Today after a long day of work I decided to again take a detour on my ride home to tack on some more miles toward my goal of 500 miles. I decided to go on a path that follows the Arkansas river south of downtown Wichita. I found that the path is very nice in downtown Wichita, which I already knew, but that the minute you leave downtown, it becomes a bumpy ride. It was tolerable enough to continue on, and would be fine with a mountain bike, but on my road bike, I felt every bump, big or small.

I stopped once for a drink and saw a friend of the family who I stopped to talk to for a bit. I managed to fall over in front of him when I did not get my foot un-clipped in time. My ride on the way home seemed to go a bit slower, and I managed to hit every single red light once I got back down town, and even managed to fall over one more time. So all in all it was a bumpy ride.

Ride Number: 4
Ride Time: 42:59 (min:sec) numbers
Distance: 9.87 miles
Average Speed: 13.8 mph
Max Speed: 22 mph

Overall Distance: 22.67 miles

Well after last nights chain incident I decided to take it easy with a quick ride on my way home. I wouldn’t call this anything special, a whole 2.88 miles, but every bit counts. I did bring my chain tool and some others with me this time. I had planned on taking a longer ride but the weather wasn’t the greatest and I had an appointment to get to.

Ride Number: 3
Ride Time: ? (min:sec)ll numbers
Distance: 2.88 miles
Average Speed: ? mph
Max Speed: ? mph

Overall Distance: 12.8 miles

After all the fun of my first ride… I decided that it was time to do a major tune up on my bicycle. With work, school and weather the tune up took several months to happen. I finally started working on the bike yesterday. The rear derailleur was totally out of alignment causing it to lag when changing gears on my first ride. After spending a while trying to tune it without luck, I decided I would clean and re-grease all the parts and see if it helped. After getting everything back together it was still having a hard time, it would shift to the lower gears but would not come back to the high, something was keeping tension in the cable. I bought a new cable only to find out it was the housing, which after cleaning the old cable and lubing it, worked fine.

Finally after all the tuning I was confident that everything was ready to go. Kristen and I went out for a leisure ride around 8:30pm. We went to the Keeper of the Plains on the river, looked around for a bit and decided to head back home since it looked like it would rain. I only got about 20 feet when my chain came off. I got it back on and went another 20 feet when the chain locked up in the front derailleur. I got off the bike and took a look only to find that one of the links came undone and had bent causing it to jam. Lucky for me I had purchased a chain tool to easily fix it. Unfortunately my wife had to ride back to the house by herself to get it for me. After she came back and I took out the bad link I was able to continue on without further problems.

Ride Number: 2
Ride Time: ? (min:sec) I will say 30 min for my overall numbers
Distance: 4.11 miles
Average Speed: ? mph ~ sidewalks : )
Max Speed: ? mph

Overall Distance: 9.92 miles