Begrudging the Sludge

As I mentioned recently, last week the icy perineum of the Polar Vortex descended upon the New York City area.  By the weekend however it was beginning to relent, and on Sunday I headed out for a ride:

While I've joked about using the Renovo as a rain bike (by the way, the creaking is still there despite my recent cassette swap), the truth it that it's my trusty Milwaukee that sees me through the sloppier end of the weather spectrum, and for this reason it spends most of the winter be-fendered and skinny-tired.

Even after weeks spent alternating between a crabon bike and an artisanal wooden bike (and despite being due for some new shifty bits in the not-too-distant future due to the aforementioned sloppy conditions to which it is frequently subjected) the Milwaukee was a delight to ride.  I also congratulated myself for my choice with each pedal stroke, for between the melting ice and snow and the liberal application of road salt the roads were a real mess.  Indeed, I daresay I felt a bit smug.

See, my ride took me on perhaps the most heavily-trafficked Fred corridor in the entire Western Hemisphere, that being Route 9W.  And because the weather had finally broken, thousands of Zwift-addled Freds and Fredericas were out savoring their first outdoor rides in quite some time.  The thing was, 9W was even more heavily salted than it was heavily Fredded, and as group after group streamed by I marveled at the fact that not a single rider was astride a bicycle with fenders.  "How is it," I wondered, "that not one of these riders has a winter bike?"  It seemed to me that for the price of the crabon wheelsets all these riders were subjecting to such foul conditions in February for some reason they could have instead purchased themselves fully-equipped winter bikes and kept their Fred chariots in pristine condition for the spring.

Then I realized that this is New York and maybe all those fancy crabon bikes were their winter bikes, which was kind of sobering.  (And after realizing that I also realized that for many years I too only had one bicycle on which to do all my racing and "training" and regular riding, and that plenty of old fusspots probably thought the same thing about me as I churned through the salt and slush to Nyack on my fenderless bike all winter.)

Anyway, not only was 9W more heavily salted than I'd ever seen it, but the consistency of that salt was also different from any I'd ever encountered in decades of riding there.  Not only did it stick to my bottom bracket shell like confectioner's sugar:

But when mixed with water it turned into something with the consistence of Pillsbury cookie dough:

In fact, as route 9W is in New Jersey, I wondered if mandating the use of edible road salt might have been one of Chris Christie's final acts as governor:

Fortunately, the George Washington Bridge bike path itself was rather wet, which meant that the road spray went a long way towards rinsing the sludge off the bike on my return trip to New York.

As for the Renovo, I took a spin on it yesterday in the gloriously freakish springlike weather we're currently having:

The creaking, as I mentioned, is still there.  The only thing I can think of is that I left out a cassette spacer or something.  (It's hard to keep track of which type of cassette requires which type of spacer, these days but I'm fairly certain that an 11-speed cassette on an 11-speed freehub requires no spacers, especially since both wheel and cassette in this case are from Shimano.)

I guess I could always stuff my ears full of road sludge.