Preparing the Machine

In my last post, I spoke a little bit about what I have been doing to get myself (aka the engine) ready for my tour. Last week my riding was interrupted a bit as I took my bike (aka the machine) to the local bike store to get it ready for the tour. For those of you who know a lot about bikes, I ride a Trek Madone 5.2 in the touring configuration. For those of you don’t know quite that much about bikes, it’s a carbon fiber bike similar to many racing bikes, but configured a little more comfortably for long distance touring. For those of you who know nothing about biking except “Lance Armstrong,” the bike is a consumer version of the one that Lance rides, and he named it after the Col de la Madone, a hill on one of his favorite training rides near Monaco.

I bought the bike last July after the bike I had ridden for 35 years finally needed a repair that only someone interested in restoring antiques would make. The Madone weighs in at about 18 pounds and is a delight to ride. But after a year of only the most basic maintenance, it was in need of some in depth attention. America By Bike has a checklist of recommended tune-ups that is two pages long and – though I had done all the maintenance on my old bike – I decided the 10-12 hours it would probably take me to go through the list was better spent riding. So I took the bike in to a pro, and had a complete “rebuild,” which involved taking everything apart, thoroughly cleaning and tightening all the parts, and relubing all the connections. They also concluded I needed a new chain and large chainring – my miles of riding and hill climbing having stretched the chain and worn the chainring.

It was an expensive process – the maintenance alone cost almost twice what I had paid for my original bike 35 years ago. It also was somewhat time consuming, as I had to return for parts that had to be ordered and for some fine tuning. But the smoothness of the ride and the confidence I have that nothing major will go wrong on the tour were worth it.

America By Bike has warned against bringing fancy racing bikes on the tour, as the roads can be hard on high-end machines. Mine is not quite truly “high-end,” but I worried that it might be just delicate enough to raise questions about its durability. Then I remembered that mine is basically the same bike Lance Armstrong rode in the 2003 Tour de France, when he took this little detour. (Sorry about the advertisement at the end.)

After watching this, I'm fairly confident my bike will hold up to the roads in New England and the mid-Atlantic.