Training Log Archive: veinbuster

Day 3 soloflex

River walk with Mrs. before heading south.

There was a group of 6 Amish girls charging up one of the bigger Pennsylvania hills today (probably about 200m over about 5km) with billowing dresses magically not getting caught in any part of their old school cruisers. They were about 2/3 up when I went by and seemed to be having a grand time. I suspect on modern bikes they would destroy many time trial teams - with or without spandex.

I think Flight would love getting that bunch trained up on the track...and get ladies night back.

Tire test.

I don't usually deliberately go out in the rain, but I have a pair of Race Kings that have been waiting for a month and I will be away the next two weekends. I used the no tools tire change technique and it works quite well on these 26x2.2. I did leave the tire levers in the repair kit for now though.

Light rain to start with a beautiful swath of pink between the cloud layers as the sun came up, but never actually showed its face. The rain stopped at about 30 minutes and I took the rain hacker off at 40 minutes. That lasted about half an hour and I put the jacket back on 10 minutes later when it started to get heavier and the wind came up. At that point I decided to loop back. All that was accessible that I hadn't tried was a dense bit of wood with a lot of tree trunks to traverse. That would have been a commitment of another hour so....I wimped out.

Tire impression:
- wet payment: nice roll with good grip and surprisingly not too big a rooster tail
- hard pack: very good, positive grip, good on a lean
- wet single track: really nice on the wet soil, small roots, golden rod bent over onto the trail (an ATV has made a pass and smashed the weed to cover about 100m of trail)
- pine straw: no slippage even though it was quite wet
- packed wet sand, kind of like the beach as the tide goes out: very good on this. I expected to slip around a bit on it in the little terrain park across the railway tracks but didn't. Very positive steering and catching the grip rolling the little whoops
- gravel, 1-2cm: no problem but none of it was more than a couple stones deep
- light gravel/corse sand, 2-3mm, kind of like what you would put on the driveway to get better grip in the winter: this is where the old tires failed first. The new tires handled it nicely with good grip at speed. I made a pint of going through some of the channels that were filled 2-4cm deep and had no issues

Don't know about mud or log crawling.

Day 2 free weights, push-ups, abs

I found an interesting option for carrying all the stuff I'd like to take to the beach.

Part two of things people do to get a bit of exercise when their schedule doesn't want to cooperate. Parked at a craft brewery and walk/jogged to a trade show. No sidewalk, but a decent shoulder. Past an outlet mall and an amusement park. Close to 6 km.

Left the office about 15 minutes early and spent all of rush 'hour' on the bike. 30C light wind and no car incidents made for a good ride. Shadows were getting pretty long by the time I got back so the trainer isn't far away for weekday evenings.

No flats for quite a while on the new rubber so I've stopped carrying a spare spare in my pocket.

Very heavy traffic this afternoon - about 3x normal volume. Never a good day to take the bike out when a crash closes the interstate next door.