The weather was prime this morning which meant I was able to bag one more ride outside this week. That brings my total to 4 days and 7 hours. Pretty weak I know but hey, it's better than the 4 hours I've been logging on the trainer the past 3 weeks!
This morning I met up with Curt, Adam and Doug from
Team Inertia and freelance Brian to ride what they call the reverse south mountain loop. The route consisted of heading south on the west-side frontage road, east on the Alpine Hwy then up to Suncrest followed by an always windy descent into Draper and back home. As is generally the case when climbing anything longer than 1 mile I brought up the rear of the pack. However, I did manage to beat my Dec. '06 time by almost a minute which was cool. And don't think I'm sandbagging back there - my average heart rate for the climb was 180 bpm! Not sure where to find watts like
Fox but man, I could use some additional horsepower.
This afternoon I was running errands with the kids and picked up a pair of Speedplay Zero Stainless pedals from
Contender. Yeah, yeah, it's true I sold a new pair a few months ago on eBay and
RB will probably give me grief for going on about how great my Time pedals were, but the truth of the matter is I just wasn't able to adjust my cleats correctly with my new shoes. I'm not sure why that was the case, but given the ability to adjust the fore & aft and lateral position of the Speedplay cleats separately from the degree of float I'm pretty sure I can get the adjustment correct. I had some concerns about cleat durability but after talking with Curt and Brian (who use Speedplay X and Zeros respectively) I decided to give it a go.
One final note: I learned today that my SRAM Force front brake is subject to the
recall. Hopefully I can get a replacement soon as I'm headed south in less than a week!