Archive for May 5th, 2009
Ride Entry – 3rd May 2009
by admin on May.05, 2009, under Uncategorized
Bike: Vela
Distance: 10 miles
That’s a short ride samuri! Whatever happened?
Well I’ll tell you shall I? I set off on a training ride for my forthcoming TT debut. The plan was to warm up for a couple of miles. Put an insane amount of power down for ten miles, ride home. A bit like a real TT really, except I would have to negotiate traffic lights and junctions and fuckwits. (You have to negotiate fuckwits on real TT’s too but the loop is generally set up for minimal conflict.)
All starts off OK, warm up, negotiate fuckwits and junctions. Long road into Culcheth starts which seems like a good place to PUT THE POWER DOWN. It’s seriously windy and right in my face (obviously), so I don’t go massively quickly. and I’ve got some hills to come yet too. All goes fine as I ride back round to Golbourne, yep, up a hill, fine, over the main road, fine, up through Hindley. This is where the proper hill starts and since it’s right through the town centre some slack jawed yokel impressing is in order. (Most people who live in Hindley think bikes are for stealing and not much else, I doubt any of them have ever seen a bike go uphill at over 20mph before). And they’re not going to today because as I jump on the pedals there’s this weird slipping feeling and the bike stops behaving like a finely tuned machine.
I stop and have a look. Hmmmm, something doesn’t look quite right.
Turns out the splines had sheared off inside the crank.
Now no doubt this failure is being attributed to my mechanical skills rather than the sheer superhuman power being output below my waist but as most people know, I tend to overtighten rather than undertighten things and the crank bolt was still in nice and tight so I reckon that 105 splines can now be relegated to the overflowing ‘not up to samuri standards’ box. The bike now has the Ultegra cranks on from my cross bike, hopefully they’ll be man enough. So it’s been an expensive fucking weekend with a whole 35 miles ridden.
Wish me luck on my TT tomorrow. I’m aiming at 27 minutes (for ten miles) . I’ll be really happy if I achieve that but I’m not really much of a sprinter over that sort of distance so I’d not be hugely surprised if I don’t do it. I can ride a very short way very quickly, or ride a very long way quite quickly but the bit in the middle seems to elude me. And I’ve had this chest thing for a while now and it’s really windy at the moment and it’s going to rain and I’m not used to these cranks and it’s my first one, and, etc… etc… 
