Lots of tuneups and last minute repairs going on Friday night.
Red wine, glue, sewup tires. A proper Italian vintage bike combination.
Two bikes from American Cyclery about to go to the Concours.
The Eroica California Concours...lots of old steel, old leather, old rubber.
"Hi, Honey! So, I am picking something up to bring home."
Old push bikes being carried by old motorbikes. A carriage for two!
A Eddy Merckx that had just happened to be raced in a Wold Championship back in the day. Not shabby!
The beautiful rides of a bunch of confused journalists. Me included.
Well, now what?
This is what. EROICA!
The Eroica California isn’t just a single day event. While the ride itself is on Sunday, the San Luis Obispo city park had been taken over by wool wearing, steel bike riding cyclists on Saturday as well. Besides the Concours of bikes, there were a good number of vendors selling vintage parts and apparel as well as some of the sponsors, such as Bianchi and Brooks, who had come out to play.
The most important thing for me, however, was to pick up my registration packet and get a ride in on the Zunow. I had no time on the bike except for the two miles I’d done from the San Francisco Bike Station to the San Francisco Ferry Building. It turns out that was actually two miles more than some of the other folks in the press pool. Like me, a fair number of the other journalists in attendance were being loaned bikes by shops and friends.
Friday night and Saturday morning had seen sewups being glued to rims, lots of seat adjustments, drivetrain fiddling and a lot of looks that said, “Wait wait wait…how do these things work again?” as people examined the downtube shifters and pedal cages with mild confusion.
Around noon a group of us managed to roll out on course. The Zunow was still a 1×7, as I hadn’t managed to cross paths with Evan yet to pick up the outer chainring. That ended up being more than okay. As a former dedicated singlespeeder, I tend to use a higher cadence on flats and see downhills as a time to soft pedal and recover. The 42 x WayTooSmall gearing made for some tough uphills and comfortable flats. I couldn’t really think of where I’d use the 52 tooth outer that much, anyways.
There was one snafu, however. As we were rolling through the countryside, I saw the left pedal of the rider in front of me hanging at a weird angle in his crank arm. We stopped and the entire pedal just came right out, on his foot, when he went to dismount. Running a finger inside the pedal mount found a complete lack of threads. It was as smooth as if it’d been polished out. Undaunted, he said “Eroica!”, hung the pedal by it’s straps on the bike’s stem, and proceeded onward.
Eroica, indeed!