Consecutive bicycle work commute number 2168:

Yesterday afternoon I decided to catch up on some road bike maintenance. It kind of snowballed quickly into a "while I'm at it" situation.

• Having nearly 7,000 miles on the chain on my road bike, I decided to replace it.
• Of course, with that kind of mileage on the chain, I probably wasn't going to get away with using a new chain on the old cassette. So I opted to replace that as well. The old cassette had seized up on the hub, so I had to get creative to get the old one off.
• While I had the wheel off the bike, I noticed the original jockey wheels on the derailleur were worn down to little nubs. That might explain why I couldn't pedal backwards without the chain binding up in the derailleur cage. So I went ahead and replaced those too.
• My rear wheel was a little out of true. Not to an unrideable degree, but enough that I could visibly see a wiggle when I rode. As long as I had the wheel off I removed the tire and put the rim in my truing stand and got it nice and straight. I find a great deal of satisfaction once I dial in a rim to be perfectly true.
• As long as I had the rear tire off, I decided to swap tires with the front wheel to even out the wear between the two tires. I know there's debate on whether or not you should rotate bicycle tires. I decided that if I didn't rotate the tires I'd be replacing the rear tire by itself in a couple of months. As long as I was halfway through the tire swapping job I might as well go for it.
• When I re-mounted the wheels I noticed that the brakes had worn to the point of sitting a ways off the rim. There was still plenty of pad left, I just was getting close to running out of lever travel. So I adjusted the brakes and got them both nice and close to the rim. The brakes engage almost too quickly now, but that will lessen as the pads continue to wear.
• With the new chain and cassette installed I had to do some derailleur adjusting to get everything shifting nice with the new components.

This morning I woke up and felt unusually tired. I slept seven hours, which is usually enough for me, but today I felt quite exhausted. I think some of it was residual from not sleeping much all of last week, some of it was residual from having a very mental and emotional day on Saturday, and some of it was the lingering effects of the muscle relaxant I had taken before bed for my back. In any event, the combination of things came to a head and I didn't have the motivation needed to get on the bike at the my normal time.

I decided to sit down in my chair for a few minutes. I wound up falling asleep for an hour and a half. Oops. So I arrived at work late. I made up for it by skipping lunch.

The ride to the office was nice. 67°F with a tail wind. The newly tuned-up road bike was very enjoyable.