Broken Dreams - A Cautionary Tale Of Woe

Not really broken dreams, just broken bike bits but I thought a dramatic title might suck you in and it has!!  Anyway, the Rock and Ride crew have been hit by the rear mech gods last week with both Paul and myself doing expensive damage resulting in unplanned walking and swearing combos.  Mine wasn't the usual blap it on a rock type of incident though so I thought I'd briefly share it with you to avoid a repeat and save you some annoyance.

I was literally two minutes into a ride when for the first time in over 25 years of MTB I snapped a gear cable.  Faced with the prospect of spending the entire ride in top gear (not appealing, I've tried singlespeed on a 32-16 and that was bad enough!) I had to fit a new cable.  Smugly buoyed by the fact that I always carry a spare cable having spent years telling MBLA candidates the advantages of doing so I was quickly back on a fully functioning bike.  As I don't carry cable cutters I did the obvious thing and coiled the spare foot of left over cable into a neat little circle and got on with enjoying my day.

It was the final run of the day when my bike suddenly (and I mean very suddenly) locked up and stopped.  A glance down at the mangled wreck of metal near my back wheel confirmed the worst, my wallet was going to take a battering!  I carefully removed the twisted gear hanger, took off the snapped mech and tried to get out the chain that was wedged behind my cassette.  Simultaneously I was trying to work out what the hell happened as I hadn't hit anything.  Long story short, the spare cable had unwound and wrapped itself around the back wheel behind the cassette, instantly destroying the hanger and pulling the mech into the gears, snapping it in half.  The chain got thrown into the back wheel and got so badly wedged that I decided a 45 minute walk back to a chain whip and cassette tool was better than killing the back wheel by ripping it out.

Check out the twist on that hanger!!

Unfortunately upon taking the cassette off I found most of the drive side spokes were trashed anyway so I still had to rebuild the wheel, so the final tally was about 12 spokes and build time, a new hanger, new mech and obviously another new gear cable too.

So what's the moral of the story?  Be better prepared and carry a set of cable cutters?  Be less prepared and never carry a spare gear cable?  Actually neither.  As I carried my bike a few miles back to the van I was overcome by a strange calmness.  It dawned on me that I was walking through a beautiful forest in fine warm rain enjoying an inner peace to match the tranquility of my surroundings.  I felt energised and healthy and thought of friends who haven't been so lucky on bikes recently, damaging bodies instead of kit.  My ride had been brilliant, fast and loose.  For the first time in about 2 years I felt pretty pinned but the breakage allowed me a different kind of experience and I was all the better for it.  Like Ferris Bueller said. 'life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it'!