Spring finally showed up at the end of last week:Only for summer to immediately elbow it out of the way, inspiring me to head over to the other side of the river on Saturday for a good old-fashioned road ride:I chose the right day, too, because had I waited until Sunday I would have run right into the GFNY, which as always I completely forgot about:Wait, does this mean River Road is open again?Either way, this is already one of the Fredliest cycling corridors in North America if not the world, and on the day before a Gran Fondo the Fred Factor was frothy to say the least, with teams forming pacelines and the air resonant with the raspy sound of overly loud cheap freehubs laced into $3,000+ wheelsets. (The current business model for wheels seems to be a cheap hub, a plastic rim, and a four-digit price tag because ceramic bearings, which in practice are pretty much the same skateboard wheel bearings as every other wheel, only they can charge you a lot more money for them. I really dont know how people can stand the horrible sound of todays freehubs, though I guess it drowns out the ticking sound of their press-fit bottom brackets.)As always on this corridor there were also plenty of triathletes, armed to the teeth (or technically the perineum) with their trademark butt rockets:It may look like simple hydration, but quick tap of the electronic blip on the handlebar releases the CO2, which in turn launches the incendiary water bottle projectile. The tip-off that this is a high-tech weapons delivery system and not simply a hydration-and-flat-fix solution is that there is no such thing as a triathlete who can repair a flat. Fortunately, its extremely unusual to see one of these actually go off, since 99% of the time the triathlete will crash while attempting to press the launch button.As for me, I was the hairy-legged guy on the old road bike with a triple and mountain bike pedals that everyone else was passing:The bike is now running beautifully, all thanks to Bens Cycle, who had exactly the spare part I needed to rehabilitate the wheels:As a middle-aged guy with all the bikes I could possibly dream of and more youd think it would take more to excite me than a fix for my cheap Craigslist bike, but youd be absolutely wrong, and the utter joy I felt when I threaded them on and confirmed they fit was all out of proportion to their diminutive size and cost. Of course, in purchasing these I did violate my oath to not spend any money on this bike; however, when you consider the alternativethat being wasting an otherwise perfectly good set of wheelsI maintain doing so was ethically sound.What amazes me even more than how easily pleased I am is how utterly stupid I was to be riding around on the wheels in the first place. Not only were both original plastic preload adjuster thingies cracked, but when I went to grease the front hub the front one fell apart immediately:Keep in mind the axle of this hub basically works like a headset, and without the preload thingy the effect is the same as removing a threadless stem. So if this had come apart while I was riding the wheel would have easily shifted far enough over to lock it up, throwing me over the bars and to my fate.Wasnt it only January when I was analyzing a similar crash and taking inventory of all the things I could have done to avoid it? Some people never learn.