Ride & Smile

Unless you are a Superhero, there are aspects of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route that will probably take you by surprise the first time through. Nevertheless, regardless of the amount of physical and mental preparation for racing, or even touring, equipment failure can still stop you anywhere along the route. I am not criticising, just reporting what happened to one well prepared Tour Divide (TD) racer a couple of days ago in northern New Mexico.

I don't know when TD racer Dominik Scherer from Germany first detected a serious problem with his rear wheel. From the TD blog it appears he may already have been in Abiquiu before he investigated the obvious warp that his rear wheel had acquired. The last 20 miles from El Rito to Abiquiu were on smooth pavement, and the previous few miles of Forest Service road were pretty mellow as well. He told me that he is a bicycle mechanic by trade in Germany, so I believe that he had some strong suspicions fairly quickly when he first noticed that his wheel was starting to "decapitate." In terms of a wheel, I did not know what "decapitate" meant. However, I do know a "tacoed" wheel when I see one.

After cleaning the adobe brick mud off the outside of the rim, and not finding any obvious dents or cracks I wondered whether he had overreacted? Perhaps I had made the late evening 105 mile (one way) trip from Albuquerque to Abiquiu unnecessarily? No, erase that thought. This guy is a bike mechanic, he knows what he is doing. Out of curiosity I removed the tire, tube, and plastic rim strip (all Schwalbe of course). I saw a layer of Scotch tape wrapped around the wheel covering the spoke holes to help stop water and debris from entering. In one short area the Scotch tape was peeled away. That is when I started to see the rim failure. I peeled away the rest of the tape and discovered that the rim was cracked continuously from spoke hole to spoke hole on the inside of the rim for about 3/4 of the way around the circumference. His wheel was ready to explode! A couple more good bumps or rocks and this wheel would have been history. In fairness to Salsa, he admitted that his rim was too light for the conditions.







I had just come in from working on a table my wife wanted built to go next to the outdoor grill. It was a little after 6 pm, and it was still in the mid-nineties. Sweaty, stinky, and hungry, but following the dictates of my recently acquired addiction to "blue dots" I wiggled the computer mouse and clicked on the Tour Divide Leaderboard. My eye caught the blog headlines in the right sidebar. There was something about a TD racer needing some help with a mechanical in Abiquiu, New Mexico. I thought that someone else a little further north had surely already come to his aide, but I gave him a call to be certain.

He said that his 29er rear wheel was "decapitated." I wasn't sure what that meant, but it sounded fatal. After determining what he needed I called up the only bicycle shop in Albuquerque that was still open - Performance Bicylces. (In retrospect REI was still open too, but I honestly do not think of them in terms of bicycle parts). Performance Bicycles did not have any 29er wheels. The only thing I had was a brand new 26 inch Sun Rhyno Lite machine built wheel. It is heavy, but once I tune them up they are very reliable. On my GDMBR tour I chose reliability over weight. I paid for that reliability on the uphills, but I was touring not racing.

There was no time to tune this brand new spare wheel. So, after several more precious minutes of discussion about his needs versus what I had on hand we settled on the rear wheel off my GDMBR bike. I needed to change out the rotor, but otherwise it was a "cut and paste" operation. He told me later that night that he had always wanted to try a 69er. It seemed to me to be a bad time to start experimenting, but this Frankenbike operation was more out of desperation than anything else. I think what he really liked were the fairly new Schwalbe Marathon XR tire and Schwalbe tube. I told him that this wheel, tire, tube, Kevlar Spin Skin liner, Stan's No-tube sealant, rotor, and cassette weighed a full 6 pounds. He responded, "I am a bicycle mechanic in Germany, and I know all these parts." "They are all very good." "Heavy - I don't care!"

Racing is largely mind over matter. That is to say: If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. This wheel climbs like a bulldozer. It descends like a runaway truck. It totally sucks in the sand, but it dances through the rock gardens. It shoots loose rocks out like a Winchester rife. Best of all, it knows the way to Antelope Wells, because it just came from there. Now you can "Ride and Smile" again. Good luck Dominik, and good luck to all the racers in both the TD and the GDR.