A Full Dinner Set????

This post is from Dennis Grelk... There are centuries and then there are centuries... this is one that will go down in the old memory book - you know, one of those rides that gets told at the Telemark Lodge bar over pizza and popcorn the night before Chequammy EVERY YEAR! (You know... to the poor happless first-timer that happens to stumble past your table...) Enjoy - I know he did!

"So I wanted to get a test ride in on my Surly Big Dummy and I needed to knock out that last metric so I shot for both Friday night. Started my ride at 6:45 or so. I thought I was doing alright holding a 13.5mph avg on the longtail running Nokian Gazzalodi 2.4s, then my timing started to fail. I rigged up simple dyno light to test out my shimano dyohub and I was using my superbright modified cheapie headlamp for backup. For the first couple hours the dynolight seemed pretty weak, then it started looking brighter than my headlamp....because my headlamp was going dead. This is the advantage to the dynolight, you see. Unfortunately it was indeed a hastily assembled dynolight with no capacitors to smooth things out at low speed, so what you get is this incredibly bright and annoying pulsing light until you get up over five mph. Only a problem when starting and stopping, climbing, and bonking. Anyways, so I took a couple of wrong turns and ran into some dead ends. Got kinda bonky, as I rushed out and didn't bring any food, just two bottles, enough to get me to the halfway point. By the time I got to my halfway refuel point it was 9:45, and apparently the gas station in Bonaparte closes before 9:45. I scrounged around in my Wingnut and found a granola bar, yay! So I ride to the next town. By the time I get there it's 10:30, again all stores are closed. Ride on. Pretty soon the corners are feeling a little funny and my pace is really starting to struggle, the rear tire is flat. Friggen double wall DH tire goes flat on a gravel ride, wtf. The bad news is changing a flat double wall DH tire on the back of a longtail really sucks, the good news is you can ride a double wall DH tire flat and it isn't much different than being full. I ride it flat for awhile, air it up when I want to go faster, repeat until finished. Finished 63 miles at midnight. Thought about doing century but I ran out of October. Here's the data

So 6 more centuries this year and I get the full tea set right? Seven weeks for six centuries, hopefully mostly on the Pugsley, or so is my plan. - DG"