As promised, I ended up replacing the rear Conti GP5000 TL 28mm tire on June 30th as the wear dimples were barely a shadow at 1,750 miles, but the catalyst was skidding to a halt to keep from hitting an electric gate, and wearing through the 1/4 mm tread left. The black of the casing has a slightly different hue than the tread, so careful inspection convinced me I was pushing a bad position and should change the tire.
Another factor was I intended to ride a long ride on the 31st, and I didn't want to set myself up for failure by riding a bad tire, especially since the new tire had arrived more than a week earlier and was sitting on the shelf, ready to go.
I stayed with a 28mm tire, which I now run at 60-70 psi. I get a nice ride and better grip. Several times now I've rolled over a 1/2 to 3/4" stone in a turn, and the rear tire just envelopes it, giving way nicely, and staying hooked up. I used to run Michelin Pro4 Endurance 25mm in back @ 115lbs, and that was a much harsher ride, though the best I could find in a tough, tubed tire.
My Pinarello Prince also has a "D" shaped, flat-back seat-tube that pierces the wind nicely for the wider tire. There's also only about a 1/4" gap between the seat-tube and the tire, so the air-flow is probably pretty clean even with the wider tire.
As I said in the earlier post, you should expect to get about 2x my mileage on a rear tire, as for some strange reason, over the last 13 years I have consistently gotten about half the mileage others do - so expect 3,500 miles, at least from a 28mm rear tire. (probably due to unintentionally skidding the rear wheel - my bad - a bad habit I'm working on)
I guess I should also mention that I ran the entire life of the tire with NO flats. Not even one, and no slow leaks either. That's frankly amazing to me. The high desert is so hostile to bike tires I used to flat every 3-4 rides. I use Stan's sealant and tape, and, NEVER, EVER added one drop of sealant. I put a full 2oz (60ml) of sealant in when I aired it up, and never touched it again. I just rode it and rode it and rode it.
They still go on tight, and I had to use Zip-Ties again to get this one on, but it was on, inflated, sealed and seated in 15 minutes total time, and that included cleaning the rim-tape and valve. No way I would ever go back to a tubed tire.
Thursday, June 4, 2020
Monday, June 1, 2020
Breaking All The Rules
When I was a boy people drawing social security checks weren't supposed to be breaking their personal performance records, and for the most part, be involved in sports at all. They were supposed to be laying back in their Lazy Boy recliners waiting for the Grim Reaper to find them, so happy to report I am breaking all those rules.
In 2010 the riders in the Sacramento area, which I called home for well over a decade, rode over 3 MILLION miles in the month of May. When the Great Recession started to fade, and more of us had jobs to go back to, that mileage dropped a bit, but in 2012 I made a concerted effort, between bouts of allergies and saddle sores and managed to log a PB of 575 miles.
A few months earlier I put in 214 miles in a single week (I looked this stat up in a post on this blog, as I had remembered it as 235 miles, but 214 it was) in response to a personal challenge from an online friend who was tragically killed by a motorist on a ride shortly after that.
As you can see, I easily beat both of those totals, as well as riding my longest ride, twice actually, since moving down to SoCal in 2015, first on Monday with 73 miles, and then besting that on Sunday with 80 miles. I also passed 3 people I follow on Strava for total mileage in 2020 and bested their longest rides.
As crazy as everything is out there right now, and as much as our nation is enduring, I am thrilled that this small corner of my life, the bit I have some control over, is going great, and I hope I can do a little leading by example in this regard.
Success ALWAYS feels great, and you can't have that unless you set goals that are attainable, and then do your damnedest to meet them.
Cheers!
PS:
If you care about sports at all, and especially basketball, you MUST watch "The Last Dance". I can't think of anyone more than Michel Jordon to embody the ideals in this post. He, like Kobe and Magic Johnson have always been a huge inspiration, and that's getting harder to find these days.
In 2010 the riders in the Sacramento area, which I called home for well over a decade, rode over 3 MILLION miles in the month of May. When the Great Recession started to fade, and more of us had jobs to go back to, that mileage dropped a bit, but in 2012 I made a concerted effort, between bouts of allergies and saddle sores and managed to log a PB of 575 miles.
A few months earlier I put in 214 miles in a single week (I looked this stat up in a post on this blog, as I had remembered it as 235 miles, but 214 it was) in response to a personal challenge from an online friend who was tragically killed by a motorist on a ride shortly after that.
As you can see, I easily beat both of those totals, as well as riding my longest ride, twice actually, since moving down to SoCal in 2015, first on Monday with 73 miles, and then besting that on Sunday with 80 miles. I also passed 3 people I follow on Strava for total mileage in 2020 and bested their longest rides.
As crazy as everything is out there right now, and as much as our nation is enduring, I am thrilled that this small corner of my life, the bit I have some control over, is going great, and I hope I can do a little leading by example in this regard.
Success ALWAYS feels great, and you can't have that unless you set goals that are attainable, and then do your damnedest to meet them.
Cheers!
PS:
If you care about sports at all, and especially basketball, you MUST watch "The Last Dance". I can't think of anyone more than Michel Jordon to embody the ideals in this post. He, like Kobe and Magic Johnson have always been a huge inspiration, and that's getting harder to find these days.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
System of Up
Being an engineer by nature and training, I have a systematic approach to problem-solving, including those that limit my cycling goals, which lately have been range and mileage. When I bought my new tubeless wheels the goal was to reduce flats to the point I could ride without obsessing about everything on the road that might give me a flat, and get home reliabally.
It took a few tries to get the tires right, but the GP5000 TLs were a home-run. I can now ride without much caring where or when or how bad the surface because they are the toughest tires I have ever ridden, roll VERY well, and as a huge bonus, have a nice plush ride.
Starting last summer I realized the tires and wheels were reliable enough to start doing longer rides, which was very liberating, as we have some great, remote places to ride here, but nowhere you'd want to sit and wait for a friend to pick you up from if $hit happened.
That worked so well I started hitting a new barrier to long miles - saddle sores. The solution to that problem has mostly been scrupulous hygiene. I always wash my bum now with anti-bacterial soap, and sometimes with Hibiclens, before I put on my bib tights. I've also largely abandoned the Voler brand bib shorts I've ridden for most of the last decade, searching for something that protects me better. (the subject of bib-shorts needs its own post, and I'll do that when I have more experience with my new PI Pro bib-shorts)
I've also boosted my heart support by taking CoQ-10, and spiking my Gatorade with Emergen-C. This combo also helps with cramping and adds a little fuel, so muscle support on the bike is pretty good now, but muscle recovery was becoming a problem with more miles and longer rides.
A couple of weeks ago I realized my cardio and general fatigue were no longer issues with recovery, but my legs just weren't recovering from 50 mile rides every-other day, so I scratched my head and started looking for a solution. That solution turned out to be Muscle Milk. The rice has a little protein in it too (GU does not), but I can actually feel my muscles soak this stuff up in a weaker version of how my calf muscle felt healing up from a bad tear, knitting itself together. It's also pretty great it tastes like of like ice-cream!
After setting a new distance record since moving to SoCal 5 years ago on Monday - 73 miles, I rode 52 yesterday, so in 3 days I've ridden 125 miles. I'm in my 60s now, so I'm pretty proud of that, and hope to break my May Is Bike Month distance record from 2012, which I will do on my next ride.
I haven't tried any other protein powder, so perhaps there are even better supplements, but MM is making a huge improvement in muscle recovery for me at the moment, and I wanted to spread the word. If you're new to cycling just know, cycling requires much more protein than weight training.
I did the latter for 20 years before taking up cycling again seriously, and was shocked that cycling required 2-3X as much protein as weight training - mostly on long rides lasting more than 2 hours. A good rule of thumb is 1 gram of protein for every pound of lean body weight. Most professional cycling coaches seem to have adopted this metric now.
I don't know where the next bottle-neck will appear, but right now I am very happy with where I am, which BTW, is atop the Leader Board at my local bike club!
It took a few tries to get the tires right, but the GP5000 TLs were a home-run. I can now ride without much caring where or when or how bad the surface because they are the toughest tires I have ever ridden, roll VERY well, and as a huge bonus, have a nice plush ride.
Starting last summer I realized the tires and wheels were reliable enough to start doing longer rides, which was very liberating, as we have some great, remote places to ride here, but nowhere you'd want to sit and wait for a friend to pick you up from if $hit happened.
 |
| Persists for 4-5 hrs |
That worked so well I started hitting a new barrier to long miles - saddle sores. The solution to that problem has mostly been scrupulous hygiene. I always wash my bum now with anti-bacterial soap, and sometimes with Hibiclens, before I put on my bib tights. I've also largely abandoned the Voler brand bib shorts I've ridden for most of the last decade, searching for something that protects me better. (the subject of bib-shorts needs its own post, and I'll do that when I have more experience with my new PI Pro bib-shorts)
I've also boosted my heart support by taking CoQ-10, and spiking my Gatorade with Emergen-C. This combo also helps with cramping and adds a little fuel, so muscle support on the bike is pretty good now, but muscle recovery was becoming a problem with more miles and longer rides.
A couple of weeks ago I realized my cardio and general fatigue were no longer issues with recovery, but my legs just weren't recovering from 50 mile rides every-other day, so I scratched my head and started looking for a solution. That solution turned out to be Muscle Milk. The rice has a little protein in it too (GU does not), but I can actually feel my muscles soak this stuff up in a weaker version of how my calf muscle felt healing up from a bad tear, knitting itself together. It's also pretty great it tastes like of like ice-cream!
 |
| Ice-Cream that makes you muscles smile |
After setting a new distance record since moving to SoCal 5 years ago on Monday - 73 miles, I rode 52 yesterday, so in 3 days I've ridden 125 miles. I'm in my 60s now, so I'm pretty proud of that, and hope to break my May Is Bike Month distance record from 2012, which I will do on my next ride.
I haven't tried any other protein powder, so perhaps there are even better supplements, but MM is making a huge improvement in muscle recovery for me at the moment, and I wanted to spread the word. If you're new to cycling just know, cycling requires much more protein than weight training.
I did the latter for 20 years before taking up cycling again seriously, and was shocked that cycling required 2-3X as much protein as weight training - mostly on long rides lasting more than 2 hours. A good rule of thumb is 1 gram of protein for every pound of lean body weight. Most professional cycling coaches seem to have adopted this metric now.
I don't know where the next bottle-neck will appear, but right now I am very happy with where I am, which BTW, is atop the Leader Board at my local bike club!
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Skydiving for COVID-19
I'm a numbers guy, and always have been. One of the things I learned to do while writing statistical software for Wall St banks is compare statistics to each other to get a better idea of the scale of things. For example, what the US spends on defense is almost exactly our trade deficit. There's no cause and effect there, but it helps one understand the relative scale of these two things.
Skydiving, or bungee jumping, which have about the same risk, gives you 6 chances in a million of dying per jump. So what about COVID-19?
Looking at COVID-19 deaths in the US it struck me that my state, California, which has so far experienced 95 deaths per million people is much better (by no means the best) than NY, NJ, CT, RI which are well over 1,000 chances per million, AKA greater than 1/1000 chance you've already died, and we're only 4 months into this. So what about the future?
I ask this because the USN's "death ship" aircraft carrier has been reporting sailors who had COVID-19 have gotten it again, and this is also being reported by China and European countries. This means NO "Herd Immunity". Like the common cold, the flu, SARs, etc, there's no vaccine because the virus keeps mutating, rendering last year's vaccine useless.
We've already lost more dead to COVID-19 than the Vietnam War, WW-I, Korea and all but WW-II and the US Civil War, but again, we're only 4 months into this. I love liberty as much or more as any other American, but given the risk, and thinking about projecting this out 10, 20, 50, 100 years, we're being complete idiots in managing this risk. If I can trade a loss of privacy for another 20yrs of life, I'm in. Privacy loss is a theoretical threat. COVID-19 is real, present, and urgent.
Lets assume the virus doesn't mutate to make a vaccine useless, as this might happen. We might get lucky. Lets assume it takes 24 months to get a vaccine, so 6X as long as we've been fighting this battle so far. In "bad" places like NY, NJ we're running at a rate of 300 per million people per month, so in 24 months, 7,200 per million. That's more than 1,000 TIMES as deadly as sky-diving.
Assuming people can develop an immunity to COVID-19, but to do so everyone would have to get infected, we'd lose 6% of 350 million people, so 21 MILLION people. That's more than the ENTIRE population of New York.
We have no assurance that a vaccine is even possible. We have no idea what 'Herd Immunity" means for a mortality rate going forward. Other than social distancing, N-95 masks, improving ER techniques, bleach, alcohol, and anti-bacterial soap, most of which have been employed while the current statistics formed, we're pretty much defenseless.
The really bracing fact is, if we stay in the conditions we've been in for the last 4 months, COVID-19 over time will kill a large percentage of humanity. We won't be a planet of 8 billion people, we'll be a planet of 1 billion, or maybe less. With stone-age transportation, The Plague killed 60% of Europe's population. Given Earth's current population, that's almost 5 BILLION dead - and that's assuming stone-age transportation.
Think about it. Our response to date has been absurdly caviler.
Skydiving, or bungee jumping, which have about the same risk, gives you 6 chances in a million of dying per jump. So what about COVID-19?
Looking at COVID-19 deaths in the US it struck me that my state, California, which has so far experienced 95 deaths per million people is much better (by no means the best) than NY, NJ, CT, RI which are well over 1,000 chances per million, AKA greater than 1/1000 chance you've already died, and we're only 4 months into this. So what about the future?
I ask this because the USN's "death ship" aircraft carrier has been reporting sailors who had COVID-19 have gotten it again, and this is also being reported by China and European countries. This means NO "Herd Immunity". Like the common cold, the flu, SARs, etc, there's no vaccine because the virus keeps mutating, rendering last year's vaccine useless.
We've already lost more dead to COVID-19 than the Vietnam War, WW-I, Korea and all but WW-II and the US Civil War, but again, we're only 4 months into this. I love liberty as much or more as any other American, but given the risk, and thinking about projecting this out 10, 20, 50, 100 years, we're being complete idiots in managing this risk. If I can trade a loss of privacy for another 20yrs of life, I'm in. Privacy loss is a theoretical threat. COVID-19 is real, present, and urgent.
Lets assume the virus doesn't mutate to make a vaccine useless, as this might happen. We might get lucky. Lets assume it takes 24 months to get a vaccine, so 6X as long as we've been fighting this battle so far. In "bad" places like NY, NJ we're running at a rate of 300 per million people per month, so in 24 months, 7,200 per million. That's more than 1,000 TIMES as deadly as sky-diving.
Assuming people can develop an immunity to COVID-19, but to do so everyone would have to get infected, we'd lose 6% of 350 million people, so 21 MILLION people. That's more than the ENTIRE population of New York.
We have no assurance that a vaccine is even possible. We have no idea what 'Herd Immunity" means for a mortality rate going forward. Other than social distancing, N-95 masks, improving ER techniques, bleach, alcohol, and anti-bacterial soap, most of which have been employed while the current statistics formed, we're pretty much defenseless.
The really bracing fact is, if we stay in the conditions we've been in for the last 4 months, COVID-19 over time will kill a large percentage of humanity. We won't be a planet of 8 billion people, we'll be a planet of 1 billion, or maybe less. With stone-age transportation, The Plague killed 60% of Europe's population. Given Earth's current population, that's almost 5 BILLION dead - and that's assuming stone-age transportation.
Think about it. Our response to date has been absurdly caviler.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)