Well, today was a beautiful day for a ride. It started off very cool as my friend and I rode to the 2005 "Fall Foliage Ride" in Washingtonville, NY. It is a somewhat hilly 50 mile route. About a third of the way through, my buddy started droping his chain...a lot. We both looked at his deraileurs, and they seemed fine, so we were pretty perplexed, but rode on. With about 10 or 15 miles left, he looked down at his big chainring, and noticed it wobbling a bit. He thought he had bent it, so he rode gingerly back to the start/finish line.

Well, over lunch, I took a closer look at his crank and chainrings, and realized that he had lost TWO chainring bolts. I strongly advised finding a ride back home, rather than riding the last 10 or 12 miles. But, he insisted it would be fine, so we set out for home. He decided to ride only in the little ring for the rest of the ride. When I turned off to go to my apartment, all was well.

I got a call from him about 10 minutes later. He had lost yet another chainring bolt, and rather than carefully spin the last mile home, he decided to stand and hammer up a hill. Well, you guessed it, snap when his small chainring. There was about 3 inches of the Bontrager small chainring from his Trek 1500 missing. The rest of it was bent pretty badly. So, I fired up the team car to drag his sorry butt home. Quite a day.

On a positive note, I did do my longest ride ever today, 70 miles. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but a good personal accomplishment.