Thurs Night Ride & Busted Link Assembly

Friday is here and the week is wrapping up into a nice and tight little burrito!  We went up to Pipestone Pass last night and got our ride on in the full moon........hoooooowwwwwwwllllllllllllllllll.....or to quote Ozzie, Bark at the Moon....
Ride profile looked a little something like:

Around 10 miles, 2400 of climbing and lots of shots of the full moon.  There were no werewolf sightings but there was a little howling at the moon...

Early in the ride, something did not feel right on my bike.  My pedal motion felt squishy and uneven...my first thought was that my bottom bracket conked out...on closer inspection we noticed the link assembly on my bike completely broke (excuse the poor quality photo -little blurry - no pun intended considering the bike is called 'Blur')

This must have happened on Tuesday night's ride but I don't remember hitting anything that hard or catching big air, or ride through anything, or feeling anything strange happen....so the mystery remains and now the dilemma will be whether to replace the link assembly, or to look at a new frame.  The frame is close to 10 yrs old at this point so maybe it makes sense to replace the frame....will have to call to see how much it will be to replace the link assembly, see how common a problem it is, etc.  I spent the rest of the ride thinking of how many cool places this little contraption took me...
It was probably not a smart thing to do, but I decided to just finish the ride with the completely broken link assembly.  The uphills were strange...could not hammer on the pedals as my chain would start to skip or the frame would start to creak a little too much from the flex...the downhills were a little hairy at first but I just decided to go ahead and not think about it too much.  I did not ride with the usual reckless abandon but tried to still enjoy the fun.  The bike definitely felt different and in hindsight it was probably not the best idea to have hit some sections at speed.

Given the sequence of events from last night's ride, the magicshine review will have to wait for now...but I leave you with some Ozzie