October 2013 Cycle Update

October has been a funny month in that I don’t feel I have actually ridden much at all, although my mileage totals are within the same ball park as I have been doing all summer. I took a week off before the Bare Bones 200 and as my knees were shot afterwards I took a break then as well. I guess doing 131miles in a single ride has skewed the total some what. I started my winter training last week with getting back in the gym. I’m planning on doing a load of heavy weight work in the gym for the next couple of months, combined with a couple of short evening rides and a long ride on the weekend. I’m still in the preparation stage in the gym at the moment where I’m getting my legs used to lifting again before jumping into 2 sessions a week at 5×5 (heavy – for pure strength) and 2 sessions a week 5×15+ (lite – for endurance). Although a lot of training programmes will tell you to knock the riding on the head while you are doing this I find that a short 90mins-ish easy paced ride often helps with my muscle recovery ie. it eases the DOMS a bit. I can acknowledged at this point that an endurance ride on the weekends might be a struggle but we’ll see how it goes. I have put together a list of events that I’m hoping to go for next year and today signed up for the first 2. Firstly There ‘N’ Back in February which probably shouldn’t really be thought of as a race, and more of a challenge. On Christmas Eve we’ll find out where “There” is and get the location of the reference points that we have to pass through on the way to “There” and back. “Back” will be Llanbrynmair, Powys by the way. There is no set route with route planning being part of the initial challenge. There are prizes apparently, only the details on what you need to do to actually win them seem a little sketchy. 🙂 The second event is a much more straight up cross country race in the shape of the Cannock Chase Winter Classic. This is not normally the kind of race I would go in for but there is precious little else going on Feb and it’s local, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to get some extra training done in a competitive environment. I mentioned last month that I had starting hanging bits on the Lurcher frame, well this month I finished hanging bits on the Lurcher frame. The biggest out standing job was building the wheels and it literally took me weeks to get these done. I was being very cautious though as it had been a long time since I had done the wheel building course and built the one and only wheel that I had built before. I was content to take the time and to only work on them at Birmingham Bike Foundry Tool Club under the expert eye of Fin. I don’t have my own truing stand either which clearly helps. Having now built 2 in “quick” succession I feel far more confident in my skills and when I get round to building the the third dynamo wheel I think that I should be able to do this a lot quicker. Oh yeah I didn’t mention that the SP-PD-8X dynamo hub arrived from Taiwan a couple of weeks ago. Just got to get something I can plug into it now. I also had my first dabble in tubeless this month. As it turns out I had a lot of success with On-One Smorgasbord‘s and no success with Maxxis Aspen‘s. With the Light Bicycle rims I used 1 inch Gorilla tape around the rim and Stan’s Universal Valves. I needed to put a tube in for 48 hours to get the tyre to sit in the bead properly but after taking that out and adding the sealant they sealed very easily. I just couldn’t get the Aspen to seat into the bead at all though. Maybe a ghetto inflater is needed but as it turns out it’s the wrong time of year for these tyres anyway. I have used the 26inch flavour on wet rock and wet hard pack before and found they offered plenty of grip but now that the bridle ways are getting a bit soft they are sliding all over the place. Although I have had a couple of short rides since finishing the build I’m still tweaking the set up and getting a feel for how it rides. First impressions are very good though. It feels very lite in comparison to my other bikes and accelerates crazy fast. The extra roll over of the 29 inch wheels removes a lot of trail chatter and the DT Swiss hubs seem to want to roll for ever. Once you are up to speed it feels like very little effort is needed to maintain that speed. I’ll write some more about it once I have made the tweaks and ridden it some more so I can do it some justice.