Scorching

No, not the temperature here in Texas- actually, it's quite pleasant here right now.
I mean the term sometimes used for riding fixed-gear bicycles off road. Sure, most of you (o.k., 3 out of the 4 of you who actually read this thing) are familiar with it, but for for anyone who stumbles across this who isn't, well,it's riding off road on a bike that has one gear and doesn't coast. There. Concise and to the point...
Anyway, all of my bikes are fixed gears, and I'm not really sure why. There's a lot of stuff that you can hear on interweb forum and such about the why, often using terms like "zen", "flow", and "gerbil". Except for the "gerbil". Usually. I don't know about any of that, but I do know that I just really enjoy the challenge of it.
Not that I was such a great rider on a geared, freewheeling bike that everything was boring, or even that I could ride through everything. But it does make it harder, although that really makes no sense logically. Logic, schmogic.
I'm now rambling. So let's get back on to where I was going. I have 3 bikes- a road bike, a custom hand-built mountain bike, and a first generation Surly Cross-Check cyclocross bike. And it's this bike that I want to write about.
This is an old bike, by bike geek standards. Not in the cool, retro, collectable, "I've got the full history of this bike including the builder's geneology" sort of way. It's a cheap Taiwanese made steel frame. And it's been abused. In the close to 9 years that I've had this frame, it's been used for a nuber of things. It started life as a commuter in Denver, with a swap to cyclocross duties on the weekends. Then it got relegated to ugly weather duty. Ice, snow, downtown slush, snow melt, mud, you name it.
Whe I was bitten by the single speed bug, it was converted to a solitary cog and chainring combination. I even remember the first ride, in the mountains around Summit County, where I was working neutral mechanical support for a race. Good times.
I was riding the Cross-Check with The Rick from a Swanks show at the Flying Dog Brewery one night, and while trackstanding at a light in Lo-Do, a prick jumped out of a Ford Explorer and hit me in the eye with a beer bottle. For no reason. I insisted that the bike ride to the hospital with me in the ambulance. At the hospital, in the property room, a cop took it home, thinking that I would give it up. Of course, I could never do that. It's my bike, after all.
When we moved to San Diego, the Cross-Check sat lonely for almost a year. No need for cyclocross in a part of the world with no winter, and I had a couple of nice road bikes, and a pair of nice mountain bikes. No real need for it, right?
I started riding it again to commute to Poway, which included a few miles of dirt. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed riding it! And when I got the wild hair up my ass to try a fixed gear off road, guess which bike I opted to fix? Yup. And it was good.
Alright, this has gotten a lot longer and misty-eyed nostalgic than I had planned. Let's just leave it at the fact that I still ride it, and have a great time doing it. Some believe that you can't have fun on a bike unless it's the latest, greatest, newest technology. How about pulling out your oldest bike, and take it out on something you aren't sure it'll survive. You'll thank me.