequently stopped....

I tried to get my feet unclipped quickly but couldn't; PLOP. Right on my left side in the middle of the road still clipped into the pedals. From a bystanders' point of view I must have looked like a fainting goat...or an idiot. I'm betting on the idiot analogy.

Finally the clips let go of my feet and I get up. I look over the bike, get the chain back on, and collect the one casualty in the whole fiasco, the front wheel reflector. I have no idea how that managed to shatter but but it did so in spectacular fashion.

There's something I haven't done since sometime in 2000 on the mountain bike only this time the only thing hurt was my pride.

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