News on My Busted Bike

When we were "up north" last week, I got a phone call from a number I recognized, and I picked up right away. It was the bike shop where my wrecked bike has been hanging out since the incident 3+ weeks ago.

I was told after a few days that they were trying to talk with someone at Blue as my derailleur hanger was kind of build "backwards" from standard, and the bike shop didn't have anything that would work. They'd talked to other bike shops too, but no one had anything that matched. So they were chatting with some at Blue (the brand of my bike).

They found out my bike is pretty rare. I bought my bike through the (now closed, I think) company "The Racery," and that sales company had stated this:

Many of our bikes come from the professional peloton while others have only been ridden a handful times at manufacturer demo rides. We also offer brand new closeout model bikes, frames and bike parts from your favorite brands.

Each bike shipped from The Racery is assessed, cleaned, tuned and documented by our in-house pro mechanics using our 55 point inspection process. Our objective is to provide the you the highest quality gear at the best possible value.

So I knew my bike had been used a few times in maybe a few TTs, but that's about it. I didn't know anything else about it when I bought it OH SO SLIGHTLY used (and at a steep discount).

Turns out that the guy from Blue said my bike was about 1 of 20 made that way. Which sounds cool, but is less cool when you're looking for a specific replacement part. D'oh.

I got another call from the bike shop a few days ago when we were at the waterpark for Henry's birthday saying that he had the derailleur hanger in his hand and was going to start working on my bike!!! Sweet! (He delayed starting the work he could have done before to make sure he could get a bracket and not just invest $500 worth of time and parts on a bike that wouldn't end up being rideable anyway.) The guy from Blue found 2 derailleur hangers from that build somewhere in his shop, and he sent them to my bike shop: one will be put on my bike ASAP, and one will be sold directly to me so that I have a back-up should something happen again. Because if it happened again, my bike would be useless without that bracket!

So hopefully I'll have my bike back next week. Best case scenario right now is that it will be 4 weeks between rides, so that puts a damper on my (possible) tri season, although I didn't have any concrete triathlons on the books anyway. Oh well... just happy that my running is going well and that I'll have a bike back that works! *fingers crossed*