Collateral Damage

It seems that last Sunday's six hours in the rain resulted in a little more collateral damage than I'd expected. I mean, I expected the water seeping into the seat tube and running down to the bottom bracket, and I expected the dried out chain, and I even kind of expected that I'd already waited so long to change the chain that my regular training wheel's cassette would be worn out. So the other night I set about installing a new chain and putting the bottom bracket back together. It was about 11 pm and after ever so carefully pressing in the connecting pin to join the nice new Campi chain, I made the disturbing discovery that I'd run the chain under the chainstay instead of over it. Crap. So that little slip-up pushed the bike cleanup project back another couple of days. I'm still planning on installing new brake and derailleur cables at some point soon. In the meantime, I've been riding the Cervelo, which I really like except that the left shifter cable is so gunky that it doesn't even click any more, and the rear brake needed to be coaxed back open every time I used it. So last night I decided to at least get the brake working again and discovered that the plastic cable housing ferrule on the little piece of cable between the top tube and the brake has basically disintegrated inside the brake adjuster. I ended up having to actually drill it out to get all of the pieces out. I'd also discovered that my trusty old Campi computer had some moisture in it. That was surprising, since it's survived numerous roof-rack trips through thunderstorms at 75 mph. Then again, it's getting pretty old and I guess those silicone seals don't last forever. Anyway, the computer was freaking out on Wednesday's ride, so I had to open it up, dry it out, and replace the battery.

The morning weather has been great this week. In fact, this morning was the first time I gave serious consideration to wearing arm-warmers. We had a big group heading out in the dark, and although we didn't start out too fast, the pace seemed particularly uneven. I found myself leaving a little extra room in the paceline, just in case. Tomorrow night I'm meeting the Tulane Cycling group to watch "Chasing Legends" again, then Saturday morning I'll do the Giro, followed that afternoon by a city ride with the Tulane group. Should be fun. Sunday I'm hoping to do a Northshore ride. There's supposed to be another cool front coming through, so Sunday morning is likely to be pretty nice.

The official results from Six Gap are up, along with a video explaining the issue with the chip-timing (one of the decoders probably couldn't handle the rain). Despite the rain and wet roads, the lead rider actually set a new course record time, which was practically an hour faster than mine. I really thought that the times would be slower, but apparently the rain didn't slow things down much at all. Anyway, my careful analysis of the times revealed that I went REALLY slowly on the Hogpen climb. Maybe one day I'll figure out just how hard I can afford to go on those long climbs without blowing up before the finish.