IT'S ALIVE!

FrankenBike lives. It's already tried to kill me. But first the inventory of parts:

• My wife's old Open Pro 3X training wheels
• Ultegra brifters (left over from an upgrade)
• Deore LX Vbrakes (new) with rollamajigs
• Scattante XRL Cross frame/fork
• Old FSA Energy compact crank
• Ultegra long throw rear deraileur (again from an upgrade on another bike)
• Crank Bros EggBeaters (new)
• Ritchey WCS Bars
  
• 12-32 SRAM Cassette
• Beat up, scratched dented Thompson SP (I believe I crashed on it sometime in the past)
• Kenda Kwick 30c tires

OK, I couldn't wait so after yesterday's shakedown ride and some adjustments I went up to the saddle below Brown Mountain. On the way up I was thinking this was the best thing ever! After adjusting to the high center of mass, cyclo tires and slow steering I got to experience the best it had to offer - charging uphill on a dirt road on a cyclocross bike. Now, it's not that I don't like hills it's that they don't like me. Seem offended at my mass. So making the process a lot more fun gives me hope I can work more on my climbing.

It's a cliche, but what goes up must come down. Off camber, sandy corners which aren't so bad on a mountain bike become quite scary to the first-time crosser. But that's not where the attempted rider-cide was committed. I got to the bottom and was flying along the paved part when I came to the bridge. One of the design parameters appears to be the placement of boards along the axis of the roadbed at a separation of around 31mm. 2.1 inch mountain bike tires roll over this just fine. Luckily, instead of washing out the front wheel I was able to lean back and yank it out of the slot designed to consume it. It seems that I've got a learning curve ahead.

Lose Weight the Hard Way

I haven't been bloggin, 'tis true. It turns out that when my wife of 21 years went on a 26 day bike trip across the USA the everyday world got more problematic. The minor foulups at work didn't help either. She made it, EFI*. Three thousand three hundred and eighty miles. PAC Tour provided big breakfasts and lunches as well as snacks along the way. Her diet included having two desserts at lunch (usually big slices of pie) and consuming a chocolate shake prior to dinner. She lost five pounds. So now I get to ride a century (actually 200K) this coming weekend with a wife who's got the aerobic capacity of a quarterhorse. That will provide some amusement.

Her experience has taught me lessons about so-called "base" training.

1. It matters.
2. It can be done in fewer days if you ride more miles each day.

My training has been 180 degrees out of phase with hers. I've been riding about ten hours a week, but spending around an hour above lactate threshold and another two within about ten bpm of it. This has produced some really freaky results which have nothing to do with cycling. Doing three slammin' hard workouts with only enough riding between to recover makes a person into the worst sort of adrenaline-junky-slash-endorphin-head. If I went more than three days without putting the needle in the red it felt like my skin would just crawl off my body. I'd wake up at four AM and clean the kitchen. Weird. The tragic part was that my knees got tweaked early on and, although I could hang in well and chase breaks (or participate in them) by using relatively low gears, when the sprint started I just couldn't wind up quick enough without doing more damage. But I showed up anyway because there's no substitute (at least for me) for racing when it comes to getting fitter.

Returning to the topic of base training, my wife's power output curve seems to have shifted by ten bpm in the right direction. It requires a big effort to actually push her heart rate into the upper ranges, but if this phase is followed up with a good building phase that can be fixed and gains maintained I think. Books on the subject recommend up to twelve weeks of base training. She did four and got huge results. It's the miles.

*Since I'm trying not to use vulgarity in this blog, "E" is for "every" and "I" stands for "inch".