Training Log Archive: veinbuster

Not much space in this hotel so skipped some bits. Also the exercise room has weights, but no bench of any kind and barely room for the cardio equipment - guess I'll settle for extra laps during recumbent tests.

Test riding a bunch of recumbents. Ride time estimated spread over about 3 1/2 hours. Most bikes I road for about 15 minutes. Mrs. took tons of photos with several cameras so it will take me a bit to get them in one place and sort through them. Here are the highlights. I went straight to Cruz because they are so different and I wanted to test them before it got too crowded. Brilliant bikes. The 20 degree Vendetta wouldn't work for me, but the 30 degree Silvio has about the same seat angle as the Greenspeed, which I quite like. I started with the commuter oriented Q100 and it was incredibly comfortable. Steering is quite heavy but I think I'd be tuned to it in one good long ride. Much easier to start on than the stick bike and very good power delivery. 'Bent needs to try one. I think the Q would handle trails similar to Caledon or Oro-Medonte very well. After lusting after a Lightening R84 since I started riding recumbents, I finally got to ride one. While it is a very cool bike, the ride wasn't significantly different from the Bacchetta. This surprised me because it is much lower to the ground. Greenspeed Aero. I wanted to try all the race oriented trikes and this one was by far my favourite. Handling was much like my X5, but the steering mechanism was very different with a pull/push lever on each side. They moved in synch so you could easily steer FAST with a little wrist rotation on one hand. Sweet bike with options for a very wide gear range. Azub tri-fly. I was really interested in this new take on suspension. I thought the suspension worked really well, but it uses a lot of space that I would like my legs to be in. I have quite a bit of ankle movement in my pedal stroke on a trike and clipped the front of the suspension plate with my heal (granted street running shoes, not clipped in). I also caught it with the top of my calf. Fatties: I wanted to try them all, but we ended up discounting some pretty quickly. One delta was just far too heavy. Another had ergonomics I knew I wouldn't get along with. It came down to the Azub and the ICE. I gave the ICE the edge last year, but this year they were very close ride wise. Mrs. preferred the Azub and the Azub team was very amenable to some customizations, most noteably building a spare set of 29er wheels that I could swap out for summer trail rides - for an extra $600. Other stuff. I finally tried an internal hub that I liked the shifting on: a Roloff set up by Cycle Monkey. It was geared a bit low for me, but we talked about a chain gobbler to easily move the boom and allow me to swap between 2 or 3 different chain rings. Or I could commit to one and get a belt drive - two loops of belt ganged together for one of the fatties trikes.

C • Wow! 2

Travel day, starting with breakfast at gramma's

Saw an incredible stretch of wind mills along the 401 in southwest Ontario today. Easily ran 50km south of the highway. Mrs. thinks it might have been as much as 80km. Nice alternative income for what used to be tobacco country.

Day 1 soloflex and free weights

Lots of running around doing errands to squeeze in today, so this might be all I log today.

Got the big yellow motorcycle ready for winter. Even the fixie got more miles on it than all the motorcycles put together this year.

I thought I would simulate different fixie gearing on the Greenspeed to try and get a sense of what gear I might be able to push on the track. Goldie has 69 gear inches. I did a set of laps with the biggest ratio on the Greenspeed, a 95, and was a bit surprised to find my pace was almost the same as on Goldie. Cadence was much lower and heart rate was about the same (150-160).

I did some sets in the next two lower Greenspeed gears with similar results. The key difference is that with the lower gears, the cadence is enough higher that I can accelerate quicker and more smoothly - no surprise really. Last winter on the trainer, it had appeared that my heart rate tended to run higher with a cadence approaching 100. I'll explore that some more this winter, in particular trying to determine the highest sustainable cadence.

Test ride with J to see if riding to work is viable for her. I led her on the route with the least traffic interaction and she kept up nicely on the long climbs west on Green Lane. Pretty good for someone not having been on a bike for about 15 years. A short pause for a Booster Juice before heading back.

C • Nice! 5

Rain delay on today's bike ride. Dry when I started working out the kinks so I dressed for a ride to walk into fairly heavy rain.

Day 3 soloflex