miscellaneous ⁽⁸⁾

Learning how to do bike maintenance is a great way to save time and money. I have been maintaining and building my bikes for about 35 years and have always done so with very little equipment. If you are relatively new to cycling and would like to work on your bike, a Google image search for "home bike workshop" will likely scare you away from getting started. Many of the garage or basement shop setups that people share online are sometimes more spacious and better equipped than your local bike store. You don’t need that.

Most of my cycling photos taken during the past six years have been shot with a GoPro Hero 5 Session in video mode. When I want to snap a picture of myself riding a particular spot on a trail or capture the scenery along a particular route, I place the GoPro on the ground, press the record button, hop on the bike, ride away from the camera, turn around and ride back towards the camera. I have an extendable mini-tripod that is small enough to fit into a jersey pocket and a longer one that needs to go into a backpack or a jersey pocket if I wear a vest over it. Shooting that way takes all but a few minutes, and the video footage the GoPro recorded is often not more than a minute and a half. At home, I view the video footage on my MacBook Pro in VLC and export the snapshots I want. Then, those unedited snapshots are imported into Photos, where I crop and color-adjust them.

In 2021 I rode 128 times or 234 hours, totaling 4'218 kilometers and climbing 119'885 meters. I spent 87% of the rides on my Nordest Albarda allroad bike and did a single mountain bike all year. That's very unusual for someone who got into cycling on a mountain bike. 2020 and 2021 have been very unusual years, not just due to the continuing pandemic, but because our two old cats have chronic kidney disease. Maintaining a good quality of life for our two bugs has become the first priority. So, whenever I left for a ride, it was a 1-2 hour road bike ride, sometimes with a bit of gravel mixed in. My wife and I stayed home to take care of them at all times, and if one of us had to go out of town, the other stayed at home with them. We never left our cats alone for more than a few hours. A weekend trip or vacation? Impossible.

Since I don't Zwift during the dark season of the year, time had come to look for a new front light. I've been using Magicshine lights since I bought a Magicshine Racer's Special from GeoManGear in 2009. I got two more MJ-808E lights in 2014 and have been using them ever since for mountain biking, road cycling, and most often for nightly fat-bike rides in the snowy Jura.

The MJ-808E series of lights are not super ideal with their rubber O-ring that wraps around the handlebar, particularly on the road. Over time, the lights tend to rotate out of position and have to be re-adjusted. So, for the past few years, I've kept an eye out for new lights but never actually pulled the trigger.

Back in the early days of mountain biking, bike helmets used to be bike helmets. Road cyclists were only just starting to put lids on and there were basically no sport-specific helmets. An XC mountain biker wore the same helmet as a road cyclist. Things have changed a lot in that regard. Mountain bikers today have a huge plethora of helmets to choose from; from lightweight XC helmets to full-face downhill helmets. For the three and a half decades I have been riding, I have primarily owned visorless road cycling helmets except for two Giro Exodus helmets, which were popular mountain bike helmets in early 2000. After those, I owned two Giro Atmos, three Aeon, and one Giro Synthe helmet. All of those are lightweight, well-vented lids you mostly see on the head of roadies.