Rockin’ Down the Highway

Jon Scott
Aug 15, 2022
3 min read

Updated: Dec 11, 2022

“And I smell my motor burn in’

Underneath the hood Is smoke

Can’t stop, and I can’t stop

Got to keep movin’ on or I’ll lose my mind”

- The Doobie Brothers

It wasn’t my motor, as I don’t have one. It was my brakes. And no, I couldn’t stop. The downside of simply knowing how to make a bike go, and not knowing how to fix it. I have suspected for a while now that my rear brakes were “compromised”. The downside of my current route is that in remote Idaho, Wyoming, Utah or Colorado, bike shops are as uncommon to see as the dinosaurs that appear to have roamed this region a while back. To further complicate things, it’s appropriate to note that I am now in the “hilliest” portion of my ride. The brakes are rarely an issue on the arduous uphill slogs, but on the downhills that I love so dearly, it can become a bit problematic.

Today’s ride was basically in 4 parts. The trip was about 36 miles of very gradual uphill, followed by 3 miles of very steep uphill, followed by 11 miles of awesome downhill, followed by about 40 miles of gradual downhill. The troubling part, as is fairly easily surmised, was part 3. Depending on which of the two GPS apps I believe, I hit a top speed of somewhere between 33 and 202 mph. Strava again managed to screw me. I was apparently going so slow at the top of the steep climb that the app Auto-Paused. It did not restart until I was 10 miles down the hill. By contrast, Ride With GPS appears to have tracked all the miles, but seems there was an issue with the timekeeping. Based on recent history on similar hills, I would guess that I was going somewhere north of 40.

The point of all this conjecture is that it was during this downhill that I realized the sounds that my brakes were making were not normal. Rather than experience total failure, I tried to be judicious on usage - i.e. around the numerous hairpin turns but not on the long straightaways. By the time I had to try and stop for the construction work, the, the slowing was more conceptual than fact, and the noise was a definite irritant to anyone within a couple miles. Given my location, the latter was not much of a concern. I was using way more front brake than I like to but it was pretty much all I had left. I successfully made it to the town of Fruita and found a bike shop. I was unsuccessful in getting them to work on my bike due to prior commitments. They did, however, give me the name of a bike shop in Grand Junction and I had a much more rewarding experience at Ruby Canyon Bikes. In what I hope is my last stop at a shop, I got new rear brakes, a new chain, and a thorough cleaning of the drive train. And a nice shepherd’s pie at the Goat & Clover.