Training in Style… or Not.

Alright, I’ve been meaning to type this post for a while now and I only have a few minutes, so this’ll be quick.

In my first post I talked about picking up the new Madone 5.1 bike. I’ve been having fun riding this high-tech toy out on the road, but how is it riding on the trainer? Especially on rainy days like we’re having this week? Well, I wouldn’t know, as I’m keeping the Madone on its hook in the rafters when I ride the trainer, sticking to my old Bianchi Premio. This is in part because I’m lazy and can just leave the Bianchi on the trainer all the time, not needing to take the Madone in-and-out of the trainer each time I want to use it. The other reason is, I figure this means less wear and tear on the new bike, extending the life of its various components before I eventually grind them up and have to replace/repair them.

I’ve got a few friends training to do the Tierra Bella century with me in April and one of them went out and bought a new trainer in January. He sent out a picture to”The Brotherhood” showing off his setup:

He did add at the time that he thought riding on the trainer was pretty boring. I thought to myself, “How can this be? He’s got a TV right in front him, plus there’s those speakers there so I assume that’s hooked up to his stereo or maybe even surround sound, the lofty heights of which our household will never reach. Heck, at our house we’re still using the massive stereo speakers I’ve had since I was in junior high school, for crying out loud. Yeah, stereo speakers don’t really start paying for themselves until you’ve been using them for 30+ years. Almost time to upgrade!

Anyway, as long as we were all sharing photos of our trainer setups, I thought I’d show off mine:

Yeah, baby. That’s got “Eye of the Tiger” written all over it, imho. lol. I have to admit that the garage is actually a little cleaner now than it is in this picture, but still. Who’s training in style here? Surround Sound? Who needs that? I’ve got a music stand… with magazines! Woot! Carpeting? I’d just ruin it with pools of sweat; give me icy cold winter concrete. That’s the stuff.

Alright, well, to be 100% honest my #1 saving grace is I listen to podcasts on my iPod, so it’s not completely “Rocky I” out in the garage. I haven’t actually read any magazines out there as the podcasters keep me busy enough. Still, I’m thinking of recruiting the old guy across the street to growl Bronx catch-phrases at me like Burgess Meredith, “You’re gonna eat lightnin’; you’re gonna crap thunder.” Hmm. Maybe not.

On the podcast front, I’ve been listening to “The Fredcast Cycling Podcast” the last couple days. This guy has been interviewing the racers in the Tour of California, including Jackson Stewart, from… Los Gatos! He was the BMC rider on a long break-away on Stage One to Santa Rosa. His interview was pretty interesting as the way he wound up on a solo break sounded unintended and the tactics of how much time he got on the peloton was more deliberate than Phil and Paul might lead you to believe on the TV.

I downloaded another episode with a Tyler Hamilton interview this morning. I’m always interested to see what his status is. That guy has been in limbo for SO long. I can never make my mind up one way or the other, but he’s served his time regardless of what he did, so he might as well be racing. Frankly, I think any revelations that come out of Operation Puerto (and I don’t think there will be any more revelations) are beside the point and double-jeopardy. He’s already been punished, so what’s the point of banning him now? By the way, if you look into how the Puerto case has been reopened, you’ll discover that it has nothing to do with the riders at all this time. It’s all about Fuentes and whether they can file additional charges against him for how he stored the blood. They’re not looking into which athletes were involved so banning various riders from the Tour of California is a bit ridiculous, imho.

Huh. Pretty easy to get on a rant, huh? Sorry. Cheating sucks, by the way.

Okay, I have more to type, but things are getting out of control around here. Gonna have to finish this up later.

Ramping up to get started to get going…

I won’t explain the part how I arrived at this wacky decision to move from casual weekend mountain-biker to wanting to do the Death Ride, but once I got to that point, I knew I had a lot of groundwork to cover just to get started.

First off, my current roadbike is a 1995 Bianchi Premio; a low-end roadbike that has served me well over the years, but with a key fatal flaw: the shifters are on the downtubes, which I knew would be very hard to use on all the downhill sections on any serious ride. I knew I needed to upgrade so I wandered down to my local bike shop, told them what I was planning for 2008 and asked them to show me some bikes. The first bike the guy showed me cost $4k and I didn’t so much laugh as just immediately dismiss it as an option. We moved down the scale, but not as far as I was hoping to. See, my Bianchi Premio cost me a whopping $450 back in the day and from what I’ve been able to find out via Google, it was actually a pretty good bike for the price at the time. Low-end, to be sure, but still, good value for the money. Accordingly, I was thinking, sure I would probably spend more than $500 on a new bike, but not $4k (which I didn’t, just to make a long story short).

Anyway, I pretty much walked out of the store in a sticker-shock trance and asked for 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th opinions from my friends and family. Turns out that if you’re going to get serious about cycling, the initial outlay is somewhat serious as well. I guess I should have been better prepared for that mentally, but hey.. if you’re going in cold with no experience, there’s all kinds of things that’ll catch you by surprise.

I did some test rides, looked at reviews on the internet and generally tried to get myself edumacated. There were a couple of problems: (1) nearly everyone who reviews a bike they’ve purchased tends to say how great it is, making 80-90% of all consumer bike reviews kind of unhelpful. Not completely useless, as they may have tips like “the seat is horrible” or “replaced this part or that part” etc. but the overall review of their bike is almost always how much they like it. (2) when I was doing test rides, all these bikes were so different from the old Bianchi I was used to that I had a hard time comparing them to each other. My test rides were on different roads at different times, on different bikes and the technology was so far ahead of my current bike it was pretty hard to compare. A bike would *really* have to suck bad for me to notice it.

Eventually, I did 2 identical test rides on 2 different bikes (Orbea Onix TdF and Trek Madone 5.1) one after the other to see if I could get any sense of difference between them. For the most part, I couldn’t. The Madone seemed marginally more comfortable, or *possibly* seemed to corner a little better (but that could have been better familiarity with the road on the 2nd ride) it was the bike I knew the most about and as a my wife pointed out, it would probably have a greater resale value if I ever decided to sell it. The salesman said, “Yeah, these are pretty much identical bikes” so I wound up buying the Madone I’d had my eye on from the beginning. Actually, I wanted to buy a cheaper version, but it turns out that the one I was thinking of won’t be available until *after* the Death Ride and this one wasn’t that much more expensive so I bit the bullet and brought the carbon bike home, treating it like a delicate egg (see the picture from my first blog post).

I got to take it out for its first ride this last weekend, in-between rainstorms. Most of my ride-time was solitary, not a lot of other cyclists chose the road I was on, which was great for me as I could figure out those new-fangled shifters, pedals, computer, etc. without looking like a total doofus. In fact, I only got passed by a single cyclist on the last hill home. This guy was younger, slimmer and clearly had years of road experience on me as he passed me up the hill like I was standing still. Naturally, he was riding the Orbea Onix TdF that I hadn’t bought. D’oh!

Next time: training in style… or not.

Inaugural test post

This is the first post for this blog. Just trying it out. This blog is intended to be a public diary of my training for the 2008 Markleeville Death Ride. Never done anything like it before. Not even close. I’ve been a recreational mountain-biker for years and somehow I’ve gotten myself into this crazy plan to do a 129-mile, 15,000-foot climb all-day endurance extravaganza. We’ll see how it goes.

One of the first orders of business was to get a new roadbike, as the old one was seriously unprepared (just like me!) for the upcoming event. I’d tell the story of picking out this bike, blah, blah, blah, but time is of the essence. In order to test this blogging thing, let’s try and insert a picture of the new bike:

It’s a 2008 Trek Madone 5.1, picked up at Summit Bicycles in Los Gatos, CA. I’ve got a few stories to tell re: buying the new bike, but I’ll save those for a “real” post.

I found a cool little program from Adam Tow’s blog called ”Klimb” that gave me this: the profile from my first ride on the new bike:

It was kind of a pain to figure out how to get the profile out of Klimb and into a blog, but not bad for a first attempt. Btw, I have no idea why the “blue-green” portions aren’t identical, since it’s the same hill (Camden Ave.) I rode on going out and coming back. Like I said, I’m still learning the Klimb software, so maybe I did something wrong.

Okay, I’ve tried out links, photos, tags and categories. I hope this thing works!