roadcx.net

My original plan was to race this weekend down in Birmingham at the Ride to Live. The race is a good race, etc., but this week just wore me out, rather stay home and continue to ride / build volume. I have the day off, so I plan to do a night 3-day block before starting backing off a bit for the 3-day/4-stage race down at Brookhaven (Mississippi Gran Prix).

Last weekend, I did the normal double (modified). Instead of the Trinity Ride, I did Ride in Spring (75 miles) and followed that with the Outdoors ride extended (to/from Cordova). My ride plans for the rides were pretty simple. Saturday was pulling as much as I could stand. On Sunday, I did much the same, but instead tried to stay around 105 rpm. The Outdoors group was a pretty lively, so it ended up being pretty tough especially after working off the front. So, for the first time in a long time, I couldn’t hold the group over the hill midway out to the store. Looking back at the file, the numbers for that section were pretty stout and given the deep hole I was digging over the weekend, I just popped.

After finishing the ride on Sunday, I was exhausted. The metrics in WKO+ aggreed. CTL (chronic) has been steadily building (42 rolling average of TSS) to 93 TSS/day. ATL (acute or 7-day) peaked at 130.7 TSS/day, leaving me at a -37.7 TSS/day on Training Stress Balance (TSB). This week has been busy at work, so I didn’t have as much training time this week. Monday was an off day to a meeting after work, Tuesday was a short moderate ride (Bikes Plus shop ride), Wednesday was an hour at the Farms on my Ridley X-Fire with Andrea, and Thursday night I broke out the TT rig (first ride with my new straight up seat post). I am still pretty tired, but I plan to put in a nice volume block this weekend. (TSB has recoved to -7 as of yesterday).

The ride last night was good. I moved my seat up and forward and switched to the cutout version of the Profile Design saddle (Andrea wasn’t using it). Setting up the Kuota seatpost (only option given the seat tube/clamp shape) is a real pain. It requires the use of both a allen key and a 8mm open end wrench. I was glad I didn’t have to make a field adjustment. I got it correct the first time.

The Polar WIND power however was messing up big time. I did a few short time trial efforts to see how it was to push hard in the new position. The position was good and allowed me to be a on the saddle a bit more with my shoulders down and my back flat (using shadows as a reference). When I pushed hard up into the 300W+ range (based on perception), the numbers on the Polar would drop down to 200W or even under. Clearly there is a problem with the chain line over the sensor in the big ring (which is where TT’ing is done 90%+ of the time). I am not sure what I will do at this point, but I might try to reposition the chain tension sensor further back on the chain stay. Hope I can get it to work better in the gear combinations I plan on using for time trialing so I can use for it pacing on longer TT’s and for training.

This morning Andrea and I went up and joined what must have been over 100 others to do the RB’s Ride into Spring ride. MV had a good showing especially in the 75 mile route front group. We move along pretty well as a group especially a few short hills sorted the group into groups of similar abilities. In general, it was good ride, except for one thing…

Dogs. Whenever we ride in northern Shelby County, we start to see more and more uncontrolled dogs out in the yard. As the big group of maybe 30 or so went by a lot of then gave chase resulting in a lot of close calls. The one I didn’t see, was my teammate Chuck ended up running into one out on the course. It happened near the back of the group, so not many saw it. It probably was a spectacular crash, but at such a price. He broke his collarbone and got generally banged up. [Chuck, let me know if there is anything you need. If you do get on the trainer, I have a whole bunch of 2001-2002 VHS tapes of races to watch when you are up for it. Let me know.]

After we all got back to the shop, we feasted on Lenny’s (as is customary) and socialized. After an hour or so of that, Andrea and I returned home. Her plan (which she executed), was to do the Swamp Stomper run (~15 miles) on her quest to get back to ultra-marathoning… including probably a 100 miler this fall.

When she was gone, I pulled my single speed Cannondale down off the wall. Since I rode it last time, I got a KMC Half-Link to shorten up my chain slightly. When I installed it last week, it didn’t quite seem to behave properly… to make it move freely, I had to push the pin most of the way out instead of centered sticking out of both sides the same.

With this, I grabbed an old multi-tool (with a chain pin tool) and headed off. My plan to try the infamous deep gravel of the Greenline. After the morning’s ride, the deep gravel was tough going… I ended up only going from Cully over Germantown Pkwy to the second road across from Shelby Farms. At the point, I had enough of the 250W+ pushing through the deep gravel.

At this point, I rode over into the Farms and started down a trail. After about 1/3 of a mile, it happened, the cranks got light as I left my chain on the trail behind me. Crap! I went back to see if I would be walking 3 miles home. The chain looked okay (except for not being on my bike), so I put it back on and got the pin pushed back in… centered this time. The weird thing is that half link pin connection was flexible… but the part on the master link was not. At this point, I am not sure what I should do. I might go ahead and get a track chain (1/8″) with a 1/8″ (3.18mm) half link… Or maybe my SRAM 8-speed chain is too narrow to use with the 3/32″ (2.38mm) half link. Not from a roller standpoint (3/32″ is the roller width) but the outer plate width. Standard 7/8 chains are 7.1-7.2 mm. 9-speed are 6.8mm, 10-speed are 6.2mm.

I couldn’t get a good measurement on the half-link (couldn’t find the micrometer), but it looks like the width inside the outer plates is 5 mm.. If a chain is 7.2mm outer width and the roller width is 2.38mm then the plate width should be around 1.2 mm. That would be a 4.8 mm inside width of outer plates. My measurement are pretty suspect, but if these numbers check out then it could explain why the master link to the half-link connection is stiff.

Tonight the weather cleared up and so Andrea and I rode down to GPAC for Tuesday night ride. Memphis Velo pretty much dominated the ride tonight with probably at least 8 of the 14-15 riders who started. Matt, Chris, Dale, Rob, David, Michael, Chuck, and myself. Several of the boys either had a rough day at work because the punishment was doled out all ride even by those who raced on the weekend.

The one notable thing about this ride is general bad attitude from a few drivers (who probably also had bad days at the mill). It is enough to taint the ride, in my opinion, I will have to come out occasionally to test the legs in the group, but I don’t plan to be a regular.

About 20 miles into the ride, just after a group splitting attack, I heard a pop and my rear tire quickly deflated. Pulled on over and started to get my stuff out my seatpack while Andrea took off my tire to speed up the process. After a few seconds she pointed out the now obvious issue with the tire… it was worn down to the threads in one spot.

After asking around, a ketchup packet appearred from the group, I guess he found on the road (I honestly don’t remember who handed it to me). Put that it, trial inflated…had a tube bulge (tube under the bead) and redid the tube, reinflated. Back in business. Rode the rest of the ride taking it pretty easily over every bump (stand and unweighting, etc). Split off the group and rode with Andrea back to the house. Was literely right in front the house turning into the driveway when the tire blew again. Good timing. Glad I didn’t have to walk or wait for Andrea to come back and get me from somewhere out on the road…. R.I.P. Specialized Turbo Cipolini tire (an old tire in good shape I have trying to wear out this spring…. locking up the brakes and skidding will do that every time, better an old $30 tire than a $60-$100 tubular!).

Since the weather was generally crappy yesterday, I put the Kuota up on the trainer to do a trainer ride. I moved the speed sensors to the rear wheel (against consel – Polar manual says not to). I needed to move it there to allow me to do a comparision of the watts versus speed for both bikes / power systems using my Kurt Kinetic trainer as teh go between.

Before putting it up on the trainer, I moved the speed sensor and the wheel magnet and got them to talk to each other as it were. But when I started riding, it looked like it was skipping a beat since I was getting readings of 3-6 mph… So I stopped and angled the sensor toward the wheel, problem fixed.

I started out my ride as a warmup around 200W in the little ring… No problem. The numbers “felt” right… My plan was to do a number of different intensity intervals for the dual purpose of a workout and to get some data for comparision. I want to get the numbers about right to help me with TT pacing. If 300 W on the screen = 250 W, for example the power meter won’t help anyone.

So I put in a VHS tape of the 1994 Pink Floyd Pulse Tour concert video and cranked it up for my workout. Once I got past my warmup, I put it in the big ring and watched my power drop… I was pushing 22-23 mph which should have been good for high 200’s wattage, but the Polar was showing 150W and even lower. Crap. The early optimism for this device was fading fast… If I can’t get power numbers in the 53×15 to 53×11 that won’t help any time trial I have ever done.

Many zip ties (and an old tube) had to die that morning.

So I get off the bike and look at the chain and the sensor… time to make some changes. After several combination of the provided spacers, I ended up using cut up pieces of inner-tube to shim up the front end.

Photos of the current install. Not perfect, but seems to be better in the big ring.

At the end of the ride, I wanted to see if I could figure out what gears (and their chain lines) worked better than others. I haven’t had time to fully work out that aspect, but it is clear that the power numbers for the Polar seem to skew lower. This can be corrected by increasing the chain linear density (g/mm)-once I get some more data. I half wonder if moving the speed sensor made things worse or is it that my on the road rides have been lower intensity / small ring type rides (or is there some harmonic due to the trainer / wheel being out of round or the effects of uneven chain tension around the pedal cycle, etc.) I did put it in the big ring on the road and when it was reporting 300W, it felt about right, but it is difficult to make those sort of judgments on the road.

I have tons of data that I can get out of WKO+ for the Felt/SRM combo, but I had only this lower instensity workout from back in November already in the software. Between getting it out of WKO+ (I found using SRM format works best) and converting km/h to mph, etc it will take a little bit of time, and honestly, this is just a side side-project. Plenty else to do besides this! (Without going into the data deeply, the lower cluster of power numbers at ~20 mph and 150-175W were when in big ring combinations.)

Today Andrea and I went out for a short ride after work… It ended up being shorter than we intended when about 12 miles in she noted that my seat had dropped (I have a white tape band on the seat post). My knees have been feeling sort of creaky the last week or so… I wonder how long it has been like this? It was stable for the 12 or so miles back home. But I won’t ride it again until I get the clamp replaced.

The most likely time it could have been damaged was back at Rouge Roubaix on the gravel or my little gravel crash. If so, the fact that I dropped my seat nearly a full centimeter might explain some things.

Seat clamp with crack.

Seat clamp parts… aluminum clamp, sleeve, and frame insert. White tape was all above the clamp before it slipped down.

—-

FYI. I ended up taking the seat clamp off Andrea’s Blue RC7. It was actually a perfect fit. Now, I need to get a replacement so she will have a complete frame again. She has taken both of my 34.9 mm Thomson seat posts for her BH frame and now today a Gary Fisher demo bike she is trying. My RIdley’s are not whole…..

You can ignore this post if you are not a Macintosh user that wants to setup WKO+ on their machine.

After getting a new MacBook a few weeks ago to replace my old pre-Intel MacMini, I wanted to have it work with my WKO+ Training Peaks software. I had installed a copy on my work laptop and that has never sat well with me since it is not really my laptop and not fully in my control.

I started out by setting up Boot Camp (the free Apple solution). It worked just fine but the rebooting got a little bit old the 2nd time I had to do it. I decided to try out VMWare Fusion. The first setup I tried was to mount my Boot Camp partion, but that is less flexible (takes up a a set number of GB of harddrive space). I ended up settling on using Windows XP using a regular VMWare Fusion virtual machine. It loads pretty quickly and hasn’t been an issue for me. Knowing that the WKO+ registration is pretty picky about moving it, I have a backup virtual machine zipped and stored in a backup location. After experimenting with it for a few weeks, I went ahead and paid for the software (there is a 30-day trial). Definitely worth $80.

As for backup, I have been using a Mozy home account for a while now and despite the fact that the software occasionally has to be uninstalled and reinstalled, it has already saved me one time when my MacMini drive laid down on me a few months back. I put a new drive in the Mini and recovered all the files a little at a time by downloading them (the DVD option is pretty pricey IMHO, I figured it would be $80 or more to get my files back in that form). I started out backing up my WKO files using a little .bat file scheduled to run daily to move the files to my shared folder which would get backed up on the Mac side. This works, but it is a lot of data moving (since my script isn’t smart enough to just add new). I ended up installing Mozy for Windows under another email account. The free version is up to 2 GB which is much much less than all the data I have.

Currently, I am just using my Garmin 705. It just mounts as a USB drive and you just drag and drop the files on an open WKO+ from within the VMWare virtual machine. The next trick that I will have to figure out is to work with my older Polar CS600 as I start to ride my TT bike. I will need to get the Polar IRDA USB adapter to make that work.

This type of post is a bit off my usual type of post, but I didn’t find this sort of thing spelled out like I wanted when I was trying to figure this stuff out. Since I have, I figured I would share.

I have always been a Mac guy, and my new one is the best yet. I like that I can do 95% of what I need in the MacOS environment and use VMWare Fusion to handle the only application I use that requires Windows.

• Mac IIsi (1992-1997)
• SE/30 (bought used in college for cheap)
• Performa 5200 (bought used from a grad student) (1997-1999)
• iMac DV (1999-2005) < upstairs… need to find a use for it.
• MacMini (2005-2009) < converted to media computer in bedroom
• MacBook (2009-?)

Since I have never ridden the Rouge Roubaix course, I spent some time trying to figure some of the course. The maps, etc are up on the event site, but I wanted to try to see where the crunch times appeared on the course.

The first one appears to be the turn off Hwy 24 in Fort Adams (Miss.) at around mile 64. The pavement disappears and turns upward (keep in mind I have never ridden it).

A bit further on (mile 80) is the infamous “Big Bertha” hill just outside of Tunica (Lousiana).

Despite these harder decision points, the race is going to be tough in general. I know I am pretty well prepared for the distance and intensity. I have had a pretty steady increasing load as I transitioned from cyclocross season to the road pre-season. This puts me as good as I am willing to be this early in the season. After this weekend with the change to DST, I am sure my training volume will go up and I can focus on different aspects of my fitness that are more difficult to address on the indoor trainer.

The plan for the weekend is drive down Saturday morning (5-5.5 hours?), pre-ride part of the course, and then get to the hotel. The race is Sunday morning, clean up afterwards, and then hit the road north that afternoon. It should be a pretty tiring and long 2-day weekend.

Due to the wintry weather, I spent most of the day doing much needed repair tasks that I have put off for a while.

First, I continued the work to convert my old Cannondale CX bike to single speed. I bought an inexpensive single-speed conversion kit a few years back (Forte from Performance). I have read a review that panned it (CX magazine a few issues ago), but decided to push forward anyway. If it didn’t work out, I could always buy another tensioner…

Anyway, when I worked on this last time, I had planned to shorten up my 9-speed chain… that didn’t work because it failed to nicely wrap around the rear cog (part of the SS conversion kit, the cog along with spacers goes over existing Shimano cassette body). Like the tensioner, I will probably replace it with a SS wheel, but all things in due time. Working to put something together on the cheap to start.

So last weekend (or the previous?), I bought an 8-speed chain, but never got around to installing it. I also decided that if I was going to replace the 105 9-speed shifter, I might has well get the RX100 brake lever off as well and make it look a little better. Enter a set of Cane Creek brake levers. So from there, it was snip (old cables), strip (bar tape), and remove (brake levers).

(before: 1×9)

Another choice I made to was to remove the Salsa top levers. I have come to conclusion that I am worse off using these levers since it puts me too upright. The original reason I went with them was due to the poor braking performance with the 9-speed shifter/brake levers. I hope the Cane Creek levers will allow me to brake more effectively.

The brake install went pretty well, although I always forget what a pain setting up the travel agent for the front V-brake. (I need to get a canti brake stop for the fork from somewhere to get these V-brakes off my bike…but again for now, I’ve got what I’ve got).

Installing the drive train was next. I setup the tensioner as I believe it should be setup (vague written instructions, no dwg). I then broke the chain to the correct length and installed the master link. Once I did this, I thought I could take out some slack…so I took out a link pair….too short! So that is why you see two master links on the chain if you look close.

So I found, a new use for the what only a few weeks ago seemed superfluous. I have two geared and one SS bike for CX now, not 3 geared bikes, that would be silly!

(after: 1×1)

I wonder how it will ride, it will probably be a while before I find out given my plans to race the next two weekends (Rouge Roubaix and Hell’s Kitchen). Although, I could probably try it out mid-week at the Farms if it dries up some (ride responsible!).

The weather was still cold outside, so I moved onto my new CX steed, my Ridley X-Fire. It was still muddy from the Wednesday night MTB ride and it hung in my garage in that state, with a flat front tire (which occurred somehow post ride). So I pulled it down and using my new Prestaflator / compressor, I aired it up. Unfortunately, I must have stuck the Silca style pump head on too far and when I tried to pull it off, I pulled the Stan’s No Tubes stem right out into the rim….

First things first, I needed to clean up the bike to deal with this and the other tasks I had planned for it. By then, the snow had melted on the back patio, time to wash it up. The hose, was half-full of slush, so it took a minute to get water flow and a few minutes more to get it cleaned up.

After that, I pulled apart the front wheel to see what I was dealing with. The valve had indeed pulled free from the rim strip. At $22.50 each, I was sort of miffed that I had pulled it apart. So I used a pen to pull get under the rim strip via the hole where the valve used to sit and pulled the rim strip up in the valve area to get the valve out. The valve that pulled free looks a lot like the valve they sell for $8 as a replacement part, basically a presta valve with a bit of rubber on inside end.

So I put the rim strip back and pushed the valve back through from the rim side and now it should be ready to go. I haven’t tried it yet, since I am letting rim and tire dry out first before starting the process. I would imagine that water + sealant wouldn’t work as well.

The main thing that I needed to get done was to swap out the decided un-sealed SRAM Red ceramic BB for a regular sealed GXP BB. This is something I have needed to do before I destroy the Red BB using it in CX service.

I’ll update the progress of the front tire “repair” (probably in the comments unless there is a lot to say about it).

For now, Andrea and I plan to knock out a trainer ride. We will make up for our softness in braving the weather with a nasty VO2 workout. 6×4 min @ 115% FTP+ and 4×2 113%-120% FTP. Total time around 1:45. I have been watching the 2002 Giro that I taped for some reason….remember when they used to have daily covered 4x day for the Giro!?

I occurred to me that I need to start keeping track of (road bike) rideable dirt roads in / around Shelby County.

Here is the short list to get started, that will be added to as I think of more. Comment to help build this list. I may even get motivated to link the rest of these on map my ride.

1. Fletcher Dr near Collierville. 1.5 miles between: (E) TN196/Chulahoma Rd and (W) Crestover Dr. Hard pack, some light gravel. Lightly potholled. Great connector from TN196 to TN205 (avoiding Poplar)
2. Old Soloman Mill / Lambert Rd. North of Somerville/Oakland. ~2.5 miles between: (SE) Old Soloman / Stafford Dr to intersection of Old Soloman / Lambert west to (NW) Lambert Dr/McNabb Rd. Only ridden it once, it was hard pack with some slimy stuff due to recent rain. Not much problem gravel.
3. Braden Road. ~2.5 miles. (N) Braden Road, south of I-40 to about 2.5 miles south of that (north of the start of housing developments). Nice fast section of well graded hardpack. Some gravel but easy to avoid, if that is your plan.
4. another one out east somewhere. Andrea needs to help me out…

Yesterday, Andrea went on a long ride as a pair. She plotted out a long 95 mile route on BikeRouteToaster. We ended up adding a few miles along the way to get an even 100 miles. The route was a good one, although the long northward march (we did the route counter-clockwise) wasn’t super fun with the 10-12 mph cold NNW wind yesterday. The route also included two stretches of dirt roads of about 2-3 miles each: Old Solomon Mill to Lambert Dr (north of Somerville) and Braden Road south of I-40. I don’t think I have actually ridden 100 miles in one go since a 3-state, 3-mountain probably in 2003 or so. Since then, I have plenty of rides/races in the 75-90 mile range, just usually haven’t bothered to go the extra distance.

Staying on the subject of route mapping, I put together a short email for a friend that just got / is getting a Garmin 705 to use with his SRM.

• First thing out of the box, update the firmware to 2.6 (or whatever the newest is). There is a Garmin updater utility for both Mac and Windows.
• The default maps suck, get the $100 upgrade maps chip (if you haven’t already).
• The Garmin desktop software is pretty useless in my opinion, except for maybe the Garmin updater.
• You can download Garmin TCX files from MapMyRide or better yet BikeRouteToaster.com. BRT is a bit clunker, but at least you can put turn warnings in. You can move the files using the Garmin plugin or just drag the saved file into the Courses folder on your Garmin’s drive.
• Mounting, I used the stem mount, the little plastic tab broke off after three months. I rigged up something using hair bands (hair bands).
• Stopping will now create a break in the file (it didn’t use to). The time line will continue, so you will see 2:11:01, then 2:30:01 on the graph view in WKO+ if you stopped it for 20 minutes at 2:11 ride time, for example.
• Downloading to WKO+. Just plug it with a mini-USB cable (included). The device will mount as two drives (if you have the maps). The Garmin one is the one you want. Under history, drag and drop files onto an open WKO+ window. It will ask which athlete you want to put it for. Couldn’t be easier. (There is no way as far as I know to pull the files from the 705 like you can from a PT or a SRM PC, but it is easy this way, so it is no big deal).
• I have the Garmin sensor GSC10 for speed / cadence. The GPS alone does a pretty good job for measuring speed / distance, although their will be speed / spikes dropouts. Even with the GSC10, you get some of these occasionally. I am not sure if you can get cadence out of the SRM crank directy (although it is measuring it obviously… power = [force] x [lever arm] x [angular velocity/cadence])
• To pair, you need to wake up your SRM. I don’t remember how it went the first time, but it was pretty easy, as I remember. You will need to do a zero offset each time conditions change. As of now, there is no auto-zero capability (the current Firmware for SRM/PCVI has this capability as I understand).
• From WKO+, you can right click on a workout in calender view, to export to Google Earth (you will need to install this). You can also do the same with a selection (either a manual selection, lap selection, or best 20 minute power, etc).

I don’t have any regrets about the 705. I have been using it since mid-October 2008.