This summer I have been riding a new bike for the commute to work and school. It’s been fun in many ways because the bike, a Specialized Tri-Cross, is a capable bike off road as well as being a decent road bike. What’s really nice is the bike feels much better than my older racer when Johann’s tandem attachment is mounted. The racer was so stiff and the geometry of the bike so tight that the tandem swamped it and every movement of Johann made the bike twitchy under me. Very uncomfortable. Tammy, Johann and I have now done a number of family rides to the beach or up River Road and back and the new setup is great.
Today Tammy wasn’t up to a ride, so Johann and I headed out for a ride up River Road. Before we have always stopped just shy of a hill that has a 7% grade and is about 1/4 mile long. Johann wanted to try it today (and last time too) so we charged up with him pedalling the whole way. Since he conquered the hill we went on through Old Mystic and did an errand at the hardware store then went to visit his favorite shop in Olde Mistick Village where he tries to stop in and say “Hi” to the store manager at least once a month.
We looped around and Johann discovered that, besides the sense of accomplishment for climbing the hill, he also gets to “rocket” back down it on the way home.
We also get to look at the statistics of each ride thanks to a Garmin bike computer and MotionBased.com
Clicking through the graphic will take you to the ride at MotionBased.com where you can also “see” the ride.
Last Ride Stats
Date: August 28
Distance: 16.6 km (10.3 miles)
Ride type/Bike: Commute / Tri-Cross
August Distance: 395.8 km (245.9 miles)
Year To Date Distance: 395.8 km (245.9 miles)
Weight Lost/Gained: +0.82 kg (+1.8 pounds)
Somewhere along the line I must have changed…
There was a time when I considered truing a wheel an exercise in pure frustration. I would take the offending wheel to the local bike shop (LBS) and have them do it, even if it was what they considered a quick and easy job of truing. I did try a number of times, either because the LBS was closed or I was desperate to save a couple bucks. Each time I ended up cursing as I started chasing an out of true spot round and round the rim. Too often the wheel ended up more out of true when I finished than when I started.
It turned out that one of the flats the other day was from a split in the plastic snap-in rim tape (I never should have moved away from cloth tape!). The spoke nipple punctured the tube in the high heat and excessive load (me, still 30lbs over weight) on the bike. Time to replace rim tape
, tires and tubes. Since they were stripped down anyways I took the time to true the wheels as well.
Somehow now truing the wheel was like some weird zen meditation. Slowly eliminating the thwack, thwacka, thwack scrape against the feelers of my truing stand
a little at a time until at last there was no more scrape laterally or radially. Not to say it’s a perfect true, but real close. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is, except now that I am older and have a decade of marriage and six years as a father I expect I have far more patience. Tammy thinks it may be because I have become more spiritual and more prone to “slow down and smell the roses”.
It could also be the fact that I really need to save the money of having the LBS true my wheels so I can replace the cassette, chain rings, chain and cables. The rings and cogs are all showing extreme wear and the cable stretch has gotten severe enough that I need to adjust them almost daily to ensure clean shifts. I am looking at the Nokon Shift Cables (Shimano road type)
as I have seen some good reviews of them for mountain bikes, but have not seen any reviews for road bikes.
Anyone using them on a road bike? Got an opinion?
The Deutschland Tour on Cycling.TV has been a pretty good race so far, with some exciting finishes. The prologue was won by Gusev of Discovery Channel, who continues to hold the Leaders jersey and the best young rider jersey. Astaná-Würth scored a victory in stage one when Assan Bazayev outsprinted Erik Zabel and Danilo Napolitano to his first professional win. CSC’s Jens Voigt beat Davide Rabellin of Gerolsteiner and Astaná-Würth’s Andrey Kashechkin to take stage 2 in style.
Today the teen-aged Team Wiesenhof-AKUD rider Gerald Ciolek out sprinted Erik Zabel and the other sprint favorites to take a most excellent stage. Great sprint performances out of Ciolek are not too surprising, even though he is currently only 19 and on a Continental team — in 2005 he beat Zabel and Gerosteiner’s Robert Förster in a bunch sprint to become the youngest ever National Champion of Germany. Now in his second Pro year, rumors are T-Mobile is looking to pick him up from Wiesenhof for next year.
Overall Gusev continues to hold the leaders Yellow Jersey (by fractions of a second over Erik Zabel) along with the Best Young Rider’s White Jersey. Erik Zabel has a solid lead in the sprinters Green Jersey competition. The mountains really only begin tomorrow (Hartz mountains between Witsenhausen and Schweinfurt), but right now Gerolsteiner’s Stefan Schumacher has the lead for the Polka Dot jersey.
Voigt’s win in stage 2 was one part of a CSC hat trick for the day, winning three different races in one day. CSC as a ProTour team can and is fielding teams in three races across Europe right now, besides Voigt’s win with the D-Tour team, Fabian Cancellara took a win in the day stage of the Tour of Denmark and Marcus Ljungqvist won the day at the Paris-Corrèze. Amazing.
The great thing about Cycling.TV is that we can watch the 2–3 hour live show when it airs (usually starts around 9am EST) or if we can go out and do whatever needs to be done and watch the edited broadcast (60-90 minutes) of the stage anytime after they post it later that night. Awesome!
Johann wanted to know what cyclocross was, since I had referred to my amateur cyclo-cross racing in Germany and wanting to get a good cyclo-cross bike for winter and commuting use. Sure enough looking through the archives of Cycling.TV and there was the British National Cyclo-cross Championships from earlier this year. We watched Helen Wyman of Team Fat Birds Don’t Fly (I love that team name!) win the women’s championship and Discovery Channel’s Roger Hammond take the mens championship. Johann now knows what cyclo-cross is and thinks it very cool.
Did I say I like Cycling.TV ??
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Today while we watched the Deutschland Tour this morning on Cycling TV, Johann helped me put new cleats on my Sidi Dominator’s (by far, the best mountain/spd shoe I have ever used!) and switch out the pedals on the bike from the Shimano SPD-R’s — which I loathe — to some straight SPD’s until I can get some Coffee Covers for my Speedplay’s.
Finally after a lite lunch I headed out for a short day at work. Really I only had to get a package packed and labeled for UPS pickup tomorrow. Unfortunately somehow time had escaped and it was now 1pm. As I stepped outside the temperature was in the triple digits and the humidity was at 90%. It felt like a sweltering hot Montgomery Alabama summer, not Mystic Connecticut.
Armed with 2 liters of water on my back and two weak energy drink bottles on the bike, I headed out of Mystic and straight into a 10–12 mph headwind! Off the big ring…and start spinning. I thought really hard about taking the cross country shortcut between Groton Long Point and Bluff Point, but it is a rocky path with lots of sharp gravel sections…
After two and a half hours at work, I refilled the camel back and bottles and headed home. About a third of the way home though I caught a piece of glass in the front tire, a tiny sliver really, but sure enough straight into the tube. As I rolled to a stop I heard the rear tire start to hiss. Sure enough… Double flatted. Damned glass shards…that’s three flats by them in two weeks.
Unfortunately I was only prepared to fix one tube at best, so I ended up borrowing a cell phone to call Tammy. She and Johann picked me up and we went straight to Mystic Cycle Center for a pair of Armadillo tires, more tubes, and two new patch kits.
While it might have all the makings for a miserable ride today…commute only, too hot, head wind, double flatting, that hill. Actually it was the single best ride since getting back on the bike. Sure I was miserably hot and sucking down water constantly, but I was spinning much smoother and I could feel the smoother spin in my climbing and riding into the headwind. It just felt better today than it has since Idaho. My form is coming back…now to get my weight all the way back down.
