As summer wraps up, I get this distinct feeling that the remainder of the year accelerates; autumn rushes by you and all of a sudden it’s December and time to think about an entire new year that will also go too quickly. I don’t think it’s just me, but in the last couple of years I’ve had a headline event every month from August to December and that certainly makes the back half of the year feel faster.

Like last year, my headline event for August this year was D2R2, or the Deerfield Dirt Road Randonee. Put on by Franklin Land Trust out in Western Massachusetts, this cycling event puts forth an entire menu of intense bike rides featuring big climbs, loose dirt roads, and, my particular Waterloo this year, big climbs on loose dirt roads. My partner and I downgraded this year to the 90km route from our very difficult time on the 100km route last year; while this was still no picnic (still nearly 5,000 feet of climbing), both the slightly easier route and significantly more pre-ride training meant we got to the end feeling notably further away from death than last year. Even with the difficulty I love this ride each year, it’s a chance to be surrounded by like-minded masochists and bike nerds, and there are so many incredibly cool bikes that people bring to geek out about.

From here, we have a vacation in September, I have Beach Weekend in October, then we run headlong into the headline events that most Americans share, namely Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is a rapid shift from ‘beginning of the year’ to ‘end of the year’, and August is a typical time for most to realize with horror just how far past ‘halfway’ they are. Still, there are four months left and I am going to try and make headway on a few projects. My first is, of course, bike-related; I saw and immediately bought a Trek 7900 on Facebook Marketplace and even after seeing the bike in person I was astonished by its condition. The 7900 is a bit of a weirdo, especially the year of the one I purchased; they were high-end aluminum hybrids, and like many of the high-end sporting bikes Trek made (sporting being either strict road bikes or strict mountain bikes) they were made in the USA and equipped with high-end mechanicals. The 1991 Trek 7900 was the last year that the 7900 was aluminum; after that they switched to carbon fiber which is even more of a unicorn. While both the carbon and aluminum bikes of this era have some peculiarities regarding their construction and durability, it simply wasn’t a concern for me when I saw how good the condition of the one I purchased was.

Of course, the weirdnesses with an early aluminum bike don’t end with age. In order to appeal to more well-heeled buyers, the 7900 has notably more aggressive geometry than the other Trek MultiTrack hybrids, which mostly means it has longer reach. In addition to that, the main tubes are oversized, which necessitated using a weird chainline and hilariously long bottom bracket spindle just to keep the chainrings from hitting the chainstay (and indeed, the only damage on the bike I bought is paint damage on the chainstay, either from flex or a little bit of chain suck). This does mean, though, that some of the ‘XBiking’ restomodders who grabbed 7900s and put new external bearing bottom brackets in them found that their chainrings immediately hit the stays. It’s not surprising, though luckily with gravel bikes being a thing there are more options for wider chainlines that will work on this bike. Nonetheless, I’m sticking with square taper (at least for now) to make sure I can adjust the spindle length as necessary to make everything fit.

Overall, though, I’m looking forward to building this bike. I have a plan to retain the stock wheels, a pretty stacked parts bin to pull things out of, and some targeted used parts purchases from eBay to keep the total cost down to ‘unnecessary’ instead of ‘eye-watering’. I’m also continually applying what I’ve learned from earlier projects to avoid running into problems; my Univega Alpina project is what opened my eyes to how chainline has changed over the last 30 years, and I’m really glad I spent some time researching and doing math before buying anything this time around.

The next project is a bit of fiction, and I do think I’m going to press on with editing Fratricide. What I need to do to the story kind of came to me in a dream, and it both fits the shape of what I’ve already written and changes the story fairly dramatically. I’ve had some recent conversations about writing fiction that I really enjoyed and that left me feeling more energized about editing, and given how much editing has been a blocker for me that’s really a good thing. I likely do have one more rewrite in front of me, but with a lot more clarity about what I’m going to do with it, I’m feeling all right about that.

I don’t know how productive I’ll be on the autumn superhighway, but I have high hopes. I’m also trying to be kind to myself; there’s also a day job amidst all that and, oh wait, I’m also planning a wedding too. Reality will land in between our ambitions and our worst case scenarios, but I usually find that everything falls into place somehow. For now, though, I press forward into September and intend to grind through the next month until I can finally take my first bit of vacation this year.