Rear View '19 - Spring

March saw the inaugural C.O.G. 100 event which N.Y, Roll and I put on.

  Hello Readers! Once again I am doing the annual retrospective on what went down over the year of 2019. This post will focus on Spring. The previous post covered the Winter season, with two to come,  for a total of four, one each week of December on Thursdays.

Spring: Things kicked off with the inaugural C.O.G. 100 Iowa Single Speed Championships. N.Y. Roll and I put the event on out of Grinnell, Iowa on a wet, cold, and very windy day. We had a great group of enthusiastic riders whittled away by the severe conditions and not many survived to beat the time limitation on the event.

My next big deal came only a week afterward when I did the Renegade Gents Race with my old team for the ninth year in a row. I ended up getting a bad hip pain, likely due to an ill-advised fixed gear gravel ride I did before the event by a couple of weeks which really made my hips sore. In fact, it took most of the Spring and into Summer for the effects of that to go away. So, it resulted in a DNF once again for Team Careless Whispers. Dang it!

Later in April I got a full set of Bike Bag Dude bags to replace a set I had gotten years ago which were so soiled that the Bike Bag Dude wanted to replace them! He saw my bike on Facebook with the old set and asked me to throw those old filthy things out! The guy cracks me up, but he is a good dude and many folks agree. BBD bags are top notch and used by many well known ultra-endurance folks and bike packers.

With the close of the rewritten "The Touring Series" posts, I started up another series called "The Story of Guitar Ted", a series to bridge the gap in time between the closing series and when I became a blogger here. That took April and May up to tell, and then I started the "Trans Iowa Stories" posts, which are still running on every Sunday.

In May I was deeply moved and honored by many of you readers and my good brothers, MG and Sam, since you all were instrumental in helping me to get Sam's old Ti Muk. That post, with all the contributor's names, can be found here. One thing I have to say, and that is that all of you are very generous readers when it comes to me and doing kind things for me. I will never forget this, or past efforts on the parts of G-Ted Production readers, to be kind to me in unforeseen ways. Thank you!!

Later on I wrote an article on terms used to describe drop bars for off-road use in "Drop Bar Terms Defined", which also can be found on RidingGravel.com's site.

Many gravel roads in my neck of the woods were like semi-Level B roads up until mid-Summer.

Gravel riding commenced and I was finding lots of dirt and mud instead of dry, dusty limestone. It was all due to a late, heavy Winter with a fast melt, then wet and cool Spring weather. This did not allow for the road beds to heal and the roads were torn up pretty badly well into Summer. I also was noting that dogs seemed to be ganging up on me. It was a consistent enough of a trend to warrant me finally declaring 2019 as "The Year of the Dog". Of course, as soon as I did that, the dog encounters went down and then disappeared altogether.

Next: Summer