{"id":243377,"date":"2026-05-14T11:43:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T11:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/14\/just-pecking-away-at-it\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T11:43:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T11:43:00","slug":"just-pecking-away-at-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/14\/just-pecking-away-at-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Pecking Away At It"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I hadn\u2019t been on the Roadini<\/a> in a little, but I corrected that yesterday:<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n

When putting this bike together, the idea was to take everything I love about my other road bikes and combine them into one lugged steel superbike, and I have to say I really nailed it:<\/p>\n

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Though I guess Rivendell deserve a little bit of credit for, you know, actually creating the bike.<\/p>\n

Even so, I\u2019m disappointed\u2013not in the bike, but in myself. See, I figured once I had my superbike I\u2019d be totally satisfied and could move on to other things, like parenting and home improvement and finally working on that wine blog I\u2019ve been meaning to start.<\/p>\n

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Maybe I\u2019d even get rid of some bikes and create some additional room for my expanding wine collection.<\/p>\n

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But no. Here I am a year and a half later, and instead of paring down I\u2019m buying aluminum bikes with skinny tires on Craigslist, and instead of moving on to other things I\u2019m spending all my spare time scouring the globe for tiny parts<\/a> for them:<\/p>\n

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I suppose I need to accept it, and to tell myself it\u2019s okay. Yes, I wish I could be like Jobst Brandt, who only owned one bike, which left him with plenty of time to insult people online\u2013and sure, I\u2019ve been insulting people online for nineteen years now, but if only I\u2019d had Jobst Brandt\u2019s capacity for austerity I could have insulted so many more:<\/p>\n

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But that\u2019s not who I am. I\u2019m not an ascetic like Jobst Brandt, and I cannot transcend my fascination with the physical object. But it could be worse. At least I\u2019m fixated on bikes and not something truly self-destructive, like drugs or gambling or analog audio equipment.<\/p>\n

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[This makes all those super-expensive plastic gravel bikes seems reasonable.]<\/p>\n

Speaking of toys for adults, on my ride I found myself behind this vehicle:<\/p>\n

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Please note I\u2019ve obscured the license plate out of consideration for the driver, though in post-congestion pricing New York it would not be at all surprising to see one fully whited-out like that.<\/p>\n

Anyway, while waiting for the light I happened to notice the license plate frame:<\/p>\n

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\u201cOh, interesting,\u201d I thought. \u201cI guess BMW still makes cars with stick shifts.\u201d But when I got a little closer I saw the car wasn\u2019t a stick shift at all. Now, it doesn\u2019t matter to me what kind of transmission people order with their sports cars, and what a man wants to do with his right hand while he\u2019s driving is his business. (At least as long as he\u2019s not within 100 yards of a school.) But I admit I did feel a little cheated by the license plate frame\u2026unless I\u2019m misinterpreting it and it\u2019s a boast about having an automatic<\/em> transmission, which I guess makes sense, since you don\u2019t shift it yourself; rather, the shift just happens.<\/p>\n

Moving back to bikes, the bike industry keeps creating new categories, and Allied recently introduced a new bike specifically for \u201croads that kinda disintegrate into dirt.\u201d<\/a> I don\u2019t know about any of that, but it did occur to me that the test of a good all-around road bike is that you can happily ride it entirely on the road without so much as thinking about the dirt (or \u201cgravel\u201d as it were), and yet you\u2019re just as happy to take an off-road detour on it when one presents itself. That\u2019s not the case for, say, the now-departed PRJCT GRVL bike<\/a>, which was\u2026fine on the road, but a whole ride without any dirt on it felt like a day at the beach without going in the ocean:<\/p>\n

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Conversely you have bikes like this one, where if you ride past a trailhead you just look away and keep on going, like it\u2019s a bakery during Pesach<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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But the Roadini meets that all-around road bike critereon, which is to say I did cut through the woods Just Because. And I\u2019m glad I did, because I got to enjoy a \u2018pecker sighting:<\/p>\n

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Unfortunately by the time I extricated my phone it was too far away and I only managed that fuzzy pinch-zoom shot, but if my research is correct that\u2019s a pileated woodpecker<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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[Photo: Joshlyamon via a popular user-edited Internet encyclopedia<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Then later I was riding along the mighty<\/s> Saw Mill River when in my finely-honed peripheral vision I noticed something lurking beneath the surface:<\/p>\n

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This photo\u2019s even worse than the \u2018pecker shot, but it\u2019s a very large turtle:<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s another on the other side of the river:<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m reasonably sure those are snapping turtles, which have been known to tear a Ren\u00e9 Herse tire completely off the rim:<\/p>\n

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[Also from a popular user-edited you know the rest<\/a>]<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the snapping turtle is widely known as \u201cNature\u2019s Tire Lever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, I guess there\u2019s a new handlebar mirror from Spurcycle<\/a>, and so far I\u2019ve come across not one<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

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Not two<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

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But three<\/em> stories<\/a> about how they\u2019ve made handlebar mirrors cool now:<\/p>\n

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To wit:<\/p>\n

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Installation is tool-free, and swapping between bikes is incredibly easy. It fits 14\u201320mm drop bars, and each one is backed by a lifetime warranty. Spur has really thought of everything with this, and for just $69 USD (nice), safety just got a significant dose of cool.<\/em><\/p>\n

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To be clear, I like Spurcycle. They\u2019re the Chris King of bells. I have several of them in fact, both the original<\/a> and the less expensive compact<\/a>\u2013which I actually like a little better, since while the original is both nicer and louder it\u2019s a little bit too<\/em> loud in quiet settings. Like, it\u2019s hard to give a gentle little \u201cping\u201d when you\u2019re on a trail like the one where I spotted that \u2018pecker. But obviously if you need lots of tintinnabulation it\u2019s the way to go.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, while I don\u2019t use a bar-end mirror, I have nothing against them, and certainly don\u2019t think they\u2019re \u201cuncool.\u201d Certainly I could see a near-future in which I do use one\u2026though not on the Roadini, since that\u2019s where the shifters go. But if the Spurcycle mirror is as good as their bells then it\u2019s sure to be a fine product.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, having checked out the other mirror offerings, I\u2019m simply mystified why this mirror is somehow \u201ccool\u201d whereas the others are not. Like, why is it cooler than this one<\/a>?<\/p>\n

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Or this one<\/a>?<\/p>\n

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Or even this one<\/a>?<\/p>\n

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I guess they all just must have read the same press release.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hadn\u2019t been on the Roadini in a little, but I corrected that yesterday: When putting this bike together, the idea was to take everything I love about my other road bikes and combine them into one lugged steel superbike, and I have to say I really nailed it: Though I guess Rivendell deserve a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":243378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6804],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-243377","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}