Happy 2008, everyone!
What with the temps soaring this weekend, Soulmate and I have planned our *final* ski outing of the winter. The asterisks represent my view, since all my thoughts are turning to the bike now. SM has her heart set on skiing well into March, and she's pretty well connected to the Big Weatherman in the Sky, so if she prays for snow, I'd better keep my skis waxed up (or at least handy, since they're the cheap waxless kind).
I've got the anthem almost trail ready, except the blame handlebars are way too wide. Anyone who has ridden in the woods with me knows what I'm talking about: Doc can nail a tree with the bar ends under even the most unlikely conditions. Sadly, the bars are carbon, so I'm a little reticent to hack them off, so I think I'll try them as is, and hack them off after I've nailed a couple of trees this spring.
I'm working on a new TT frame for this season, so I'll be stripping down my old LeMond Zurich of its Ultegra 9 speed components to put on the new frame. Then I'll have Luke cobble together a fixie out of parts from the shop's parts graveyard. It'll keep us out of trouble for a week or two, and I should have a bullet-proof fixie just in time for the winter thaw, which is always hard on my CX bike's gears and other moving parts. I figure since I spend most of the winter spinning for hours on my Revmaster without ever coasting, I won't have any trouble adapting to a fixie outside.
Fixies are all the rage, and have been for several years. I've toyed with getting one, but decided to wait until I could make one out of an existing bike. I raced the Zurich in 2002-04 on the road, then converted it to a TT bike for 2005-07, and I just can't bear to part with it. It's a bomb-proof metal frame that's been crash-tested several times and comes up a winner. Finishing its life as a fixie is somehow right. Spy photos to follow once I have the basic bike together.
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