Another week of Fahsong pre-dawn rides is still in the routine even though it curtails evening activities except for Saturday and Sunday nights. They don’t ride on Monday and I choose to ride with the “touring” division of the Trang Cycling Club on Sundays, which doesn’t leave until 8 AM.  Good thing because that is an all-day ride and leaving at 5 AM would make it 12 hours of touring and that’s a lot of food to take in.

Speaking of food, the clutter above left is the detritus after one of our Dim Sum breakfasts where at a minimum eight riders crowd a circular table and stuff down Thai treats.  My new nick-name is Kii Tham, which rhymes with Tom. I’ve learned that I can get any quantity of hard boiled eggs each morning and fill up on those before starting on many of the palm-oil-fried delicacies. Not that it’s all unhealthy, they go thru two or three plates of lettuce leaves and sliced cucumbers before the Thai donuts come out of the Wok. Fahsong (pre-dawn in Thai I’m told) bicycle group is a collection of Trang men who take

this early morning ride 5 days a week and they’ve obviously been doing it for many years. I’d label them as Durango’s B or B+ riders who take the hills on the Trang ring road seriously, providing an endless challenge for the Thai testosterone tigers. They don’t rotate the draft line like we might in the States, they just wait until the lead “bonks” and then zip past with not a care for him catching the tail of the peloton. I’ve thought about taking photos but in the pitch dark it would be stupid and at 20+ MPH it would be foolish. The sprint is only about 17 km (11 miles) but enough to leave everyone pumped and hungry for Dim Sum. It takes me 10km to get to the start and the ride home is another 28, so I’m getting in about 55 km (33 miles) by 7:30.

The Trang Cycling Club is a very diverse group, in that some members never seem to ride with others. However they all know each other and the network helped me get my Cannondale mountain bike repaired.
There are probably 5 or 6 bike shops in town, only one of which specializes in high-end bikes exclusively and another that carries a full range.  The other four deal mostly in kids and cruising style bikes that would compete with the Thai big-box stores called Tesco or BigC.  Many of the Club members are mechanics who handle only scooters and motorcycles, but one member does their high-end bicycle tuning and repair.  Even though it is basically “shade tree” looking, Mr. Piak is great at tuning and troubleshooting problems like I brought: a skipping chain when hitting the pedals with full torque.  We tested, switched-out, replaced, tightened and tuned everything in the drive train before settling on the solution that the middle chain ring is flexing and pulling the chain off the sprockets.  We probably spent 6 hours altogether running down spares to borrow, new parts to try, and tear-downs of clusters, cranks and chains.  They even figured out what year vintage the chain wheel was as we searched for a replacement.  No luck in Trang however, I’ll just not be able to stand on the pedals in middle front and middle back from now on.  BTW this bike is over 15 years old and has seen lots of miles, it’s the same one on which I did a 500-mile section of the Great Divide. It’s retirement is coming soon.