At the Track

Saturday's Giro Ride seemed strangely civilized. The turnout was pretty good, the wind was light to nonexistent, the temperature about normal, the humidity, well, the humidity was impressive. For some reason, however, there wasn't much will up at the front to sustain the pain for very long. The Daughter had taken the Volvo out to Jacksonville to meet a friend and see a concert, and since I had to officiate our track championship in Baton Rouge I had rented a tiny little Chevrolet for the weekend. I'd picked it up on Friday, parked it at the house, and then ridden the bike to work. When I got home there was a little dent in the door that hadn't been there before. On the plus side, the city had finally come out, after repeated requests and one photo on my part, and cut the grass on a little triangular section of median that they had been ignoring all summer. On the minus side, they were probably the ones who had dented the door since they had shown up with a big mower on a trailer and various other pieces of equipment. So I wasn't in a good mood Saturday morning. Fortunately, as I was sitting at Starbucks drinking my coffee and complaining about it, Woody gave me the name of a friend of his who does paintless dent repair, which by the way is a pretty amazing process. Near the end of the ride Woody flatted just before the Seabrook bridge and a few of us stopped to help out, which generally consists of offering suggestions on how to change a flat better or faster or more elegantly.

So that afternoon I headed out to Baton Rouge, got stuck in traffic for a while over the spillway, officiated a few races, and was back home by 8 pm. I was back on the road Sunday morning by 6:30 to basically repeat the process, except that the traffic jam was on the way back rather than the way out.

So Danielle got her new Cannondale CAAD 10 on Thursday. Mike Lew, who has known her since she was a baby and who has recently opened a bike shop in Hammond made us a sweet deal on a CAAD 10 Force women's edition in the smallest size they make, which is a 44cm. Even so, that put the handlebars rather high and far away for someone barely 4'10" so we threw away the headset top cap and put on a Slam Your Stem top cap, along with a negative slope 7 cm stem, which involved some creative cable re-routing. The saddle position is fine and the handlebars, although about 2 cm farther out than before and perhaps a bit higher as well, should work OK. We could always to with a tiny 5 m stem or even a downhill stem, although the shorter reach would come at the expense of a higher handlbar.

Life is a compromise.