Late Spring makeover

So every spring a addition of new parts to replace the old parts that have worn out is called for. Maybe in most sports gear is not as technical and does not require as much maintenance but this is cycling and we have to replace parts prior to them getting too old. New chain and cassette (so that they don't wear out the cranks), new tires (so they don't wear through and you get a bad flat), new handlebar tape (b/c the old stuff looks worn out). Same old drill as usual. I had been acquiring parts since Christmas and I was waiting to put them on.

New parts:
















My bike prior to the changes:

















It was the first time that I had tried to change my own cassette but I had seen it done and it was supposed to be easy. Well it would have been had my cassette not dug into the cassette body!!! Fortuatly thanks to Bluebonnet bikes for telling me what was going on and making me feel like I was not an idiot and then a trip to Bicycles Plus to pull off the cassette and put the new one on I was in business. Plus I got to drool on the wheels that I would love to have. After getting home and getting some real work done ( I am writing a paper) I was able to do a really good job cleaning my bike and getting the new stuff on.

The completed makeover:















So I had to get the grey/black tires b/c Performance was out of the red ones that look so much better with the bike but they were cheaper and I decided that for this year I could go with the grey/black ones!

Now the last of the makeover was completed by Sunday. Thanks to new hair clippers my hair is much shorter and the legs are back to looking like a real cyclist.


We did make it down to Dallas this last weekend to watch a few races at the Matrix crit. The races were very good and despite the heat the shaded sidewalks made watching the races a lot of fun. It did make me want to be out on the course racing myself! So now to work on getting back into racing shape and doing some real races!

Back on Track

So I had a great weekend back on the bike. I rode much stronger this weekend on both the Saturday and Sunday ride and ended up getting a little over 100 miles in. I even beat everyone up the last climb of the day today despite a good amount of work that I had done into the wind.

Speaking of the wind. WTF. The wind has been pretty strong around here all week. When I say strong I mean 35+mph. Some how I managed to do ok today and yesterday in the 20-25mph wind, even taking a few strong pulls into the wind. I am looking forward to this week. I plan on commuting to campus a few days and then doing atleast the Wednesday KOW ride as well as maybe the Thursday night ride. I also have to do the work on my bike to put on all of the new parts!

Well we will see how the week goes.

Resuming a normal schedule

Well I am happy to say that I successfully completed my first training block of the year and I feel like I am in better shape and won't be horribly embarrassed on tomorrow's group ride. I will see if I am in better shape tomorrow since I have not done any fast group rides since the training block finished. I have been spending a lot of time on campus this week running participants for one of my studies. Now for those of you who may not be familiar with the process I will explain a little. We have undergrads sign up to take part in our studies at specific times and then we sit and wait in the lab for them to show up. Now most of the time during the semester this goes pretty smoothly. We have some that don't show but the majority do. The last few days I have had very few participants show up so I have been spending time reading journal articles and trying to put together an outline for a paper that I will be writing. Now if only more of those participants would show up I might have another paper to write!!!

So I am getting back to a regular schedule of riding, writing a paper, and running a study or two. Hopefully the rest of the summer will be relatively calm, but with a trip to NC, a two week job doing data collection, and probably moving I can only hope for the best.


At least the riding will help cure some of the stress.