I think you should drop a minimum of 10 just so it’s a “reset” and 165s are easy to get. If you want to try shorter on the cheap, there’s the Goldix cranks on Ali (what I use for 160 and 155 right now) and if you can run square taper there’s some 152’s on AMZN under the name Ganopper I think. I can’t say what length anyone should run any more than I can tell a random person what length stem to run. You just have to go with what your body is happy with.
Missed out on a few goals thanks to getting sick, but overall the year was good. Lots of commuting and fucking around with some big dumb rides thrown in. Started taking racing seriously again after a long time off. Looking forward to 2024.
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tarcklebee for best EOY journey of discovery
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getting in early for 2024 awards season!
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I don’t have any stats but I built a couple of new bikes and had a lot of fun, even if my own fitness let me down a lot.
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It’s staggering how good we have it here and still amazes me weekly
Overall a pretty mid bike year for me. Mostly commuting, which is great because it gets me out on a bike more often, but only like eight non-commute rides outside of that, two of which were running errands (also great). No clue how much time or miles since I stopped tracking rides. More would have been nice tho. Two of the rec rides over one long weekend in August resulted in ankle tendonitis and that kept me off all bikes for a while and that was a real bummer. That was the first injury that’s kept me off a bike in a very long time and holy crap did it spark a dithering wallet fire of epic proportions. It showed me that I really need something else that scratches a similar enough itch if/when riding is not an option.
Starting to wonder why I have any drop bar bikes at all. Started the year out with one, the Kirk, then the Endpoint got converted back to drop bars in April, along with the Sam sometime in the summer thinking it might get sold. Then the Sam turned out to be the only drop bar bike that got ridden outside of the neighborhood, and it was great. The Endpoint is in the process of getting converted back to a sweepy bar bad weather/winter commuter. The Kirk, well, pretty sure I’ve known for a while that it needs to find a new home. One drop bar bike is probably perfect because getting back to doing some spontaneous but casual late evening summer rides would be nice like were happening in 2019.
I’ve planned out a low-buy 2024 in general, including bike stuff. There’s a limited amount of approved dithering on the planned shopping list, which is mainly getting the Boost and Jones setup. There’s some leftover ditherings from 2023 that haven’t been dithered yet, so that’ll happen as well. I’d like to have the option of downsizing my housing situation sometime in the future and there’s just too much bikes and parts around right now, so the overall bike goals for 2024 are lessening the hoard (both bikes and parts) and riding more.
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Boy oh boy do I feel ya there.
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I’ve already got a fucked up toe thing happening on that same foot so it set off a whole spiral of worrying about my future mobility.
Getting old sucks.
I commuted more than in the past. That was nice. Experienced the bliss of true supple tires on the commuter, and then promptly shredded them and had to Uber home, which was a first.
Mountain biking was still my preferred recreational riding. I fell out of touch with some local guys I was riding with last year, which was a bummer. But I explored a lot of the reservoir behind my neighborhood, and feel comfortable going in there solo. I still miss my old riding buddies. I did get to hit the trails with my youngest finally; of my kids, he seems most amenable to what is good in life: riding bikes in the woods. Riding slow with him and my wife actually got her to not hate mountain biking, so that was neat too.
The dithers continued, with the steel roadie getting back up and running, hambiek in progress, Endpoint frame from schultzor in progress, S&S frame with parts from Ferg in progress. Dabbled in AliExpress, and have a small mountain of not-quite-right parts to show for it.
Barely rode my carbon gravel bike at all. Should probably classify it as available-for-sale, or make more effort to find gravel.
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Tell me more. In what ways are they not right?
I ordered some 165 cranks in 144bcd-way and narrow wide ring for them, but of course the narrow wide ring was not actually a narrow wide ring because a 144bcd narrow wide ring does not exist, silly. They’re just track cranks I don’t need.
And some fat bike cranks for 100mm BB and 197mm rear but they don’t fit the frame I have which has 100mm BB and 197 rear. Standards? 
.
And some 175 cranks I accidentally ordered to get 1x cranks to replace the 144 cranks but I accidentally ordered 175 not 165.
Mostly all ordering errors, or just gambling that something cheap might work. I’m planning on throwing some reviews of some of the knockoff stuff I’ve gotten into the China carbon thread.
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