100 Hours Of Solitude

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

That is the first sentence of the novel “100 Years Of Solitude”, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As far as opening sentences go, it’s a hell of a good one. It slaps, as the kids and probably Isabelle Allende would say. I am gonna guess that some of you probably feel the same dismay reading about great novels here on nsmb.com as you do reading about our political opinions. Ah well. I am also gonna guess, with a twinge of hope, that a few of you still read books. And if you fall into that latter category, that of the book reader, now on some sort of cultural endangered species list, and you have not yet read 100 Years Of Solitude, I highly recommend that you find a copy and lose some time in the story of Maconda and all those internamed Buendias. It’s one of my all time favorite novels. I listened to it again when I drove down into Mexico back in December, and Marquez’s lyrical prose, his poetic mixing of love and blood and time, has been filling my head ever since as I have been pedaling through these empty slices of desert.

There’s a lot of disintegration in that book. Chaos and entropy and The Human Condition all seem to keep cycling around, undoing what has been done, rendering the previously understood nonsensical, grinding away at the best efforts of people to enact some sort of order, unraveling the very minds of formerly sensible people. I have been thinking about this a lot, about entropy, as I have been riding.

By the end of February, unless chaos and entropy decide to derail me, I will have banged out 100 hours of saddle time since I got down here in mid-December of last year. For me, this is a lot. Like, twice what I have been riding in the peak of summer, and an easy quadrupling of what used to be my winter average. It has been a revelatory and introspective time, taking the lessons of last year’s Zone 2 experimentation and applying them to the idea of riding without any specific goal or purpose other than getting the hours in and maybe exploring a bit along the way.

That’s a lot of riding for me, but when looking at the kind of hours that the bikepackers grinding their way down the peninsula are putting in as they follow the Baja Divide Route, it pales in comparison. I suspect that some of those riders are knocking out at least six hours a day, at least five or six days a week, as they churn through the sand and rocks. I raise a toast to them, wish them well. Nothing really comes easy down here.

And I wonder, as I look at my shoes, my tires, my empty chain lube bottle, about the attrition rate of their bike components. Because I am realizing, here at 100 hours, that the more you ride, the faster everything wears out. I mean, I knew that. Hell, we all know that, right? This is not a newsflash, but it is something I have needed to learn again. The more you ride, the more the hours and the terrain eat away at your bike and your gear. Sometimes, here in the rarified air of people who test bikes and as a result often rotate through bikes in 20 to 40 hour blocks of riding time, one can forget the realities of long-term use. Shit wears out.

Not too long ago, in the swansong years of BIKE magazine, I was part of the crew that tested bikes during an annual “Bible Of Bike Tests.” Every Bible camp was a pretty intense three or so weeks of riding and comparing and trying to decipher the qualities of sizeable herd of bikes. Each of us tried to ride as many bikes as we could out of the two or three dozen bikes on hand, and also snag extra hours aboard the four or five bikes we were each individually assigned to review outside of the group tests. Having all these different bikes on hand allowed a huge degree of in the moment comparison and contrast, and really helped us discern not just individual bike characteristics but also get our heads around where the industry was trending from year to year. It was a highly educational grind.

But it didn’t teach us a damn thing about how any of those bikes would hold up over the long haul.

There’s a pair of Specialized Butcher tires, T9 compound up front, T7 out back. They still had those new tire nubs on them when I packed the bike in the car to come down here. Now, the front is getting flat in the middle, I’m guessing about half depth, and the rear is looking a bit ratty around the edges even though it is holding a lot better knob depth than the front. I should probably check the sealant. It has been earning its keep. An entire bottle of Boeshield T-9 has vaporized onto the chain. Jeeezus it is dry down here. Lube every ride, chain will be squeaking in three hours. The shock was brand new, and the fork freshly lubed after a damper shaft install. They are both now, apparently, knocking on the door of a more dedicated service. Brake pads, freshly installed about 80 hours ago, are about halfway gone. The rear needs a bleed. One of the front hub bearings feels kinda shitty. And it’s time to grease the freehub pawls again. Seems to need that about every 40 or so hours.

But my shoes. Good lord. They look like they got used as chew toys. Admittedly, they are probably more than 100 hours into their life by now. Might be more like 150 hours. When I took delivery of this pair of Giro Sectors for review a year and a half ago, I said in the preview; “there will be no walking in these shoes. No. I will be flying all the time. Like a hummingbird.” And then I promptly sold my ranch, put everything in storage, eventually moved to Colorado, and decided that pinner XC shoes were not the right call for hiking around in the high country. So, aside from a little bit of XC bike testing and gravel exploring, they didn’t get used much.

And really, down here, I shouldn’t be wearing them. Average speeds are slow. There WILL be hiking. Lots of it. Through sand so fine it just flows straight through the mesh of the shoe so freely that I might as well be wearing socks and sandals. Following rocky arroyos where every step is a game of turned ankle roulette. Up goat trails that are composed of a dozen different flavors of rock, all of them sharp. This is not the kind of place you bring a swank pair of XC kicks. But it’s hot down here. And those shoes run cooler than anything else I own, and so they have been the daily drivers. And this place has, in about 100 hours, hammered the everloving shit out of them. They aren’t completely toast yet, but I seriously doubt they will make it back north.

If I extrapolate out this new time and location based burn rate, things look consumptive. I am about 40 hours overdue for a fork lower leg service, along with a rear air can service. I am halfway to a damper service at both ends. So, basically, lower and air can service every month, damper service three times a year. Brake pads are at about half, so that’s three or four sets of them a year. Mileage on drivetrain has been low because the speeds have been slow, but it is dusty and the dust is a talcum fine insidious kind of grinding paste. I would consider myself lucky if I get 200 hours out of this chain and cassette. So, three of them for a year? And three sets of tires, while we are at it. I’ve got some hub bearings that are already complaining. Optimistically, I give all the bearings on this bike a year, with fingers crossed behind my back. Might be eating those words. Four 4oz bottles of chain lube. If I wait until I change tires, I can get by with 24oz of Orange Seal for the year, 4oz per tire per change. I had one pair of gloves wear through last month, but they were already well-used. I suspect that light gloves last about half a year at this rate. My helmet pads are best not brought up in polite conversation. A pair of shoes a year, hopefully.

No wonder the Baja Divide riders are all rolling rigid bikes, and wearing big shoes that look really good for walking in.

There’s no small irony in realizing that as I ride more, I become fitter, but my bike pays an exponential price. As, eventually, does my wallet. Which kind of brings me back full circle to 100 Years Of Solitude. It was Marquez’s eloquent way of writing entropy into a beautiful and vivid story of love and loss and time and the messiness of us all that got me thinking about the attrition of these little pieces of metal and rubber as I ground my way along these goat paths.

There’s another book I have been reading that – totally unrelated, intellectually and stylistically the diametric opposite of the lucid dreamstate that 100 Years of Solitude inspires – has me thinking about my burn rate, our burn rate, the marks we leave, about resources and reserves and sinks, and it feels totally tied in with 100 Years Of Solitude in this regard. It is called “The Limits To Growth”, and is the result of a project put forth by The Club Of Rome in 1972, that ended up creating a model for predicting possible outcomes of human existence on this planet. It ain’t no bedtime story, but it should be required reading for everyone with opposable thumbs.

Usually I try to loop these columns around in a circle. But I am not sure I can do that tonight. There’s a Ford Ranger parked across the street and the entire bed is a horizontal wall of speakers, and it is hammering some Juan Gabriel songs so loud that the brickwork in my apartment is beginning to flake. And I’ve got to wash the crusted salt out of my helmet pads and gloves, then I gotta go sit outside with my dog and a shot of mezcal, and look at the moon and listen to Juan Gabriel disintegrate the structure of my apartment, and think about where I am going to ride tomorrow. Entropy. It’s inescapable.