Thursday, May 27, 2010

Mud, meet Power

So what do you do when you purchase two older wired SRMs (stone axes as my teammate calls them, virtually indestructible), a SRAM for the road bike and a entry level Amateur for the TT bike, but suddenly a teammate hooks you up with a FSA SRM? Well, I put the FSA on the road bike so I have the flexibility to run it compact or standard and moved the SRAM to the TT bike.

Now I have this Amateur SRM with no home.....



What's this? 46t and 38t chainrings showed up in the mail???



Now the solution seems obvious.....We have a cyclocross SRM!!!!



Bring on the mud!!!!


At first thought, putting an SRM on the cycloX bike seemed like overkill. B as I considered the situation, I use my cycloX bike for commuting throughout the year. This can mean in a given week anywhere from 30-70% of my miles can be on my cycloX bike. The ability to see my power numbers and better regulate the work I do on my commutes far outweighed the small amount I could resale the extra SRM for. So now I'm pimping with power on 3 bikes including the cycloX. I'm sure there will be more to come once cross season starts.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

My Dream

Owning a Pegoretti is one of my dreams. This man is a legend.


Here is a link to a preview of a short video about him.

(caution: contains some explicit language)

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Next Chapter in Power

I took the weekend off due to my wife's graduation and to catch up on some missed sleep. My other reason for the time off was my project of switching from my PowerTap which I sold to a teammate and going with some older wired SRMs. The downside is that I don't have the Garmin (which I kept to use for on the cross bike) and all the info it provides and I have to deal with wires. The upside is having the durability and consistency of the SRM system and having power during my races.

So I worked most of the weekend and the road bike was a pretty easy set up and I quickly had power going. The TT bike was a lot more difficult to get the sensor in a position that would read from the crank and it wasn't till Sunday afternoon and lots of Internet research and emails to other guys that use SRMs that I finally had the TT bike set up. When I went back to calibrate the road bike all of a sudden I didn't have power any more. After completely taking apart the system on the road bike a couple of times and doing multiple test I still couldn't figure out why I couldn't get power. Finally after checking the TT bike again I realized I had accidentally changed the display on the head unit and the road bike had been working all along but I just hadn't realized it. More then a little frustrating but a lesson learned. I'm onto the next chapter of working with power and an looking forward to being able to see how my racing develops, especially the TTs.

I'll try to get some updated pictures of the bikes in race setup soon.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Learning to Say No

Sometimes less is more. We can get so caught up in quantity that we often loose sight of the diminishing benefit. This often holds true for documentaries, graduation speeches, vacation photos, and maybe this post. I've had a hard time convincing myself of this when it comes to training. I still find myself subconsciously thinking resting is synonymous with quitting. I think it goes back to my youth when I tried to make up for any lack of talent by working harder then everyone else and the habit is hard to break.

This past Saturday I went into the ride with tired legs but still couldn't convince myself to hold back from the early fireworks and actually won the first "intermediate sprint" with some personal best power numbers. Soon after there was a small mushroom cloud and I was done. Thankfully I had the sense to call it a day and go home versus trying to gut it out and then I actually took today off as well. My body says "thanks" while my mind says "wimp". Can the same drive that makes me successful also holding me back? As I grow older and hopefully wiser, I hope I learn how to say "no" at the right times and appreciate the quality over striving for quantity.