Today I went out for a nice ride with a few of my teammates. The ride was interesting in that Ted had a series of mechanicals. First was some derailleur noise which we thought was due to the front derailleur hitting the chain. We stopped to check it out and the front derailleur was in bad need of adjustment. I did as much as I could to try and fix it on the road and tried to get it “good enough” to finish the ride. Unfortunately, the noise continued, which was baffling because it didn’t look like the front derailleur cage was anywhere near the chain. So it wasn’t until Ted got a flat well into the ride, that we found the culprit. While his rear wheel was off the bike, I noticed the chain took an awkward path through the rear derailleur–his chain was riding over the little tab on the jockey pulley assembly!

Between the low pressure of his slowly leaking tire and the chain issue, no wonder he thought the ride felt so hard! Well, we fixed both of those issues, but since I didn’t think the little cut on his tire was big enough to warrant a tire boot, I told him to just put the tube in. Well, wouldn’t you know it…a mile later and POP! Same wheel, same spot. During the second tube change, we used the wrapper from my granola bar as a tire boot. From that point on it was smooth sailing. I ended up doing 45 minutes of tempo with Ted and Ben in tow. With the tailwind, they probably were working just as hard as I was, so it ended up being a great workout for all three of us. I had a TSS of 194.