Fenders are much on my mind sometimes; say, when the weather turns wet. During rainy spells this equipment comes in handy; but there’s at least one thing that I have to watch out for — mud!

My hybrid has fenders; and I need them, because we average 60 inches of rain per year. It’s one thing to have my road bike’s rear tire toss water up my back; but when I rode a bicycle to work, I needed to stay halfway dry.

Fenders can be a problem if you run into mud. At one point, there was a lot of road work going on in my neighborhood; including the street I normally took to reach the bike path. Then one night we got some rain; and that street became an absolute quagmire!

I decided to ride the hybrid to work the morning after the rain; but I didn’t even try to  ride through that street. I walked the bike; but even so, the tires picked up so much muck that the rear tire got jammed!

For some reason, the rear tire’s fender fits more closely than that on the front tire; and it was very hard to pedal with all that muck on the tire. I put up with it for the ride to and from work that day; and for the next day’s ride to the supermarket. After that, I had to hose down the bicycle’s tires.

Even then, there was still a clump of mud stuck under the rear fender. When I was riding to the store, it had made annoying scraping sounds; and twice it nearly jammed the tire. 

Lesson learned: don’t even walk that bike through mud again! And if I ever get new fenders, I want some with a little more clearance between fender and tire. I can see why mountain bikes don’t use this particular piece of equipment. Imagine the result if a MTB tire got jammed during a highly technical descent. Disaster!