Rear View 2020: The Second Quarter

I had a great experience on this Salsa Cycles Stormchaser.

 Hello Readers! Once again I am doing the annual retrospective on what went down over the year of 2020. This post will focus on the Second Quarter of the year. The next posts will cover the Third and Fourth quarters and the previous quarter posted already will account for a total of four, one each week of December on Thursdays. This is the second "Rear View" post of the series.

As March closed with fear and foreboding, April came along with no real future but that of the unknown. Each day we held our collective breath and wondered aloud how the year would possibly be lived going forward. Lock-downs, mandates, and protocols made life so unpredictable and scary that it was hard for me- and I imagine many of you as well- to handle it all. 

Of course, everything was getting cancelled or postponed. All the events I had planned to either attend or put on were affected. This made it so I had a kind of void in my bicycling life. I missed what would have been the tenth running of the Gent's Race, and the C.O.G. 100, the event we were to put on in late March, was put off until 2021, (and eventually fully cancelled). I did a retrospective on the Gent's Race to commemorate the nine consecutive years I had done the event. Then I set my mind to what I could do. One of those things was a plan to ride a single speed 100 miles on gravel. I called it "The Single Speed Century". 

Testing on the Pofahl Signature custom bike I own was started in May and at the end of the month, Jeremy Fry, a long time friend and former finisher/volunteer of Trans Iowa, made a route for me and we rode it at the end of May. The ride was a successful one. The first century I had done on a single speed in many years. 

Jeremy Fry off in the distance here during my Single Speed Century ride on Memorial Day Weekend.

 

 Around about this time I started with "The Quest", although I didn't call it that to begin with. I just figured that I would have all this time to ride gravel during 2020, so why not? It was an idea I got from another local cyclist that had done a similar thing in a county North of us in Black Hawk County. So, every once in awhile I'd do another ride to bag more roads I hadn't ridden yet in the county. Looking back I wish I'd been a bit more proactive about the idea, but in the end it happened anyway. 

One of the highlights during this time was getting the opportunity to test and review a Salsa Cycles Stormchaser single speed gravel bike. I ended up kind of bonding with that rig, and it was one of the reasons that I ended up setting up the "Gravel Bus", the Twin Six Standard Rando v2, as a single speed. Which was another highlight of this time of the year. 

The end of May kind of brought out the 'normal' in people and despite businesses being shut down periodically and schools being out, things seemed to go back to the normal hustle and bustle of any year. The bike shop got slammed and I was busy doing what repairs I could do. Parts shortages and new bike shortages set in and made what could have been a stellar business year one where we were left wondering if we'd be able to make it just on repairs. 

June was a beautiful month in terms of weather, and I was busy doing a lot of riding throughout the month. I was trying to do this "quest' thing, get ready for a couple more big century rides, and do work and family life. Reviewing stuff, surprisingly, was not affected by the pandemic, and if anything, it made that part more busy than ever too. 

Next: July, August, and September......