My legs are getting tight.
My legs haven’t felt like this in at least five years. Wow. They’re tight. Better yet, they’re getting the endurance and power back. After only a week or so of riding, I can definately tell. I managed between 6.8 and 7 miles tonight. New record for me since riding again.
My all time record ride was ~4.2 miles in 12 minutes. That’s a sustained average of 21mph for 12 minutes. I was on my way home from a band rehearsal and there was a huge storm brewing. I turned in the driveway just as it was starting to rain. I remember passing a few cars in a 35mph zone on the way home that day.
Anyhow, for a day after a wreck I feel really good. My neck isn’t even sore anymore. I’m planning to hit the nice flat 8miles across the Ross Barnett resevoir spillway road (the damn road across the damnned lake created by damning the Pearl River that constitutes my damnned water source where if I had some fishing gear I could catch some damnned fish…) and back tomorrow. It’ll be about 9 miles from my apartment, the damn itself is 4 miles wide. I think I can take it. We’ll see.
October 16th, 2004 at 1:25 pm
Lucky bugger – my legs are still as somewhat flabby as they’ve ever been despite the 400+ miles of North Kildares roads I’ve done in the past two/three months.
I managed to do in the handlebars on my 1 year old Saxon with all the bumpy roads around here – I’m using my fathers Trek while I’m waiting for a new steering post to come from Wales. Ultimate irony in all of this is that the elcheapo Saxon is made in the UK and the ‘precision engineered’ Trek is made in Malaysia…
October 16th, 2004 at 3:33 pm
I was saving up to buy some new wheels and tires before the car wreck. Scratch that.
The shimano 10 speed assembly is in good shape, but the whole thing needs greased / oiled up. I think I’m going to head out in a bit to get some bearing grease and maybe some wd30 or something. The squeaks have got to go… There’s parts on the bike that are pretty corroded (sitting unused most of four years will do that) and I figure it’ll move a bit eaiser if I get it all smoothed out.
I’ve been tossing around the idea of ramhorn handles… they’d be nice to have.
I’d have gotten new tires already (the ones on there are the OEM tires, and they’re starting to dry-rot and have some cracks I’m concerned about) if I could find 26×1.5s so far, the closest I’ve found was a decent looking pair of 26×1.375. That and I don’t really want to have to remove the back wheel before I have a replacement wheel to put on instead. Dang car wreck.
October 16th, 2004 at 4:03 pm
WD30? That ony 3/4 the power of WD40? :-p
The ramhorn handles aren’t much extra use IMHO – I took them off my Saxon when I got it.
How much is a set of wheels/tyres for a bike stateside? Over here they’re not what you have to “save up” for usually – a new bike is under a hundred EUR.
You can tell you’re a techie by you calling them OEM tyres :-)
October 20th, 2004 at 12:06 pm
Yeah I suppose I should have labeled those OE tires. (That’s what they normally use in tire-talk)
A -good- set of lightweight wheels run about a hundred bucks. I’m going to stop by the bike shop one of these days on the way home from work (I pass the place twice a day) and price some things out. I really don’t care if they’re lightweight wheels or not — especially since the bike frame is steel. Lightweight steel, but steel. It’s not some lightweight composite thingy. This badboy has hit a car, been hit by a car, wrecked more times than I can count (I had some -really- good wipeouts on this bike) and has taken the punishment without much damage.
The tires (if I can find I tread / width I like) will probably run between $20 and $30. I’m sick of the Wal-Mart bike department, some of the stuff they have is pretty good quality, but most of it is cheapo use it a few times, throw it away kind of stuff.
October 20th, 2004 at 12:41 pm
My wheels are lightweight and seem good quality, E40 for the pair.
As goes steel bikes – the bigger the tubes the lighter they get. They just thin it down, it isn’t any less-steely than it was before. My Saxon is incredibly light, lighter than many aluminium (IUPAC spelling, not Americanism :-)) bikes.
Then again biking is huge in Ireland, has been since ‘we’ (refering to an irishman) won the TdeF in ’87. Probably as many bikes in use here as in many countries 10x the size. Like the UK….