Oh, SNAP!

Another cold front shuffled through the area last night, leaving us with a chilly, windy, and overcast morning today.  The outdoor thermometer read something like 48F as I rolled out of bed, but glancing out the window I could see the wind blowing the trees around and knew it would feel a little colder than that.  By the time I rounded up an appropriate wardrobe for the morning ride I had fewer than ten minutes to make it over to the levee to meet the Tuesday morning group at 6:15. The cloud cover made for a particularly dark morning as I rushed down Carrollton and Willow streets hoping I could at least minimize the damage and maybe have a chance to catch the group before it really got rolling.  As I climbed the bike path up to the levee I could see the meeting spot was deserted, although my watch told me I was only a minute or two late.  I looked up the road into the darkness searching for blinky red lights, but there were none.  It was entirely possible that the whole group had bailed out, because the chances that everyone would have left early on a morning like this were somewhere between slim and none.  A moment later Richard rolled up from behind, commenting, "It's not really all that cold!"  I replied something to the effect of, "If they think this is cold they're in for a big shock a few weeks from now."  So anyway, we settled into an even pace at 21-22 mph, picking up Luke at the playground and eventually a couple others along the way.  There was no question that we were going to shorten the usual long ride, considering the wind, number of riders, and resulting slower than normal speed.  The only question was whether to turn around at the Little Dip or the Big Dip.  We decided on the Big Dip, since most of the wind was of the crosswind variety, and with only four riders there was ample draft available in our mini-eschelon.  Somewhere out near the turnaround we caught the guy on the white Cannondale whose name I can never remember.  He was pushing the pace a little harder than the rest of us, and until we caught him I think he was assuming he'd missed the group and was in chase mode.

We were past the country club on the way back when he went to the front and ramped the pace up another notch.  I'd been spinning along happily in the small chainring all morning, but once the pace crept up to 25 or so I decided it was time to deploy the 53.  I shifted and felt something odd, and then my chain dropped off the inside of the small ring, accompanied by a rather nasty scraping noise.  I coasted to as stop as my front derailleur cage, which had slipped down and twisted to the inside, started scraping long shreds of aluminum off of my rear rim (glad it wasn't one of those expensive carbon ones!).  I didn't really know what to make of it all.  That derailleur had been sticky lately and a couple of times I'd had to reach down and give it a push to get it to go from the big to small chainring.  I figured it had really gotten bad and when I'd gone to shift, the cable had pulled the derailleur clamp down instead of moving the derailleur.  Anyway, I had to pull out the multi-tool and re-position it, but something still felt odd.  When I got home I took a good look at it and realized that the seat tube clamp that was part of the Campi record derailleur had actually snapped at the hinge.  Oh well.  Good thing I happen to have another front derailleur on hand. I would have taken a picture, but once you've seen one piece of broken aluminum, you've seen them all.