I have started off the month a few days late on the 4th. Gardening and duties intervened. A nice shorter ride out to the park, then part way back to the harbor I decided to climb the hill and head over through Dana Point via Salt Creek.
It was a bit cool, so leg and arm warmers along with the base layer felt fine. I caught up to a fast older riding as I got on the river trail where the new railroad bridge is being built. I had to do a good deal of work to keep pace with the fellow. If he had been willing to drop back into zone 2 riding we could have had a chat. He headed off toward Cow Camp and I made the turn for the Sendaro Field park. I’d only brought one water bottle and no food at all. I was tempted to head up the hill, but decided a sharper climb would be a better workout today. I wasn’t wrong.
It looks like very likely rain the next two days so, I may not get back on the bike until Friday. We will see how that goes. I’ve also begun the month without the. use of the PInarello F7 as I am waiting on the return of the crank from 4iii. Tuesday marked day fourteen since the factory had my crank in hand. I expect to hear something this week. I have been rabidly consuming new bike tweaking content. From GCN Tech, I’m not going to be balancing my wheels, but I may source an 11-34 12-speed cluster. The Ultegra version is fairly. reasonable, where the Dura Ace is less so. Compare $100 to $400. Yes, I am not $400 curious. My new tires, tubes and second chain are all delayed a few days according to Fedex, I may seem the order Saturday. But, who knows? The Roubaix continues to serve me well. My new air set up using my compressor and Park Tool inflator work wonderfully. Very easy access and very accurate pressure. I did do a short search for balancing kits and found things silly expensive and decided I could live without.
Wednesday was predicted to have rain in the late afternoon. I got going on my ride an hour and a half later than hoped, more than planned. The predicted rain turned out to be nearly spot on. I had not really decided on where I was riding when I left, but I took my Rapha rain jacket tucked into a jersey pocket, Base layer, leg and arm warmers were good for the first bit of chill I experienced along the coast. This was even more welcome as I continued on my ride, heading up toward Rancho Santa Margarita. After making the turn there I ran into my first few rain drops in more of a sprinkle than real rain. I did not deploy my rain jacket and the rain held off until I crossed under the. freeway on the Aliso Creek trail. As I exited the underpass, I was met with full on rain, that proved to only increase in intensity until I stopped just off the road at a protected spot and donned my rain jacket now that I was soaked. My core stayed relatively warm, but my feet and hands were numb and alternately useless. At this point I was about 25km from home. I made no more stops, just pushed harder than I usually would have in an effort to stay warm and to just get this over.
I took the above photo about twenty minutes after getting home and being confident in walking and handling the phone as a camera. The ride was not smart or fun. I did knock a big chunk of time off my personal best 100 kilometer time. Yeah Strava. When I got home, I was lucky my daughter had the garage door open. I nearly collapsed on the ground trying to walk on very cold and numb feet and control the bicycle with nearly as numb and cold hands. It took me a good ten minutes to get enough feeling into my hands where I could manipulate the helmet clasp and get that off along with the soaking head scarf thing. My gloves were so wet they were sagging enough to peel off. Shoes were easy enough with the Boa system, but socks were a tougher piece of work. Fighting against my socks helped get more function into my fingers. I went directly to a hot shower. I spent a long time slowly warming my feet. Oddly my legs were not sore from the effort, but man my lower back was sore. The old injuries all ached. Once out. of the shower I made dinner of some leftover chicken, veggies and rice. I made my self a big bowl of mostly ride and veggies with a little chicken. I would later find a leftover pancake and eat that with fruit spread, some nuts and finally a mini ice cream sandwich. Some Sleepy Time tea, then off to bed after taking two tylenol for the lower back/hip pain on my left side. A spot that has been a chronic area of pain when stressed since an old hockey injury almost thirty years ago.
I had only eaten four dried apricots for the whole ride time. About a half bottle of Nuun and about the same amount of water from the second bottle. I was really hungry when I got out of the shower, but decided it was too close to supper time to eat much and decided to skip post ride food. Of course I made up for that later.
I was hydrated enough and never cramped, but I definitely had not eaten enough. The cold masked my food intake. I should have worn shoe covers. My feet would not have. been much dryer, but they would have been a lot warmer. Full coverage gloves would have helped. 8°C was the low I saw on my Wahoo Bolt, with t he rain and windchill likely a good deal colder. I never got shivering cold, but my feet and hands were colder than they have been in decades. Summer shorts and leg warmers have zero waterproofness. I don’t own any cycling bottoms for rain and am unlikely to bother buying any. Good stuff costs enough to make it smarter to skip riding on rain days and save the money and storage space. Of course we are supposed to see more rain this afternoon and a lot more next week, beginning Monday. I’ll get back to the garage gym work for exercise time with those days.
On the exercise and limits side of the spreadsheet, I figured out I can go harder than I. thought I could. There was plenty of places I relaxed into a low to middle zone 2 ride on a long slope rather than attacking it with a sustained effort. I plan to create a custom workout page on the Bolt and re arrange the workout page I normally have in view. The main view would have my Speed at the focus, Cadence, Power, Heart Rate, Distance and Workout Time. I’ll move the temperature and calorie burn over to the new page along with battery power metrics, time of day.
And then I remembered that maybe I could fit the crank out of the Roubaix in the Pinarello F7. Hmm. I pulled the crank and disassembled it to pull the granny ring off. Then pulled the spacer off the crank. That would get fitted to the opposite side to take up the excess for the Q-factor. Well, not, quite. There was an extra thin spacer, that may need to go back under the chainring side to get the big ring overshift issue remedied. Of course everything works perfectly on the work stand at home. I’d rather have the chain come off the outside ring than the inside ring. So, I’ll leave it. And I may see the powermeter back from 4iii this week, or early the following week. I had ordered tires and tubes. They arrived, but when I opened the box, I found what they refer to as “Creme” colored sidewall GP 5000 tires. Hmmm. Well, I did order that. Not on purpose mind. Just didn’t pay close enough attention to the scrolling in the choices box. Always a bit of a niggle with the Competitive Cyclist site and the Mac and me.
It’s not horrible looking, just not what I was ready for. The stems are a bit short as well on the new latex tubes and the TPU tubes. I will figure out the right size and get that done right next time. I took a three hour ride to check. the crank and really enjoy the Pinarello. What an amazing machine this is. I am so happy with this bike. I set up a custom page on the Wahoo Bolt with all the battery levels, phone, shifter and derailleur. Once I get the powermeter, I’ll add the battery status of it to that page as well. I had planned to ride with the Orange County South Riders on Sunday morning, but woke in the night with a sore throat. I shut off my alarm and cancelled out. Slept through the alarm. Had a bit of breakfast then fiddled with the bike a little more. My sore throat is a bit less, but I am definitely sick.
The 10-speed triple spacing of the chain rings is just enough wrong so the 12-speed shifting set-up will either overshift to the inside or outside. I set the spacers so it over shifts to the outside. I can get it onto the big ring with a careful and slow pedal motion. I hope. At least this isn’t for long. And with being sick, I’m using the bike even less. Other than that the sniffles, the bike feels good and the week was pretty good. 291km for the week with 2,131m of climbing.
So much for the garage gym. This is a week of rain, long nights of sleeping off this cold and using up tissues. No miles, no exercise. But, I think this cold is wearing off along with the rain. For this week. By the weekend I should be back on the pedals. I hope.
Sunday I got a ride in. Short and sweet. Caught up with some of the folks with OCW and OCSR and spun up the creek to donuts.
One of my issues this winter has been dropping weight and old beach winter kit wearing out or not fitting or not existing. I need to find a gilet that works for me. That is my new hunting task. This ride I was still runny nosed, but no chest congestion, no coughing. We have a family trip planned the end of the month which will eat a few days of riding. That few days will be followed by a couple of days with my wife traveling which will also reduce my March and delay my start to April riding. I’m thinking I’m going to have a very strong summer. I still have a good bit of March to ride.
The 4iiii Precision 3+ Pro Powermeter arrived a day prior to the original shipping estimate. I had that evening free so installed it.
The only feature I did not get setup was the airtag feature. The lighting in my shop is not good for seeing black on black. If I were to do this all again, I’d have activated the Apple pairing with the crank arm off the bike on the bench under the good lights.
The next day I had all day to myself so headed out for a longer ride, if I felt it. I felt it.
A second gran fondo for the month. Lots of numbers and graphs resulted. These metrics don’t completely transfer to Strava, they stick in the Wahoo Elemnt app. I find the. 52/36 chain ring combination works even when I’m tired on the, for now steepest hill I climb. I did have to go all the way down to the 36/30 for that hill. A 34 would let me sit and grind more than spin. The 30 was just about too short a gear for standing. I relaxed to a tempo to match the low gear and conserve that much needed energy.
I am very happy with the finish of 4iii installation. The installation, pairing and setup using the app was simple other than seeing how to release the safety battery cover, but once I had daylight and time, that was quickly completed. The process took about a month box to box. I didn’t weigh the setup and I don’t have anything other than old Garmin pedal powermeter data to compare to. I don’t see any reason for me to compare those. I’m not a reviewer of these things and not about to be any further than saying for a retired former engineer the process is simple.
I’ll get a group ride in on Sunday with OCW and OCSR, not a big long ride, but some climbing and the toughest bits in my view nearer the end of the ride because of a start point change.
Then there is prepping and selling the old bike. I don’t have room to hold on to the bike. I’m considering selling my old mountain bike as well to free up some space. As part of selling the Roubaix, I wanted to go back and calculate the mileage. When I added the. Roubaix back to Strava the gear tool doesn’t allow for setting a starting odometer. I have a mileage number for when I started Strava back up, I just need to subtract the Pinarello mileage from this years riding, add that to the 12/2020 re-start on Strava and I’ll have a very close number that unfortunately includes indoor riding as well. I’ll ignore the indoor versus outdoor problem because both have their wear. Indoor is a small number where out of doors is quite a bit larger. After a bit of fiddling I have numbers, 60,978.4 km, or 37,890 miles. Not a huge number for 15 years. Doesn’t look too awful for the age and miles.
Two group rides in succession. Sunday we did Aliso Creek loop backwards. On the. easy. stuff I hung at the back as sort of a sweep, then rode with the front group on the hard parts. The climbs. I barely hung with the front two. I’d get dropped back but would catch up on the descents, with some help from lights.
Then on Monday I met a small group in Oceanside to ride recon down to San Diego to check a route Dan has been working on. There were several riders along who knew the various options. I was lost a bit of the time. Not lost, lost, but not exactly aware of exactly where I was. Again I rode easy stuff along the rear to a point then Rob and I hammered with Rob setting a brisk pace for me to play catch up to. On the descents the Pinarello F7 was a rocket. I had to use my brakes to keep my speed down to where I was behind. Primarily I hung back because I had no idea where we were headed. Well, I knew we were headed to the Santa Fe station, but not sure how to accomplish that until we were very close.
The bike works really well. I am so very happy with this purchase. I’ll do a writeup after I hit a thousand miles. I’m about halfway.
Our route was fairly easy, but there are a few tough climbs. Nothing steep, but two long climbs one felt to be about a mile.
Nice views of the ocean at several points. We had a good time then a far too big of a lunch at San Diego before catching the Coaster back to Oceanside. Senior Citizens pay only $3.25 for the ride with bike, (the cars only hold six bikes strapped in, so a large group could be caught out and near rush hour the trains get full real quick.) I was hoping to get a long ride in to follow, but I’d forgotten about my 8am dentist appointment, so breakfast an hour after, then garden work to finish preparations for the tree and stump removals on Wednesday. I’ll get to pedal on Wednesday to make up. The route we rode on Monday was part of what will become a metric century and full century ride with trucking the bikes back and the rest of us riding the train back to Irvine. I don’t remember when this is wanting to happen, I think toward Fall. Wait and see how works out. They have loads of details to sort before it can become officially a thing.
My fitness is improving. After an online consult with a nurse my doctor prescribed antibiotics for my persistent sinus drain. At around halfway through the course I am experiencing much reduced symptoms. Still runny nose a bit, but that has been an allergy thing with all the wet and bloom we’ve seen around here.
Last day of the month for me to ride. I made it a big one. Not, quite my longest of the year so far, but close. 136.9 km, 5:29 and 60% in zone 2. I manage a few PR’s too. Pretty quick for my 100kms, though Stava does include stopped time when calculating timed distance best efforts. On the head unit I see an average of just over 25kph. In the Strava overview it shows exactly 25kph for the whole distance. Makes me happy.
For my month I did OK for having so much time off the bike. I’ve managed to drop my weight down to 70kg. BMI should make my doctor happy next week at 23.5. I’m looking for a bigger math in April. Fewer colds and less time off the bike.
Totals for the month:
Distance: 845km
Climbing: 5,987m
Time: 34 hours
Along The Way 