A Day Off??

Coming down the Casino overpass near the end of Sunday's Giro Ride. Three TT bikes in a row. 

Friday evening when I got home and turned the car off (Candy had taken it to work and so I got a ride home) the "Low Battery" warning came on. Hmmmm. Now, in the old days I would have immediately assumed that the alternator was bad and that it wasn't charging and that was why the battery had died. Also in the old days I would have checked the charging voltage before rushing out to buy a new battery, but these aren't the old days and time was tight etc., etc., so I had kind of rolled the dice on the battery issue. At any rate, now I wasn't sure what the problem might be. Battery terminals were pristine, no other warnings appeared, car started and ran normally. My experience told me that it could very well be some module somewhere that needed to be reset after the battery replacement - in other words, lousy software. In an abundance of caution, however, and since the "Service Overdue" message had been popping up for the past couple of weeks, I decided we wouldn't drive the car over the weekend and I'd take it in on Monday. I didn't need to be anywhere that required a car anyway.

The weekend was hot and pretty dry and for me the highlights were two Giro Rides and the last two stages of the Tour de France on NBC Gold. Both Giro Rides were fast last weekend. We have the Team Time Trial coming up and so there were a couple more TT bikes in the mix and they were all apparently trying to see how fast they could go. Fortunately, there was no crosswind. Unfortunately, the group split at least once each day. Regardless, I felt like I got in a couple of good workouts, although you couldn't tell from my heart rate monitor that has been gradually flaking out for the past couple of weeks. On Saturday I sprinted hard a couple of times. The last was an all-out effort up the Seabrook Overpass at the end of the ride. I blew up a bit short of the crest, gasping for air, legs on fire, and looked at the computer to see it showing a nice sedate heart rate of 54 bpm. It was obviously time for a new HRM, or a Cardiologist. That afternoon I decided to try a Mio Link arm-band HRM since I have always hated the chest strap and only use my heart rate data out of curiosity. I figured that the skin on my aging paper-thin lily-white forearm wouldn't pose much of a barrier to the optical sensor. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, it was actually a good weekend of riding with some solid intensity here and there with lots of recovery time in-between watching the Tour and some really old Buck Rogers era sci-fi on Comet TV, and a little while in the garage re-setting the garage door opener that had forgotten where to stop a few weeks ago and wondering what was holding up the front part of the garage since the termites seem to have eaten pretty much everything except the old barge-board.

So this morning I decided to take a day off from riding in order to take the car in to the dealer early. Looking back at my Strava data, I see that I haven't taken a day off from riding in three weeks, so I guess I'm due. Fair warning: If I voluntarily take a day off from riding, a rained-out day is virtually guaranteed within the week. I went out early and checked the running voltage on the car and it was up around 14, so I felt reasonably sure I'd make it to the dealership. They called a little while ago and as I'd suspected, the car needed a software update to clear the low-battery warning. Of course, it also needed the usual $250 oil change, a $150 front-end alignment, a $290 repair of a broken piece of plastic for one of the rear seat latches, etc., etc., and I won't be seeing it until tomorrow. Also, new tires appear to be in my immediate future.