Asphalt

A Mellow Monday

Back to the usual routine now, although not without thinking about the upcoming road trip to Dahlonega for Six Gap at the end of the month. The plan is to go up with three of the Tulane riders, who of whom were doing just the 50-mile ride. Amazingly, Tulane's travel service got us a room at the hotel right in Dahlonega, so that will be convenient. Getting the van, however, is still a little up in the air since a couple of them still need to get approved for driving. Every few years, as I get older, I get cassettes with lower gearing. I recently got an 11-32 cassette, along with a Wolf Tooth Roadlink that will hopefully allow me to use the 32 with my short-cage derailleur. I think it will work with the new chain I installed last Saturday. If I need a couple more links I have a backup chain I can use, although adding two more links will definitely make the sag in the 39x11 or 12, not that I am likely to need those particular gears. I'll just have to remember not to go there if that's the case. Anyway, I haven't installed the Roadlink yet, but I did put the cassette onto my good wheels to confirm that there is enough chain even in the 53x32. The only question is whether adding the Roadlink will be the straw that broke the camel's back. I'll put all that together next week and I'm sure I can make it work one way or the other. 

Friendly Friday - regrouping along Canal Blvd.

After a couple of months that definitely qualified as a drought, we finally started getting a little rain here and there, fortunately not at times that had interfered with my usual rides. 

On Labor Day we did a nice little "Holiday Giro" that was followed by some significant rainfall that afternoon. At the time, Pine Street alongside the house was a dirt road about eight inches lower than the adjoining asphalt, which turned it into a nice little pond for a while. That evening Adam was having a little 60th birthday party down at Barrel Proof, so I decided to go to that for a while. Dan Bennett was in town, so I knew he'd be there as well. It was kind of a meeting of the cycling dinosaurs with Dan, Adam, Mike Lew, Russ Broussard (who was playing drums for the band), Wendy, and a number of others. 

What a difference a day can make ... when they actually show up

The next day the roadwork crew showed up and by the time I got home from work they had fresh asphalt on most of the street. Of course the sidewalk is still torn up so getting the bike, or the garbage can, out the basement door is still a chore. The sidewalk work has been abandoned since they tore it up on August 17th, so almost a month ago now.

Adam and Dan at Adam's 60th

We've been kind of back into drought mode for the past week, but on the plus side the mornings have felt a little cooler. It's kind of amazing when you step outside and it's 78° and it feels cool. The good news is that the hurricanes are still staying away from the Gulf, at least for the moment. On Saturday I did the usual Giro, which on Saturdays has apparently shifted to a 6:30 am start from West End. This is both good and bad. The good part is that it's nice and cool, relatively speaking, for the first hour of the ride. The bad part is that I don't get my morning coffee even though I have to leave the house at the same time. The Sunday Giro hasn't been affected, so at least there's that.

As it turned out, though, I didn't get my Sunday morning coffee either. Charles and Steve had cooked up a 75 mile ride in Mississippi for Sunday and I figured I should probably do that since it at least wouldn't be flat and would give me a little more saddle time. With Six Gap looming on the horizon, a longer and slightly hillier ride wasn't such a bad idea. 

The day before I had finally decided to address some deferred bike maintenance. I needed to change out the cables, one of which was hanging up somewhere and often keeping the front derailleur from shifting into the small ring - not something I wanted to deal with in Georgia. Also, my rear shifter was so worn out that I had to remember to push the shift lever all the way to the outside before shifting or it would kind of lock up. It's happened to every Campi shifter I've ever had. I'd replaced both shifters back around the end of 2017, so they had accumulated well over 70,000 miles since then. Fortunately you can buy just the "shifter body" which includes basically all of the mechanicals for the shifter, so it's just a matter of transferring the brake lever, clamp, and brake hood. I'd ordered one that arrived a couple of days prior. I also had some new handlebar tape and a new chain ready to go. That all went smoothly except that I found the aluminum handlebar to be pretty well corroded on the right side where I guess the brake lever clamp had scratched through the anodization. I cleaned it up but definitely need to replace it. I happen to have a counterfeit 3T handlebar on hand, so I'll probably just put that one on until I decide if I want to bite the bullet on a carbon bar. I don't think 3T even sells aluminum handlebars any more but I really like the feel of the Ergonova. If I go with carbon I may get the Black Inc one since I can get that in the 38 cm (end to end) width which would be a bit narrower than what I have now and might suit me better. We'll see.

So Sunday morning I walked next door where we've been parking the car and drove it around to the side of the house to put my bag and bike into it. It was a bit before 6 am and dark, and as usual I looked up at the sky for Jupiter and Venus. It was a little more clear than usual, so it was easy to make out the Orion constellation and all. Just then I noticed something moving more or less west to east. It was a string of those Starlink satellites! I just happened to look up at the right time on the right day to see them. I've stumbled across the ISS a couple of times like that. Anyway, I made the hour-long drive to the ride and soon our little group of six hit the road, heading mostly north into a light headwind for the first half of the ride. It felt cool for the first hour or so, even though we didn't start until 7:30. One thing I can say about the back roads in that area is that they sure have some nice smooth asphalt. The pace was mostly Zone 2 stuff, although for some reason my legs were kind of achy from the start. Maybe I'd done a little unintentional damage during Saturday's Giro. Whatever the reason, I just compensated by taking relatively shorter pulls than most, just in case. The route eventually took us back to where we started, but there was another 10-mile loop after that to get us up to the advertised 75 miles. Only Charles, Peter, and I did that. The others called it a day with 65 miles. It was probably around 90° by the end, but even so I hadn't even gone through two water bottles, although I'd had a Coke when we stopped at a store along the way.