A new outlook on the killer hill

I thought that perhaps I was getting old and feeble. I'm sure that's probably the case, but maybe things are not quite as bleek as I'd thought.

I've always resented the vehicle inspection laws. If they had any validity, they would be more uniform among the states, and they wouldn't be changing them from year to year. Although it's a good idea to keep your automobile maintained, it has always seemed to me that an arbitrary set of "safety standards" that only has a vague relationship to safety is punitive.

The law requires that we have an inspection of our motor vehicles each year. Bicyclists are on their own.

On Monday, as I started out to bike The Trail, I noticed that the final sleeve on my rear shifter cable was trashed! I wondered just how long that had been going on. From the appearance of it, maybe it had been going on for some time..........I made my 7 1/4 mile trek that day using only the sprocket shifter, using only the low and intermediate gears.

Tuesday, I bought a new cable kit (even though my only problem was with a single little sleeve that's only about 10" long). In the way of Willie, I waited until Wednesday to replace the cable, and, in the evening rode the bike to Taijiquan down at San Gabriel Park, noticing that the ride seemed to be easier, and I must have found gears I had forgotten I had.

Today was the day of proof. I rode The Trail upstream to the lake. I was "just plumb tickled" to find that I could take the hill up to Springhouse quite easily. It's hard to remember just how long it's been since that's happened.

When I got to the killer hill over near the dam, I rode to about 8' past the midpoint mark. That's only 4' short of my previous record ascent! Once again, I can have hopes of making the entire killer hill, with a little more practice. I suppose that what I thought was old age was simply a cable that was not able to properly reach the entire range of gears

The moral to this story is, "No matter how much you dislike being inconvenienced, it's a good idea to maintain your ride once in a while. You may get more satisfaction than you can imagine".

Epilogue: 8/07/09
Last evening, we were at the home of our next-door neighbors' for awhile, and my wife mentioned a spooky Jeffery Deaver book she's reading about data mining.

I noticed a missing ")" from this entry, and went to correct it. On my editing screen was an ad logo, "Improve your bike's performance".....be not decieved, the WWW owns us!




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