Solid Month, Ten Long Years

The weather gods have been smiling on my riding schedule lately with the rather unexpected result that I haven't missed a day in over four weeks. During that time I have logged three consecutive 300+ mile weeks and a total of 1,284 miles, without even leaving the city. What does that mean?  Well, nothing really. A pretty large share of those miles would hardly be considered training unless simply sitting on the bike and moving your legs counts. The past couple of days have been pretty great since a cold front came through bringing lots of wind but much, much drier air. It's not the heat, it's the humidity.

Even so, it's pretty unusual to have such a long unbroken streak of rides that hasn't been interrupted by weather or other incursions. Perhaps the fact that I've been forced to ride earlier in the morning since the river levee bike path was torn up has something to do with it. Since we'll be heading up to Dahlonega this weekend for the annual pilgrimage to the Six Gap Century I will at least have a break on Saturday. It's about a 9-hour drive, so it's doubtful I'll get on the bike that day, which is probably a good thing. Last year I started that 104-mile ride with sore legs. This will the sixth year I've done the ride - well fifth if you don't count the year I fell halfway through an broke my collarbone. I'm going up with a bunch of Tulane riders in three rented minivans.  Should be interesting. Some are doing just the 3-Gap ride, which will no doubt be quite challenging enough.

While I'm on the subject of history, it's been ten years since I started this blog, and although Facebook and other forms of electronic communication have definitely cut into posting frequency I've accumulated 1,930 posts since then. I often go back to review old posts and race reports in order to find information about a particular race, or which year it was when something happened. When you've been racing for forty-plus years the races and courses tend to blend together a bit, so it's nice to have a log to which to refer now and then.

So this year I'll be riding Six Gap on my old aluminum/carbon Orbea that I bought from Gina Voci back at the end of 2007 (yes, I had to look back in my blog to see when it had been). That bike has lots of battle scars from lots of races and lots and lots of miles but it's still going strong even if the rear shifter is so worn that it doesn't really "click" when shifting sometimes, and often hesitates to shift at all.

The Bianchi had to get shipped back to wherever the bike ship ships them in order to get its brake cable stops re-riveted back on. A few weeks ago my right shifter had gotten so gunked up from a summer of sweat and rain and dirt that the rear brake cable was hanging up. I replaced the rear section of housing which accomplished nothing, so I had to take it off and push out the brake lever pin to clean it up since that's what was causing the problem. In the process I discovered that one of the two tiny aluminum rivets on each of the top tube cable stops had broken. Making the repair without the appropriate tool small enough to get into the front part of the triangle on my 50cm frame would have been kind of sketchy, so the shop called the Bianchi folks who said to send it back. Anyway, I was certainly not going to risk having one of the brake cable stops let go halfway down one of the 50 mph descents at Six Gap. On the plus side, I still had my 12-27 10-speed cassette. On the minus side, I'd just bought an 11-speed 11-27 cassette. Meanwhile, I ordered a 44cm Cannondale Caad 10 women's edition for Danielle though Mike Lew who recently opened a new bike shop up in Hammond. Mike had fixed me up with my Campi Record Cervelo Prodigy way back in -- I don't know when since it was before my blog. Anyway, it won't arrive for a few weeks since it's one of the new ones, but it was a great deal and has a short enough head tube that I think we can do a reasonable job of fitting it to a 4'10" rider once we deal with the ridiculous headset top cap and track down a teeny tiny stem.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty routine riding, Lots of medium paced group rides, a few blazing fast Giro Rides, but no trips to the northshore or anything. The Tulane Cycling training center has been seeing more and more use lately, which is great, and yesterday I received some autographed jerseys from one of our main sponsors who is involved with Six-day racing in England. One of them is Jason Kenny's from the Rotterdam Six Day 2013. He is reigning Olympic sprint champion in both individual and team sprint. It's particularly interesting because he crashed in it so the back and collar are all ripped up and it is stained both with his blood and paint from the blue band.  Very cool. It still smells of sweat. Others are from Chris Hoy, Bauke Mollema (Tour de France), and Gregory Baugé from Rotterdam Six Day 2013, when he was reigning world champion. He's the Frenchman who got silver in individual and team sprint at London 2012 Olympics. So we have the full podium from the sprint in London in 2012!  Now we just need to get them framed!