Envy

I love my bike. It’s fast, it’s light, it’s half Italian, and damn its got a great story, but its also showing its age. A couple of weeks ago I heard this really funky clicking in my rear wheel. Being the crazy mechanical dude that I am, I started playing around with the wheel trying to find the source of the noise. After about 30 minutes of tinkering, I cried uncle and brought it into the shop. Bringing your bike into the shop is like bringing your car into the shop – generally the outcome is financial bad news. Sure enough, my rear wheel was completely toast. Not just nicely golden and crisp around the edges, but the kind of toast that is so black and destroyed that it ends up in the garbage. The prognosis came in the form of a somber call from Travis, one of the mechanics down at BikeSource. Turns out that the weird clicking that I heard only when climbing or pushing a big gear was a wheel about ready to turn into a taco of aluminum and steel. Grudgingly, I bit the bullet and bought a new wheel. As much as I hated doing it, one more chunk of my bike was being relegated to the world of scrap metal. As I clipped La Machina into the rack in the back of my truck I began to admit to myself that I just might have to replace La Machina at some point in the future.

One of my rituals whenever I’m at BikeSource is to check out the bikes that are up on the racks.I liken it to being a kid in a candy store…you look at everything…heck you might even drool, but you just can't take them all home. Cameron, the store manager and the magician who did my bike fit, obviously saw the puddle of drool forming on the concrete floor beneath me and came over. The magic words came out of his mouth with no prompting: “Looking for a new tri bike?” We chatted for a few minutes about tri bikes and without pause, he said that he had a terrific deal on a 2008 Orbea Ora. Only two left: One really little one and one that’s just the right size for me. As he pulled her down from the rack I could feel a tear welling up in one of my eyes. She was beautiful!

Just one question: When?