roadcx.net

What a good race. I didn’t count heads but I would guess there was approximately 30 Cat 3’s lining up for the 5 loop road race (~50 miles). The course was rolling with a few decent little hills (Polar said ~460 feet climbing per lap). David Jones, Jarrett Kinder, and myself lined up for Memphis Velo. The other Memphis team, Marx & Bensdorf cycling had at least 4 as well.

Almost out of the parking lot the attacks started. Bryant from M&B was on the attack early on several times. We covered a few of those early attacks. I took off after one, David another, and then I did another… There were some other attacks mostly surround the two marquee hills of the course (one about a 1mile into the lap another ~2 miles from the end of the lap). There was someone up the road about 75%+ of the time it seemed, but they would always come back…

On the long hill to the finish, I made sure I was near the front and often would push the pace somewhat to try to be well positioned to cover the attacks to the start/finish (and to conserve some energy by sliding back in the field on the false flat at the top). Usually, the field would come together … the last attack (the one that worked), started off on the 4th time up the hill. I wasn’t in a position to cover it (tired) and it was gone. The break had a good mix of guys from the teams (M&B rider, VeloCity rider, Tria rider, a Krystal/SCV rider, and the eventual winner). Sam Linhoss from SCV flatted out of the break at about 3 miles to go, so it was down to 4 left. They finished about a minute up on the field.

In the sprint for 5th, I was pretty cooked and ended up 17th overall. Jarret came in just behind me at 19th. There was some commotion in the final sprint when two riders rubbed wheels, but everyone stayed upright. I felt good and trained through this race weekend… My goal was try to get up the road. I did that, but just didn’t get into the right break. I am looking forward to some more racing back in Chattanooga (4/12-13) and Brookhaven (4/19-20).

I have started to put up photos that I took (Masters 35+, Womens/Jrs) and some that Andrea took (Cat 4 & Cat 3).

I will link the libraries as they come up…

• Crit: Masters 35+ (Ryan)
• Crit: Womens-Juniors (Ryan)
  
• Crit: Cat 4 (Andrea)
• Crit: Cat 3 (Andrea)
• RR: Cat 12 (Ryan)
• RR: Women (Ryan)
• RR: Cat 5 (Ryan)
• RR: Cat 4 (Andrea)
• RR: Cat 3 (Andrea)

–

I need to put together a race report for the Cat3 road race (and post up those photos as well). I went out and rode very aggressively trying to get into a break…in the end I didn’t get in the correct one. I finished in the field (17th). Jarret finished behind me at 19th.

Tour de Tuscaloosa - Cat 3

This crit features a pretty tough little climb on each lap… Memphis Velo showed up with three of
us in the Cat III race: David, Jarret, and myself. Just like last year, I flubbed my start… I think it might be a mental block of something, but I spun my pedal trying to get into it. This put me off the back down the first hill.

At the bottom of the descent there is a sort of strange left hand bend that is sort of strange the first time you take the corner. I raced this race last year, but did not get a chance to pre-ride it. I tend to be cautious through unfamiliar corners, this one being no exception… that meant that I had to chase hard after the field to the base of the hill… Jarret and I caught back and started the 2nd lap at the back of the field. Again, my cornering was bad and I had to chase…this time just barely catching on… by the time I came around the third time I was getting used to the cornering but had burnt a whole book of matches already… so I just settled in and started to collect the people falling off the field.

Eventually I caught up with David we rode together for a number of laps…

A bit later David and I were ridding and rider came by and we worked with him a bit… on the bottom of the course he got all pissed when he was told that we were lapped. I ended up drilling it up the hill and putting him behind after he got so indignant. Going through the start/finish he was yelling at the officials to give him the time elapsed… (a watch / cyclocomputer might be a good idea…), it was really a bad showing on his part..

In the end the two leaders lapped me twice and the main field lapped me just at the finish…. I was marked 29th out of about 35-36 but I know there were some issues with the scoring …so maybe I was 27th or something. No a great race but a good ride nevertheless.

Doesn’t my new bike look great? Andrea is convinced that I need to ditch my Elite cages and go with carbon… I do have that matte carbon thing going on…

I took a bunch of photos of the Masters 35+ and Womens/Juniors race. Andrea took a couple of Cat4 and a bunch of Cat3 photos. I will post them up in the near future (after getting home). The hotel’s (Ramada Inn) internet is more than slow…

Tomorrow is the road race which is more my style.

Since things are going so well with my new Felt, I haven’t ridden my Kuota Kebel at all since I have built up my new bike… so it was time to start the TT bike project. (First race will be mid-April in Chattanooga, so I need to get this done soon.)

I started out by removing all the cables, housing, and handlebar/stem/brake-shift levers, etc. So far so good. I slid my Vision Tech TriMax integrated bar (aluminum) onto the steerer and figured out where I wanted it.

My first plan was leave everything alone (drivetrain, etc) and just recable the bike for the new handlebars. Messing with it I ran into a few problems…first of which is that it is really hard to setup the housing while on the bike… I was trying to route the brake housing through the front of the wings and out of the bar at the end… I was having a difficult time getting the housing to come out to the brake area at the end…. it turns out that VisionTech has sealed off the ends of this bar…presumably to force the use of a external brake housing model (like their own…).  [on a completely random side note, I found this... it is an older version but... Rouge Mechanic article / CPSC recall note]

[brake housing going into wing portion and coming out just before the ends of the bar]

[brake housing routing!! :-@]

The SRAM brake levers require the brake housing to approach the brake lever inside the bar! I have two choices at this point… void the warrenty and drill a strategic hole in the end of the aerobar to get the cable housing back inside the bar to the SRAM brake levers. Or go out and buy an external routing style brake lever (of course, they offer one)! I really hate that most of the advertising for this bar talks about “fully-internal” routing. This is total bullshit. The housing for both the brakes and the TT part go inside for about 4 inches. Both end up outside (although you could stay inside going to the shift levers…which, of course is not needed for the SRAM shifters.)

Since I am facing a $85 purchase of a VisionTech or a warrenty voiding modification… I decided to tear down my bike to the frame and clean it up for the rebuild (which should have been my original plan anyway).

Taking off the parts was pretty routine until I got down to the crankset-bb. My Kuota is equipped with a StrongLight Pulsion crank which features a lot of carbon and titanium. The design is the now common two piece design with an ISIS 10-spline connection… The non-drive crank self-extracted easily (and the self-extracting cap even uses a “normal” hex key of 10mm which I have….nice).

Okay, so now we have this….

[non-drive side. note: I reinstalled the screw to prevent losing it.]

At this point, having worked with a lot of Truvative and SRAM cranks, the next step is obvious. I usually try to pull the crank out from the drive side by hand. That failing, I apply a tap or two to the axle with a rubber mallet….that has always worked. … I even pulled out the non-drive cup to see if that would help, nope…

So this is what I have. I looks like the Ti spindle has fused to the Ti-lined bearings… Since I did not assemble this bike…I can’t know for sure, but there is no evidence of any grease or anti-seize on the spindle. This is exactly why I hate to have bikes built by other people. I will admit to making mistakes (I messed up my first octa-link Ultegra crank back in 2000) , but I always put things together with the plan that eventually after 10,000 revolutions and 30 rides in the rain….I will have to pull it apart. It is an annual thing for me to tear down a bike fully and rebuild it. Anyway, here I am at another crossroads… leave well enough alone and go with it knowing that I have a this going on… or figure out a way to un-seize the spindle from the BB bearings with force and/or some sort of penetrating oil/grease.

Well, all of this interesting stuff will have to wait… In a few minutes I plan to head out for a short ride and then finishing packing up for the weekend. I took the day off since I have 20 days of vacation and wanted to hit the road this afternoon with Andrea (she is done with work mid-day) and head down to Tuscaloosa. Another race weekend… The projects will be there when I get home.

Here are the photos I took of Andrea’s W123 race and ones she took of the Men’s 4 and the Men’s 123 race. It is also my first use of simpleviewer plug-in. I really like this plug-in for cataloging images quickly. I previously would generate galleries on iPhoto and then upload them… which means I have to do it from home (not on the road). [3/25 update: linked iPhoto thumbnail galleries to the hot links above....enjoy]

What a course… today I went down to the Ride to Live race at Barber Motorsports Park near Birmingham, Alabama with Andrea and a bunch of Memphis Velo guys… The course was a 2.2 mile circuit normally used for motorcycle and auto racing. The course was a little bit up and down and had a number of interesting curves to it.

Early in the afternoon, Andrea raced in the Women 123 field. Near the beginning of the third lap she attacked her field and ended up soloing the remaining 4 laps for a win… She will undoubtedly reveal all in her blog… Here are couple of choice photos of that.

[end of first lap-Womens 123]

[Andrea with the win]

[random bike shot]

In the Cat 4 race, we had Matt West coming in 11th with William Frogge, Chris Copeland, Scott Horkey, and Tim Moore coming with the field…  It was good to see such a turn out for our Cat IV’s.

[photo from end of first lap-Cat4]

I was sole MV representative in the Cat 123 race. After Little Rock, I was wondering how I would do, but I had a new bike and the course was a good one for me with some up and down. A real power course. Our race was 9 laps of the circuit. For the first 3-4 laps, I was all over the pack as I was having trouble gaining confidence in the corners on my new bike. As the race progressed, I was able to improve my confidence and also limit the amount of catch-up I was having to do.

[riding up the left side - windward, the only lap I did that. Good photo, bad position....]

On the 8th lap, I moved up towards the front in the tailwind section and moved in to position around the long sweeping downhill curve… there were a few people stretched out in front me and I caught up to two others and started working. The field had slowed up through the curves some so we had a bit on a lead to work with. We worked together in a fashion but we were all in a different place and it wasn’t working well. By the S/F line, the field was on us and we were all together again anyway.

[Cat123 - just after getting caught... about 1/2 mile from getting dropped.....]

I was well positioned in the field through the first couple turns as we wound our way around the final lap. For some reason, I found myself on the leading edge inside on the long sweeper (same one from the previous lap that I rolled away on)… I ended up getting jammed up and had to slow up… exiting the corner, I found myself gapped off the field by 10-20 feet… as they accelerated into the last half of the lap, I was done.. I chased for about 1/2 mile pretty hard but they were walking away as we came into the final stretch… So that was that. I rolled in behind the 34 field finishers (and wasn’t scored).. The end result was a bit disappointing, but all in all I was happy with my day. Unlike my Little Rock race, I felt like I belonged there…that I should be a Cat3, etc. Plus my new Felt did well for me.. it just took me a few laps to get the feel.

[riding in solo after getting dropped with 1/2 lap to go...]

Well I wasn’t going to do it…  but I got it all setup and rode it today and it felt great.  Andrea and I rode out to RB’s and put our bikes on the scale… both of our bikes with our heavy clincher wheels weighed in at 16-1/2 pounds.  Mine was 16.5 lbs., hers was 16.4 lbs.   I figure that would put my bike at less than 16# with my Zero’s on it….

So… I am planning to race my new Felt FC down at Barber Motorsports Park (Ride to Live race) .

Picked up my Felt FC frame from RB’s on the way home and brought it home to start the build….

The build kit I had from last week….

The first hour was spend trying to match up my new bike to my old and cutting the fork, etc…

On the frame was about ten stickers such as these….

Here is the bike at about 1 hour after unboxing…

Andrea came over to work on her bike (we cut her cable housing a bit short on her bike…so she was a redoing her cables and housing).  Since her Red-Blue build was the first SRAM build I have done/helped with (my Kuota was shop built) there are definitely some things that more tricky for doing the cables and housing (getting length correct for the under the tape routing).  And as she found out replacing the derailleur cables on the SRAM shifters is pretty tricky…  The cable must be threaded through a pretty small hole in the side of the shifter (maybe that is why SRAM ships the shifters already cabled…?)

After a dinner break, I finished the build. I will do the final adjustments and tape up the bar tomorrow….

First ride will be tomorrow…. first race will not be Saturday!

Well my Felt FC frame is finally coming in. This evening I will start putting my Red components on my Felt frame. I expect to get most of it done tonight and then finish it in the morning (I have Good Friday off) and then take it for a ride.

On Saturday, I am going to race the P123 Ride to Live race at the Barber Motorsports park down in Alabama. Andrea and I will head down there as a day trip (it will be a long day). Even though my Felt will be done (most likely), I am not planning to take it down there since I want to ride a couple of times before racing it.

Most of my weekend was taken up by a clinic on training. My racing club, Memphis Velo invited Todd Nodemeyer (a cycling coach) to give a presentation on training with power (and somewhat with heart rate) and then we did some on the road rides as a group. Saturday was a wet day and we pretty much just rode around getting flats with the exception of a very spirited rip down N. Watkins at 35+ mph….

On Sunday, we started out from RB’s cyclery and road out northeast of Arlington to the Long Road loop. It is a 5 mile loop were we did 3 mock races. The rules of the race required two team members (we split into two sides) had to bridge up the other team and tag them out… and in the end had to finish with two from your team. We divided up into team by just alternating off, but it ended up that my team was pretty much the Cat3 team along with Todd. The other team was all the rest (Cat 4).

[bike stand]

The first race played out with Matt and Scott starting out ahead… Jarret and I bridged up to them…and then the group came together more or less. Late in the race, there was a long hill that ended up causing it to come down to Matt, Scott, Todd, and I. Todd and I took that one.

The second race saw some more attacks… but they all came back. There was a small group of us on the hill near the end including John (moved to the other team), Matt, Scott, Jarret, and I. Matt & John attacked away and I had to let them go (although I don’t know that I would have been able to counter if solo) since I needed Jarret with me… They took that race…

[John, Todd, Frogge, Tim, and Scott]

The last race dissolved the teams and it was everyone for themselves. There were attacks, etc…but the hill proved to be the decider again. Jarret had started to roll off the front and got a 100 ft lead or so. I pushed hard up the hill to chase him down and Matt came with me. We caught Jarret about 1/2 mile from the end. Matt lead into the sprint and I could do nothing but watch him walk away with it…

[John]

The results of this don’t really matter, but it was a good fun exercise and I gives us a chance to see how our team is doing this time of year…

—

Next race for me is the Ride to Live race near Birmingham, AL.