bicycling Odd stuff

Maybe it’s a sign I should ride more

Had an interesting dream last night/this morning.

I was at my Dad’s house, but it wasn’t my Dad’s house (you know how it is in dreams). It was a Monday night, and I’d passed up going on the ride with the Old Scratch Posse group (which I did last night, passed up on the ride, that is). Instead, I was hanging with Cynthia, my Dad, my ex-GF’s mom (WTF?), and someone else. Then my brother, Tim, showed up for some reason. He convinced me to go on a bike ride. Before we left, he was adjusting the drivetrain on his Rig, because something wasn’t right. The chain kept binding up, then going really slack. I noticed that the rubber O-ring that was holding the bearings in on the Bottom Bracket had popped off, allowing the bearing retainer to come loose, which allowed the spindle to move around, thus causing the chain issue. He put everything back in place, but it still didn’t work 100% correct. He still wanted to ride, so we figured he’d just deal with it when it caused an issue.

We were both on Single Speed MTBs: him on his Gary Fisher Rig, me on the bike I’ve dubbed El Chupacabra. Eventually we met up with Levi Leipheimer and Bob Roll. (I’m not entirely sure if we met up with them during the ride or before it, because they were on bikes they’d borrowed from us. This is important later.) Levi & Bob were feuding, because Bob had recently caused Levi to injure himself. For some reason, Bob was still terrorizing Levi, as if he was trying to make him crash.

At one point, we were off the bikes & jumping/climbing a concrete wall, as if we were participating in Parkour (no, I wasn’t high or drunk when I went to bed last night). During this, Levi fell & hurt his knee, which is how I found out about the feud with Bob. I told him I’d help fend off Bob for the rest of the ride.

We left the concrete area & headed to Cafe Brazil for food & drinks. We were going to meed up with the OSP group there. Along the way, Bob kept trying to mess with Levi, so I was attempting to block him, and hopefully cause him to crash, instead. We both kept rolling over, but kept riding, battling away at each other. I ended up on Bob’s right side, and was having trouble causing him to crash without me crashing, too. I then noticed that he was on Tim’s 1988 Mongoose MTB. So I reached over and squeezed the brake lever on the right handlebar. Bob saw me reaching, & got a smug look on his face as he stood up to power through the application of the rear brake. Except it wasn’t the rear brake, it was the front, as Tim runs his breaks opposite from most people. Bob ended up flipping over the handlebars & crashing.

Levi & I raced away, trying to catch Tim. Bob got up & chased us. He came up on my right side, and reached over to do the same thing to me, expecting my brakes to be set up like Tim’s. Except they aren’t, and he only slowed me down.

We arrived at Cafe Brazil where Kyle was starting to lock up everyone’s bikes.

And then my alarm went off, waking me up.