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Chapeau everyone, good
Chapeau everyone, good efforts!
I’ve had to build back up from lower back surgery in December due to herniated disc, probably cause through over-training for CX race season with inadequate gym work.
Either way, it has required lots of low short low intensity rides, but I’ve been building up and am now doing 2-3 short midweek rides (usually early morning) at a very easy pace, then a 3-4hr weekend ride or gravel epic, depending on family commitments.
Definitely feeling the benefit fitness wise and tried my first training session again on the rollers last week and felt fantastic afterwards, sometimes it does you good to be dripping sweat all over your stem for half and hour!
Weight loss has been slow, has taken me until now to get back down to my ‘normal’ 85kg from post-surgery 90kg. I can tickle 84kg depending on what I ate/drank the night before (am learning about the effects of dehydration after a sneaky single malt the night before, but also ‘low residue’ foods. If I eat badly e.g. a chippie I can sometimes end up lighter the next morning than if I eat well e.g. a health veggy dinner with lots of fibrous veg. A useful technique come race weekends I think!).
One word of caution if looking to lose weight whilst enjoying your riding, I took it too far one weekend doing 100km at a very easy pace (barely left the 34t ring) but didn’t eat enough. I was one cranky daddy the rest of the weekend, basically must have been within inches of bonking on the ride but instead just spent the weekend hangry. Not worth it and will fuel longer rides properly from now on rather than trying to use them to burn fat…
I’ll probably cough up, I’ve
I’ll probably cough up, I’ve always felt like I should anyway due to the value I find in their route planner, seems so much better than alternatives that I’ve used.
I briefly toyed with Trainingpeaks and really liked the ‘hours spent in zone’ feature when I was training with heartrate (too cheap for a power meter). Hopefully Strava has something similar.
I could possibly also save the £10/year I spend on Veloviewer if Strava offers heatmaps (I believe it does?) and details of weekly mileage/hours etc.
Will need to investigate, won’t be putting me off anyway.
Yeah, although I’ve built
Yeah, although I’ve built back up over 8 or 9 weeks (Veloviewer.com is really useful for tracking weekly time/distance in saddle) in short bursts (lockdown restrictions etc.) so don’t feel like I’ve been silly, after all, recovering from back surgery doesn’t let you just leap back into centuries!
The chafing issue definitely co-incided with the new shorts, but I think they’ve just highlighted an existing issue in my position or riding style. I’ve moved my saddle back 1cm recently without correspondingly lowering it, which might have been a mistake.
I also wonder if my core/glutes etc. have lost strength due to my layoff and that’s somehow causing a change in posture on the saddle.
Either way, solution seems to be patience and chamois cream! Will persevere with the new shorts as I can’t really afford to keep buying new pairs and suspect I’d drive myself round the bend trying to find the perfect pair! (although I’m seriously tempted to try one size larger in Castelli, so maybe just one more pair…
).Ta
Ha, weird, same for me, the 6
Ha, weird, same for me, the 6 year old 3/4s are fine, the new short shorts are super-chafey.
Think I need to work around the problem, as much as I tell myself ‘I’m worth it’ I can’t afford to keep buying new pairs of bibs at £85 a pop!
Am taking a week off to let the skin recover then will start over with the chamois cream…
I’m not actually too
I’m not actually too surprised, I think all these event organisers work to really tight margins, would probably fold if they refunded everyone and as we’re learning, nobody’s insurance covers things like global pandemics…
I’d actually applied already for a refund due to having surgery on my back in December. I had taken out cancellation insurance but they still made me jump through hoops and apparently can take up until two weeks after the event to process my refund! Not expecting anything now…
Not unusual to run a wider
Not unusual to run a wider tyre on the front of MTBs, that’s where you need the most grip. Same applies with road bikes, I’ve ridden out of back wheel slides but never ridden out of a front wheel slide. Wider front would help prevent the front washing out.
Yeah, Specialized were pretty
Yeah, Specialized were pretty sneaky with the marketing of these bikes and none of the magazine or website reviews called them out on it.
Basically when they said the frames had space for 28mm tyres, what they actually meant was 25mm tyres but mounted on the stock R460 rims, so that the tyres actually measured up as 27mm. If you order a set of actual 28mm tyres they will barely fit.
Also, using 25mm tyres with mudguards leaves virtually no clearance. I butchered a set of SKS Bluemel 35s to fit, chopping the front guard to stop at the back of the fork crown (using a Sheldon ‘Fender Nut’ to mount the mudguard into the back of the brake bolt).
I also chopped the rear guard either side of the brake calliper and used a PDW Z-Bracket to grip the rear portion (the Z-Bracket extends over the calliper and grips the mudguard like a normal bridge). I superglued a stretched piece of innertube between the two sections of guard to stop the calliper getting pasted with muddy water from below.
It sounds like a faff and took a bit of experimenting and Dremelling, but the end result is actually pretty neat and works really well. Still a shame that the bike doesn’t really live up to the dream of a lightweight aluminium rim brake road bike with space for 28mm tyres and guards!
Worn drivetrain components
Worn drivetrain components can be bafflingly hard to spot, it always seems like the problem is elsewhere!2650g for a frameset? 6lb?
2650g for a frameset? 6lb?
My old, steel, MTB frameset weighed that much!
Done.
Done.
Survey limited my respones slightly, would have ticked 4 of the 5 ‘why do you ride’ boxes if I could.
Have just seen the new more affordable Torch Shoes with 4 different colour schemes, where were they when I was buying my last pair of shoes!
Keep it up Specialized, nice to have colour options at the cheaper end of the range
Absolutely the opposite! My
Absolutely the opposite! My best bike resides on the turbo for half the year as I’m afraid to get it dirty/salty/drop it on icy roads.By doing this I get all the training benefit of riding singlespeed commuters and 105 mudguard bikes for half the year, but will also probably get 5 years out of my Ultegra groupset and posh wheels. Truly Scottish parsimony!
Hmm… I wondered about the
Hmm… I wonderfed about the influence of the turbo! My ‘good’ bike spends 2/3rds of the year on the turbo due to good old Scottish weather.It has Ultegra cranks as well. That being said, I rarely do any out of the saddle stuff on it, just seated.
*eyes two year old Ultegra cranks nervously…*
Quote:
Might have been the discs?…Ha, no, I had come round to having discs as there were no fully built gravel bikes without them and I wanted to use bike-to-work, which made going custom too complicated. In the end I somehow managed to justify going custom as it allowed me to build with rim brakes which in turn made the whole process cheaper etc.
Tenuous logic which might end up not being true once the custom build spec list suffers from scope creep and gets un-necessarily blingy!
Anyway, enjoy the new bike, from my experience in the past, Cube bikes a really well specced, me and several other co-workers all started off with Cube Road bikes and my boss still has at least one, if not two in his various foreign homes!
No, can’t remember what put
No, can’t remember what put me off the Orro, I am extremely fussy though so it could have been something utterly trivial!
I’m going with a Kinesis CX 1 frameset built up with handbuilt Pacenti rims/DT hubs, Avid Shorty Ultimate cantilevers, 105 shifters, Shimano 48/31 GRX chainset, Ultegra RX mech, Miche 12-34 cassette.
The reason I decided to go custom is that I wanted shorter than average cranks (170mm) and also wasn’t impressed with the wheels specced on any of the off-the-shelf bikes. Changing the cranks alone would add a bit of cost on top of bikes which were already at the upper end of my budget.
I’m also a bit of a rim brake fan, have never got on with discs so resented paying a premium for them on a new bike (however I’m in the minority so don’t let me put you off discs!).
Only drawback is the BB height, it’s designed for CX so is higher than the average road bike, but since I’ve been using my 29er MTB for most of my gravel riding of late I’m hoping the Kinesis BB won’t seem too high in comparison!
Road.cc reviewed the Orbea
Road.cc reviewed the Orbea Terra, said it felt fast and stiff but wasn’t as off-road oriented as some other gravel bikes and would only take a 40c tyre max.
I was all set to buy one of the M30 models, it was everything I was looking for, plus you can get custom paint schemes free of charge so I spent ages coming up with wackier and wackier colour schemes!
Eventually decided to go custom but my second choice would absolutely have been the Orbea.
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