Jim: On the Road Agin...

I rode to work today on the fixie. The Giant is still down. Things were nervous since I'm suffering from PTSD and other potentially profitable injuries as a result of that crash in the race saturday. No, I'm not as delusional as those funny blogging M Street / Rockville Harley / Silver Cycles / Your Name Here for $10 / Will Race for Food guys. But I see how it can happen.

The commute to work was easy. It was raining just a bit, but I didn't mind. The undercarriage of the fixie is easier to clean than mine so rain is a non-factor. I was wearing my oldest shorts, the Bellwethers that they used to sell to British motorcyclists in the 1960s for riding in trials competitions. I should only ride in them if I'm wearing a waxed cotton jacket and green Wellington boots. The shorts are that old. The funny thing is they are my "fat shorts" that used to fit when I was really rotund, and they are now so loose that the downwind side flaps in the breeze, so I have to keep looking down to see if it's the shorts flapping, or if some bearded pipe smoking guy on a recumbent is tugging on my leg to ask if I have our current GeoCoordinate, the windspeed and our velocity. But the shorts are made with this really heavy substance, maybe Bakelite, so they have outlasted many nicer, newer shorts. Yep, perfect rain gear. I also had on this opaque rain coat with underarm vents. It's like a body condom for riders. I don't know why it has the underarm vents, because the they are completely covered when you ride, trapping in the sweat. If the rain stops while you are riding, it looks like it has been raining on the inside. If I was like John and winning (or even finishing) races, and raising my arms all the time, it would be perfect. There'd be lots of ventilation. But I'm usually head down, grinding, so the vents are useless and its like being inside a steam room, except without the nudity. I should have just bought a Hefty bag and used the money saved to buy some Pabst.

On the way in, I stopped at stoplights because, y'know, after the big crash I'm really cautious and completely scared about riding. That lasted about three traffic lights, until some guy in a cab cut me off, which sort of lit my fuze. After that, I decided to run the red lights wherever I thought it was safer to run the light than to sit there. Which was pretty much all of the time.

On the way home I knew I needed to do some work. The ring finger has stopped bleeding, the road rash is on the mend... So I motorpaced across town on K Street. I left work late, a bit after 7:00, the traffic was light. I was doing over 30 MPH behind this big Volvo most of the way. Yeah, that sounds terribly slow for motor pacing. But consider my gearing - 44-18, fixed. It works out to about 160 RPM. I must have looked like a freak, more than usual anyhow. When I got to the C&O Canal/Capital Crescent, I started doing stomps - starting from a wobbly trackstand, doing a full out accelleration for 20 revolutions. The gears were a little too low for me to do 20 revolutions standing the whole time and still keep accellerating. So I would stand for about 10-12 revolutions, get on top of the pedals, then sit and spin up in a seated sprint for the last 8 revolutions. This would take me from 0 to 27, and take my heart rate from 115 or so, up to about 160 in the 15 or so seconds it took each time. I would then soft pedal, as much as you can with a fixie, for the next 4-5 minutes, and do it again, for 6 reps. By the time I did the last one, I was shooting through the tunnel in Bethesda and just a few cool down miles from the car. Yeah, a pretty weak workout, but the best I could do on the fixie. Plus a few of the stomps were uphill, so that has to be worth something.

I got the call from the bike shop today. Turns out the Giant's handlebars are wrecked, there are more scratches on the bike than there are on Guy Ritchie's back, the rear wheel is wayyyyy out of true. But otherwise, things are fine. My LBS (Family Bikes, Crofton - good shop, owned & operated by a Cat 3 racer) is hooking me up with loaner handlebars until the new FSA Wing comes in. I chikkened out and ordered the aluminum. After the 10 speed chain blew up this weekend, I'm a little leery of "lighter better" technology. My personal components are of the "older, worse" variety for the most part, so maybe me and carbon fiber are just fundamentally incompatible. Still, it's nice to dream.