Jordan's Bike Blog

The winter of 2020/21, I finally decided to commit myself to the Alberta Rockies bikepacking race, scheduled for August 2021. The race has grown in popularity over recent years, with 2021 being the largest event to date. As with most things, there are ample resources and blogs across the web summarizing the event, the route, and the experience of participating riders. I don't plan to go into too many details about my actual experience riding, but more want to highlight some of the key considerations I made when preparing for my first event. Plus, I don't have much interest in writing "trip reports", so I wont be doing that.  This will be a deep dive into the nitty-gritty details, so if that interests you, feel free to read on.  Bike Check The real reason for drafting this post. So let's get right into it.  For the event, and all of my bikepacking/adventure riding pursuits, I opted to ride my trusty 2011 Surly Karate Monkey. This bike has been my daily driver for m

Many year's ago, my partner was gifted a MR300 Sekine from someone at her Dad's work. He used to race for Manitoba, and passed along this vintage stead. My partner used this bike to tour from Vancouver Island down to Oregon, a pannier full of books in towe. She loves it. The drivetrain, bottom bracket, headset, and nearly every other component were operating on borrowed time, so one rainy day spring 2021 I decided to pop it in the bike stand and start a rebuild.  Taking apart a bike is easy, and the budding bike mechanic is always awarded a few surprises. In this case, the vintage suntour race parts provided a whole new suite of standards I wasn't prepared for. I thought a simple clean, some new bar tape, a new cassette and chain would have this Sekine back on the road in now time. Nope!  Once I got the frame stripped down, I brought it into my local bike shop to replace the bottom bracket and headset. Both were worn to the point of indexing, so replacing with cartridge BB