I had another nice early morning bike ride today. Started before dawn again and made it back by about 9:30.

I had an interesting experience a few miles before making it back home. Suddenly it felt as if my chain had slipped off. I coasted for a while until I saw a nice shady place to stop and investigate and discovered that there was nothing actually wrong with my chain. I had apparently ridden over some debris – a piece of wire about a foot long, sort of like a length of coat hanger wire. This wire had somehow managed to thread itself through my rear derailleur along the path of the chain. It was this wire that brought things to a stop. I realized I was probably lucky it didn’t wrap itself through the spokes and around the hub. That could have locked up the wheel and caused a spill. The shoulder of US 41 is not a place I want to get thrown from my bike.

At any rate, after a little struggle I managed to disentangle the wire. I ended up with black chain grease smeared hands, but that’s what happens when you do road side bike maintenance. Actually that’s what happens whenever and wherever you do bike maintenance.

I continued my ride and ended up getting in 50.5 miles. That’s the best mileage I’ve done in quite a while. Now I just need to keep building on good rides like this. Increasing the mileage and the pace.