Has Pro Cycling Hit Full Nutter? Again?
There’s a new trend in time trialing that has the time trialists wearing fairings under their clothes, including what they’re calling, for the fellas, an “aero-bra” adds little stripes to a skinsuit that help disrupt the flow of air around your arms and little calf jobs to make the back of the calf muscles more “aero” by shaping them more like a foil.
Cue Jim looking to the sky and muttering, “Oh dear God, Why?”
Well, boys and girls, the day I think about putting on a bra, or anything called a bra, I’m hanging up the Lycra bibshorts. Shit. As for the camelback hydration pack worn on the chest, oh please make that go away and not become a thing… please, please, please. Anyway, full they’ve gone full nutter, my friends. Some shit you just can’t make up.
I have to look at the bright side, though; this madness gave me something to write about. Now, where’s our gravel wheels? My wife and I are going for a non-bra-wearing jaunt in the dirt, where that silly shite doesn’t matter. Well, she’ll be wearing a bra. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. As they say.
The Update on My Friend, Dave; He’s Doing Excellently
I spoke with my buddy, Dave yesterday and he’s doing splendidly. His mood is up, he’s excited at the prospect he may be getting out of the hospital in a week or two, and he’s beyond stoked to get on a bike again to work himself back to riding fitness.
I was shocked at how far he’d come in the last couple of weeks.
For now, because my daughter has some serious swim meets coming up in the next couple of weeks (she’s qualified in four events at MISAs this year – she’d qualified for three Saturday and then a fourth last evening), I’m staying away from the hospital. Dave’s wife swears she caught Covid there and I can’t risk her senior year swim season… even with a N-95 mask. We’re all taking extra precautions to minimize that risk and thankfully, Dave was exceedingly understanding.
This’ll change when he gets out, though. Hell, I could ride a bike to his house from mine. Oh, wait, that’s a little vague with people like us. He’s less than five miles away.
In my health world, I had to swing by the Urgent Care yesterday afternoon for a tetanus shot. I stepped on a rusty nail in the backyard because I can be stupid. About eight seconds before stepping on the nail I thought, “I should put my boots on”. I obviously didn’t. Anyway, before the shot, my vitals were taken. 110 over 72 for the blood pressure and a resting heart rate, with a small hole in my foot, of 52… in the middle of the afternoon. Damn, I’ll take that!
All in all, it feels like things are looking up around here… and thank God for that.
A Frame-Off Cleanup Of My Trek 5200
I wrote, a couple of days ago, about getting a bug to tear down my Trek 5200 to clean it up and to address one or two minor mechanical issues (the shifters take a little more effort than I’d like and the rear derailleur is still a little finicky to dial in – mainly a flaw in Shimano’s 10-speed road system). Well, I’ve been under the weather with allergies (we think it’s allergies… my wife got hit too, much harder than me) and while I could have ridden Tuesday, it felt like a good idea to take a rest day.
I had to attend to day two at the Secretary of State’s office after getting some paperwork filled out to satisfy some bureaucratic hoop-jumping, so that took the better part of my morning. I tinkered on the Trek a little under the roof of the back porch as it rained on and off throughout the day, taking my time to enjoy the process. I’d stripped the components off the day before, so I tended to touchups with nail polish, then cleaned, dried and waxed the frame. The hazy frame turned sparkly in an instant.
I turned my attention to the shifters, blasting the internals with a spray cleaner/lube. After the first blast, I took my air compressor out and blasted the dirt out, then repeated the process again. The shifters operate like new again. New stainless steel cables for the brakes and shifters, hoods back on, then for the components in no particular order, though I did start with the crankset for a reason, because the front derailleur lines up off the crank.
Before long, actually just before dinner, I was setting the cable tension for the derailleurs. I hit a snag and I ended up backtracking a couple of times to get the bike to shift right. The last trick was a touch of lube on the metal cable guide under the bottom bracket (there’s a reason they’re plastic now).
I was all set after that. The bike shifts considerably better and it passed a short test spin up the block. After dinner, it was getting dark, so I didn’t bother much with really getting into the fine tuning. It shifted up and down the cassette and the front derailleur seemed perfect, so I put it away and got dinner going.
Sadly, the Venge is perfect and the tandem is brand new… maybe I should start looking into my wife’s Assenmacher… I’ll even need some new tools to get that one taken apart! Mmmmm… New tools!
UPDATE: Here’s the fun part; my buddy, Mike needs 40 today so he can hit 1,000 miles for the month, so he wants to do the deer loop. It’s currently raining, so after all that effort, I’ll probably trash the bike in a couple of hours, anyway. You almost can’t make this stuff up. I rode the bike the day after I rebuilt it and painted it in such crappy weather, you’d have thought I was a bike abuser. Such is the life of a rain bike.
There are a bunch of YouTube videos dedicated to cleaning and refreshing your STI shifters, here’s a good one, though hopefully Si did something about that hair since then:
A Little Too Much Gravy, Not Enough Meat; What’s Happening In Recovery For Me
The cycling stuff on my blog has always been the gravy in my recovery. Cycling is absolutely necessary to my peace and contentment in this most wonderful life. It’s only a piece, though. Without recovery, there are no bikes. Well, to be honest, there may be one bike. It would be a rusted out Huffy mountain bike with a broken shock, wrecked front brake cable, and a dry chain with squeaky jockey wheels. And I wouldn’t be able to name any of those parts by their proper name because I wouldn’t care. This is, as they say, my reality when I choose alcohol. I am helpless against it.
I wouldn’t like recovery as much without cycling, but I could recover without cycling (though likely rather grumpily).
With that out of the way, I’ve had a new sponsor for the better part of a year, an old, gruff, blunt instrument of a retired therapist. He is good. Good enough he was on my list of resentments for my recent Fourth and Fifth Steps.
How recent? Last Wednesday afternoon. I thought he was expecting a big, fourteen page Fourth and expressed quite a bit of bewilderment. He explained that a Fourth shouldn’t be all that difficult after a few decades in recovery. You’re doing the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth, so the big resentments don’t pile up like they used to. That part of my 4th was only three pages… but that still took us the better part of two hours to parse through during my Fifth. And we only got through half. We’re re-scheduling for the other half, then the review of my amends.
It went better than I could have hoped for, and I’m looking forward to much more. I only wish I hadn’t waited this long to get going. I don’t want to say I sat back on my laurels, because that’s way too simplistic and not true, but doing a little more didn’t hurt. Much.
I’ve also been working with a sponsee – we’re cruising through the steps and it’s been incredible to watch him grow and change through the process. That part never gets old.
I know I get wrapped up in the cycling quite a bit, because that stuff is fun to tinker with and great to write about. It’s only the gravy, though, and I’ve been swimming in it of late. Wait, did someone say triathlon?! No? Okay, phew. Anyway, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes.
One day at a time.
The Project Of The Week: Tearing The Trek 5200 Down To Clean It Up! (And Fix A Couple of Things)
My 5200 has led a hard life. It’s been my rain bike since 2013 and I’ve treated it as such. It’s also my trainer, so it gets hammered with sweat all winter long as well. I take care of it really well, too.
I got to thinking yesterday, there are a couple of things bugging me about the component and cable setup that could use some attention and we supposedly had a few days of rain that would keep me off the bike, anyway… so on a spur of the moment, I decided to strip the bike down and polish it up with a nice wax and buff job before putting it back together.
So there it sits, stripped down and ready for a good polishing before I clean up the shifters, the housings, and put everything back together.
The goal here has mostly to do with shift quality. The bike shifts great, but it feels like there’s a little lag in the shifters. It’s a little harder to move the levers than it should be (the ratcheting mechanism in the lever, the paddles work great). I figured while I was at it, I may as well go whole hog and see what I can do to fix the problem.
The more I work on that bike, especially when $#!+ goes a little sideways like it is now (dealing with a used car and the Secretary of State’s office for our daughter, the washing machine got a bra pad from my daughter caught in the water pump impeller and we had an underwire shoot through the drain hose… all of which I’m fixing because our normal guy had a stroke and a quadruple bypass), the more I see how therapeutic it is. I do love that bike!
I’m Becoming A Dirt Convert… The Scenery Is Better, The Traffic is More Patient, And The Miles Are Pleasant.
With our gravel/road tandem solidly under us, with the ability to change wheels in less time that it takes to order and receive a Big Mac at the drive-thru, my wife and I have been moving onto dirt road adventures more frequently. I don’t mind traffic much, though there is the occasional @$$#o!e, but there’s no traffic on dirt roads. My wife and I recently knocked out a quick hour just south of our house before heading to our daughter’s county swim meet (more on that in another post) and we weren’t passed by a single car.
Now, we’re not new to dirt road riding, we’ve got gravel bikes, but our tandem is several steps above our gravel bikes in terms of quality and enjoyability… it’s a vastly superior ride.
And so we’re taking to the dirt roads. Just the two of us or with friends.
I’ll put it like this; even a ride straight out of our house feels a lot like an adventure when we’re cruising down a dirt road taking the time to look around. I don’t see us bothering with any KOMs/QOMs, but I neither of us cares about that at this point in the season. We’re just having fun, now.
Now, we’ve gotta do something about the bike cleanup. That, I could live without! Time to fit those fenders, methinks!
10 to 15 Minutes From Road to Gravel (Or Dirt, As The Case May Be)
Ten to fifteen minutes…
That’s the amount of time it takes to get our tandem from a sleek road tandem:
To this, a beautiful, gravel ready steed:
From Rolf Prima tandem wheels with Specialized 30mm Turbo Pro tires and a worthy Ultegra 11-32T cassette, to Astral Outback wheels with White Industries hubs mounted with 45mm WTB Riddler tires and a hill-crushing 11-40 tooth cassette.
Ten to fifteen minutes is all it takes.
I’m coming around to the notion of “one bike to do it all”… and I’m really excited about dirt roads.
It’s been a long road getting here, but my wife and I are exceedingly fired up about the adventures we’re going to have on this bike.
The Last Little Tiny, 0.5mm Piece To Our Gravel/Road Co-Motion Kalapuya
We were so close for our first gravel ride on our new(ish) Co-Motion Kalapuya. Close only gets it in horseshoes and hand grenades, though.
Our rear wheel brake rotor was just a hair inside where the road rotor spins, so it took a little adjusting and finagling to get the bike rolling when switching the wheels over. With the TPR Spyre break calipers, this was a simple process. Run one pad in with a setscrew, run the other out with the set screw on the other side. Easy, peasy.
I wanted perfect, though. Slide one wheel off, slide the other in, tighten down the thru-axle and roll.
Perfection arrived in a small package with a TRP 0.5mm 6-Bolt rotor shim.
Installation was a snap. Loosen and remove the six bolts, slide the rotor off, put the shim on, then the rotor (making absolutely certain the rotor goes back on the right way), install and tighten the six bolts, install the wheel, set the rotor, check the other wheel works (not even a sliver off – it’s astonishingly close), and Bob is literally my uncle.
It wasn’t a cheap part, but it works seamlessly with the TRP Rotor, and it’s stainless steel, so it’s worth the cost to me.
A friend used a cassette shim on his, but I’m picky about that stuff. If they make a part for the task, unless it’s priced way above decency, I’ll opt for the proper part.
So after fifteen minutes of messing around with the thing, it’s done and perfect. I don’t have to adjust the calipers, not even a smidgen when I switch wheels.
Guess who isn’t too fat to reach the drops on his Specialized Venge anymore?!
That’s right, baby! This guy!
I started thinking about riding the Venge at 3am in the morning, when I woke up out of a deep sleep.
The following is how that conversation betwixt the melon committee went…
“It’s going to be nice this morning. You should ride the Venge”.
“You know I’m too big for the drops. Shut it”. I’m all in with the Trek, now, anyway”.
“Yeah, but the Venge is the Venge”!
“Dammit, you make a compelling case. Maybe I should try the Venge”.
“Yeah you should! Just make sure to ride on the hoods!”
And so it began. I prepped the Venge, sure I was going to struggle trying to ride around my gut… but I had to try.
Just before my wife left for the office I threw a leg over the Venge and beat a path to meet Mike for his birthday ride. I started in a fairly easy gear and spun it out. I shifted up. Then again. One more time. It was only then I looked at my Garmin. 22.8-mph and I felt I could have gone all day. Oh, how I’d forgotten how that bike snaps when the pedals are pushed. I met Mike about three-quarters of a mile up the road and my wife drove up behind us to wish him a happy birthday. She headed on when a few cars backed up behind her.
Mike and I talked and laughed the miles away. We were 20-miles in when I got to thinking about how comfortable I was on the hoods. I felt I had plenty of space… I reached for the drops, and sure enough, my gut is down enough that I can ride the Venge again. Even in the drops.
Now, if you think I’m joking, or exaggerating, I’m not. The drop on that bike, from the saddle to the drops, my own doing (the stem doesn’t have to be that flat, it’s adjustable with a collar), is staggering. The bike is also a serious looker in its current form. And therein lies the rub.
I’m sure I still look a bit sausage-like in my aero-kit, but I can live with that. Too much barbecue and not enough miles made Jim a chubby boy. I’m glad to be trending the other way of late.
What Causes a Bike’s Drivetrain To Be “Noisy”
I think for this post, I’m going to go by bullet point to differentiate the different causes, and I’m going to try to go from easiest to hardest to diagnose and deal with. That out of the way, let’s dive right in. I’ve dealt with, and likely written about, all of these at some point or another…
- Choice of Chain Lube
Believe it or not, your choice of chain lube can greatly affect how noisy your chain gets around the jockey wheels, cassette and chainrings. For the cleaner lubes, like Boeshield T-9, they tend to be a little noisier than the wet lubes. I like Boeshield on the tandem and ceramic wet lubes for my road bikes… so the tandem is just a touch noisy when it comes to the whir of the chain. If, however, I have to touch the chain, my hands stay relatively clean. I need MuckOff if I touch the road chains.
- Rear Derailleur Adjustment
If the rear derailleur isn’t adjusted properly, your drivetrain will “talk to you”, as they say. Fixing this issue is generally simple, but not always easy. Take all of the drag out of the housings and cable, make sure the derailleur is in good order, tighten or loosen the barrel adjuster to dial in the proper shifting. If this doesn’t do the trick, see below. - A & B Set Screw Adjustment
The limit screws play an integral part in how your bike shifts. Not only do the limit screws keep your chain from crashing into the spokes or falling off the smallest cog when you shift into the last gear, they help set the shifting distance each click of the shift lever moves the derailleur. If the limit screws are out of adjustment, the chain won’t hit right on one or more of the cogs which will cause a whirring sound while you’re pedaling… sometimes even a clicking sound, especially on the smallest cog on your cassette. - The Rear Derailleur’s Tension Screw Is Set Incorrectly
The tension screw for the rear derailleur has three very important uses. First, it can be used to take up slack in the chain, especially when we’re talking about today’s monster cassettes… the idea being you have to allow the pully wheels to clear the big cogs but take up the slack in the chain when you’re “up” (down) in the small gears. If there’s too much tension in the tension screw, it’ll pull the jockey wheels too far away from the cassette and foul your shifting quality. This can also cause a faint clicking in one or more gears, especially the smaller, higher gears (lower, technically, on the cassette). Now, the HIGH limit screw doesn’t change. That’s the one that keeps the chain from shifting into the spokes. Once that one’s set properly, you never should have to change it. The low limit screw, that one gets a little bit of play time. Once set correctly, though, it should never need to be changed (unless something was off and “correctly” wasn’t “correctly).
- Front Derailleur Rub/Trim Adjustment
This one can be a little tricky. Look down the chain when you’re in the high gear (small cog) on the cassette. If the chain is touching the front derailleur cage, try trimming the derailleur with the shifter, just one little click should do. If there’s no click left, you need to adjust the cable tension so the rub goes away. See YouTube for a dozen videos on how to properly set up a front derailleur. GCNs are usually quite good. - Cassette Installation
This is another tricky one. I’ve got a bum cassette body that came with my Rolf Prima tandem wheels. It’s just a little oblong so the cogs are are tricky, but not impossible, to slide into place. If they’re not perfectly on there, I’ve got a couple of cranky gears that are slightly noisier than they should be. - Dry Jockey Wheels
Oh, the dry jockey wheels. God help you if have dry jockey wheels. First, no, just jetting some lube into the bolt hole won’t fix the problem, and yes, it’s more annoying to everyone else than it is you, so you’re going to have to bite the bullet and lube those jockey wheels but good. Just make sure to put everything together exactly as you took it apart. The jockey wheels have to go back in the same location and direction you took them from. Technically, most times it doesn’t matter top or bottom but direction absolutely matters, so you might as well put them back exactly as you took them off to clean them.
- Old Chain/Cassette or Chainrings
You should get about 3,000 to 5,000 miles out of a well-maintained chain (half that in rainy or rough climates). 6,000 to 10,000 miles out of a cassette (again, half that in rainy, rough climates)… and maybe five to ten years out of a good set of chainrings, depending on how often you ride the bike. I’ve been through, and I mean “wore them out”, two sets of chainrings. One on my Trek 5200 and the rings on my Venge weren’t far from going as well, so I got in front of the problem and changed them to some quality Shimano rings. I use a Park Tool chain checker for my chains and replace them as soon as they hit “replace”. The cassettes are changed every other chain (without fail). Old equipment is not only noisy, it doesn’t work very well. I won’t ever try to stretch the lifetime of a chain or cassette. Too much can go wrong if I do. In fact, too much has gone wrong.
So, that’s the list that I’ve dealt with over the years. It won’t be a complete list, as complete lists go, but it’s pretty thorough. In fact, beyond these, it might take a shop mechanic to sort anything more out.
Fit Recovery 