This morning's ride was promising. It wasn't raining, that I could tell, when I woke up. I checked the forecast, and it said no rain for the next hour. So I decided to take a chance, and dress for no rain.
I had to tweak a little bit when I opened the door and realized it was colder than I thought (last night, 50F had been predicted, and I think it said within a degree or two of that when I looked at the precipitation. But maybe I ignored temperature when checking). So I grabbed my windbreaker, and got going.
The minor irritation was that, as soon as I turned my headlight on, I could see that it was, in fact, raining a little bit (misting, basically). I wouldn't normally care about that, but I had put the Lakes on, and was a little concerned about the leather uppers (I really need to find out if there's any reason to worry about that).
Regardless, I got going, and was mostly enjoying the ride (the other irritation was that the power meter wasn't reading anything) for the first twelve miles and change. Then, I went up a hill, and I heard something. Glancing down, I thought I'd dropped the chain, but closer inspection revealed that the problem was much more serious. I'd somehow dropped one of the jog wheels. I really have no idea how; I didn't hit anything, it was purely a shifting issue.
Well, that was annoying, but at least it should be easy to fix (hopefully, anyway).
So I coasted back down the hill, and started riding (as much as I could, with no transmission) towards home. I realized, once I started going significantly uphill, that the way I was propelling myself was really going to hose up my shoes, so I stopped to take them off. From there, I alternated jogging uphill with coasting (on the bike, of course) downhill.
And that worked great until I was about half a mile (maybe less) from home. At that point, I think the chain slipped off the crankwheel, got caught on something (the tire, maybe), and pulled hard on the derailleur. The derailleur wasn't used to a force from that angle, and all hell broke loose.
The chain snapped (fairly new chain, too), the derailleur was sheared almost in two, and the arm of the derailleur was sheared in two, with the smaller piece getting lodged between the cassette and the spokes. And the chain ended up wrapped all over the place. It looked like a small bomb had gone off, down there.
I really didn't have time to try to figure it out (most of what I described above I figured out after getting home, getting the kids to school, and then pulling it apart), so I just hoofed it the rest of the way, carrying the bike (the rear wheel wouldn't turn). So I arrived home with my shoes in one hand, and my bike in the other. And extremely wet socks.
Fortunately, my feet came through unscathed. I'm sure it helped that I was, as always, wearing heavy hiking socks. And that I went through a stretch, some years back, where I went barefoot as often as possible (which I recommend, actually; it's very good for your feet. Just a pain, often, from a practical standpoint).
In any event, I was hoping to make another attempt at a century tomorrow; but I don't think I'll be able to get this fixed in time. I still need to make some calls to verify that. I'll almost certainly be riding the hybrid tomorrow; we'll see how that goes.
Update: I forgot to be more specific. The initial problem (the jog wheel) occurred roughly three miles from home, and the final blow-up happened just over a quarter mile from the house.
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