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Another good weekend weather wise… Got out for two moderately long rides to start bringing my endurance up.  Saturday, a solid core of Memphis Velo riders road out to the cat pee store and back from RB’s.  Taking out stops for a flat and a later incident (see below), the ride was fairly fast, but I felt good.  A few miles from getting back to Arlington, I made a couple of hard efforts and was happy with the results.  It was a good check on where I am headed.   It is going to a good season.   Sunday was the usual Outdoor’s ride riding out from Germantown and back with Andrea.  The Outdoor’s ride was a calm in that as nice rotating paceline ate up the miles to the Forest store.  Normally, that ride can be pretty cut-throat.

Unfortunately, at the end of the ride on Saturday a couple of us had a front row seat for one of our own getting taken out by a dog.  Frogge was riding with the group down Anderton Spring (residential road) when a pair of dogs came out of a driveway/yard and came over to us.  Frogge was the unlucky one as one of them ran right into his front wheel after he tried to evade.  He went down pretty hard and fast.  Fortunately the damage was pretty limited and he will have to deal with some healing on his arm (fracture).  The season is still out there.    The trend seems to be more dogs on the loose this early season out on routes out in NE Shelby County.  Maybe it is just a bunch of new dogs this winter that are being let outside and haven’t yet been run over by a car.

Still waiting on my Felt frame to come in…   in the meantime, I picked up another fish scale to do some weighing.   Here is what I found:

• Kuota Kebel [SRAM Force] with Bontrager Race Lite Wheels (17.4 #)
• Trek 5200 [Ult 9] with Rolf Sestrires (18.4#)
• Ridley Crossbow [DA 9] with Velomax Vistas/Mud2′ (21.6#)
• Cannodale [105 9sp] with 105/Mavic wheels (22.6#)

Putting the race wheels (Zero 038) on my Kebel takes off over a pound of weight.  I was surprised by the weight of my Crossbow since I thought that it was so much lighter than my Cannondale… I guess 1 pound is a lot, but I thought it was more.  Both bikes’ complete wheel sets weigh almost 7 lbs with tires and cassette.  The frame of the Crossbow like the Cannondale is aluminum and is not especially light.

The way I weighed them I got frame/component weights (after taking wheels off):

• Kuota Kebel/Force:  11.5#
• Trek 5200 / Ult 9:  13.1#
• Ridley Crossbow / DA 9:  14.6#
• Cannondale / 105 9:  15.7#

At some point I will do some work with the wheels to give some real world weights, but it looks like most of my wheels are not that impressive.   I like knowing this stuff, but really it doesn’t make that much of a difference in the end, but a lighter bike just feels so fast…