I broke the chain

Folks, last weekend was another milestone clocked by me, I did 80K (patting my back). But of course, there must be some drama behind it.

Started of the ride at 5:05 Sat morning. As most ppl were still snuggling up in their blankets, I forced myself to wake up at 4:45. Was actually worried that I couldnt get up as I only went to sleep at abt 1 am. But man... I couldnt miss the opportunity to ride to Putrajaya with those crazy Ironmen (Stupe, Shazly n others).

Met up with Bandit at his house abt 5:15, Then we rode down to simpang Kg Pasir to join the others. The plan was to go to Putrajaya n back using the new Putrajaya highway (Kg Pandan). Total distance abt 100K. I was innitially sceptical, mostly bcos of safety reasons. First, we'll be doing it in the dark, and secondly we'll be riding on hiway most of the time. And not to mention doing it with freaking Ironmen.

But Bandit assured me of my worries one by one. He'll provide me with safety lights, the highway's emergency lane is very wide n not to many cars use it and lastly, he said they(ironmen) wd only be doing avg 25K/H.

How wrong was Bandit. They were doing 30-35 from the start. I only managed to keep up with them for abt 15K. Then, I can only see the tail end of the safety light from the last person like a small red dot at the corner of my eyes. Damn, those guys were really fast.

As I was left alone in the middle, (5-6 guys in the front group, 2-3 at the back) I could feel something wrong when I was shifting the cranks. It produced some weird noises and I could just feel that the chains are not sticking. Eventually, my worst nightmare did materialised. The chains just snapped.

Crap, I was in the middle of the hiway, and to make matters worse, I was on the elevated part of it. Need to at least walk back abt 5-8 KM to normal road. But I didnt panicked cos I know Bandit brought along his toolkit and he was behind me.

Stupe and Kam stopped by and offered help, but I asked them to carry on as I know Bandit will help me fix this problem. After few more minutes, the sight of a hulking man in a gayish red jersy was definitely a sight of relief, here comes SuperBandit....

Bandit straight away assessed the problem and told me that everything will be allright. He wd just cut out 2 chains(the broken ones) and re-clamped it back. But there's one problem, we couldnt get the particluar tool out of its barcket. It was too tight. We tried to get it out in so many ways, even using our teeth, but to no avail. But Lady Luck must really be in our side, while we were struggling to get it out, a CRV pulled over and the driver came down. That guy(Mat Salleh) was a cyclist too, we could see his Cervelo lying at the back seat. This poor guy was actuallly lost, he was trying to find his cycling grp. Their RV was at Midvalley, so this guy was heading totally to the wrong direction.

Anyway, we borrowed his tool to unlock our tool and gave him the direction to go back to Midvalley. Thanks and gd luck to u man.

From that point on, myself and Bandit was just pedalling at our own pace. We re-set the target -> we will stop at the next R&R and wait for the main grp to turn back so we could join them again. We use these moments together (sounds gayish) to do some bike fitting on me. So Bandit did assessed the way I cycled, my body position, the way I shift the gears so that I can enjoy the ride better.

During our stop at R&R, bandit shifted my saddle to the front, with this new setup, the pain on my shoulder and neck were not as bad as last week.

As we were waiting for the grp, OP AJ came zooming past by us. This guy is 55 yrs old but looks fit as a fiddle. Salute to u sir.

Then we decided not to wait for them but ride slowly as we were very sure they could catch up with us. And so they did, we joined back the big group back home. This time they were really doing avg 20-25K/H. Thank god. Myself and Bandit couldnt wait to do this route again in a fortnight.