My Epiphany broke again, right before the end of the last race, during the last 10 miles of the last bile leg. Unbelievable. Thank goodness for the kind folks of Cal Coast Cyclery who are warranteeing it for me. While I was in the bike shop, a sales rep from Ellsworth happened to be there, checked out the damage, and assured me that they would take care of it. Throughout owning this bike, Ellsworth has certainly taken care of me. The two times that I have broken this bike before the turnaround time has been less than a week! This one's a bit longer, but the part is also bigger.

When the bike broke on me, during the Moab Xstream race in Utah, Michael was going a little nutsy. He took off in a huffy, after trying to steal the SPOT device and call for help. I told Bob to chase after him, and Diana and I patched up the bike as best we could. We duct-taped a wooden splint to the break, and I rode it out just like I am in the photo on the right. Luckily, we made it back to the TA soon enough that nobody really got suspicious. Michael realized on the way down that if we had wanted to kill him, we would have done it in his sleep. The house of cards fell from there, and he was fine by the time I saw him in the T.A. This is the incident that forced my hand to getting a dedicated racing bike. I can't have bikes failing during races! It's bad enough for them to fail when I can just call my room-mate to come bail me out, but in a race you ride it, walk it, or you DNF. I'd rather walk a long, long ways than drop out of a race. That's what makes Adventure Racing interesting!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Mountain Biking, Racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.