Category: Bikes

No, my shiftless feeling isn’t related to my lack of employment. It’s because my front shifter went out and the local bike shop doesn’t have a replacement in stock.

I don’t pay much attention to details

I have lots of gadgets on my bike, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to components so long as they work. My left shifty thing adjusts the front gears to make me go faster or easier. My right shifty thing adjusts the rear gears to fine tune what happens related to the front gears.

I NEVER felt the need to go faster

When I bought my used Trek 1220, it came with road gears with 52 teeth on the big front chain ring. That’s so you can go fast. I never said to myself, “I’m in the big ring and I”m pedaling as fast as I can and I want to go faster.”

I HAVE said to myself, I’d sell my firstborn (sorry, Matt) for a lower gear to get up this hill.

I had Wayne (remember Wayne?) swap out the road gears for mountain bike gears with a 46-tooth big ring.

Everything worked fine for awhile

Until, that is, I went for a ride up in South GA on a cold weekend. The temps were in the mid-40s and my gears wouldn’t shift until the day warmed up. Wayne replaced the shifters and life was good again.

Let me explain something about Florida riding: we don’t have hills. We get a nosebleed when we go from the curb to the crown of the road. We diddle with gears to compensate for headwinds and tailwinds, but our low gears are mostly for show.

Compensating for altitude

Jan Norris, my old riding partner and former Palm Beach Post food editor fielded a call from a reader one day asking how much she should adjust the cooking time for altitude. Since subscribers could be anywhere in the country, Jan asked, “Where are you calling from?”

“South Palm Beach,” was the reply.

“That’s sea level,” Jan said. “You can SEE the ocean from there.”

“Yes, but I’m in a condo on the 13th floor,” the caller explained.

Do you see now why we can’t conduct an election without hosing it up?

I needed the granny yesterday

On my first hilly ride this week, I used the full range of gears. Luckily, shifting to the lower ones took just a punch of the button with my thumb. It became increasingly difficult, though, to get into the bigger gears.

Like I wrote before, my mother lives at the top of a hill, so I was in the front granny gear on the way home yesterday. When I started the downhill run this afternoon, I needed to shift up. I pushed as hard as I could with my left hand, but it wouldn’t shift. I had to reach all the way over with my right hand to get it to go.

When I passed the Cape Bicycle Shop it was still open and I stopped in to explain my problem. One of the guys looked at it and thought the cable might be binding on the kickstand plate. It was, kinda sorta, but not really.

Owner Eric Gooden took a look at it

He was hoping that it might be a frayed cable. I was, too.

I knew I was in trouble when something fell out in his hand and it wasn’t a small mouse that had crawled into the shifter when I wasn’t looking.

Bottom line: it’s broke. There might be a spare off another bike somewhere on a shelf, but if there isn’t, I’m in trouble. They are backordered.

Bro Mark is going to see if they have one in St. Louis, but it’s looking bleak. My bike is old and has seven gears in the back. Spiffy new  bikes have nine or 10, so there isn’t much demand for my flavor of parts.

This might be the excuse I need to upgrade to Shimano Dura Ace ST-7801 Dual Control Levers with matching Shimano Dura-Ace CS-7800 10-speed 12T Cassette, except that they ring in at $400 and $154 respectively, almost exceeding the cost of the bike itself. (And then I’d have to upgrade to a Shimano Dura-Ace CN-7801 10-speed Chain for another $35.)

Worst case, I’ll have them lock me into a middle-range gear and I’ll do a lot of coasting downhill and some slow pedalling or walking uphill. It’s always good to have an excuse for being slow.

Scott took up biking in May. He’s a runner. He’s working toward the Miami half IronMan in November. After riding a solid but basic Specialized road bike for a few months, he was ready to upgrade. Below is his account of last weekend’s ride on his loaner tri-bike. —Matt

My ride actually started yesterday at about 1pm. That is when I was at the local bike shop to pick up and borrow the owner’s son’s time trial bike (aka Tri-Bike) that he is going to sell me. While there, he took the wheels off, because apparently they cost more than my Jeep. No, not more than my Jeep’s wheels — the entire Jeep.

Always Pack Your Own Parachute

Anyway, while he was putting on the other wheels the conversation went down like this:

Owner: Hey Wrench, I grabbed some tubes from under the bench. Are they the good ones or the bad ones?

Wrench: I think the good ones are in the front and the bad ones are in the back. Where did you grab them from?

Owner: I think I grabbed them from the front but I’m not sure…

At that moment, I thought, ‘Danger, Danger’. Do I ask him to double check the tubes? I mean, he’s letting me borrow a $3,000 bike for free. Who am I to complain?

Water? Too Heavy. Who Needs It?

Fast forward to today at 12:30. I leave my house with no water bottle (no cages on the time trial bike) and no computer to provide a metric to compare the road bike to the tri bike. About 6 miles into the ride, the front tire is dead. I spend 15 minutes changing the tire out. At least now I know I can do it if I’m in a race… Get back on the bike and about one mile later the back tire is flat. I’m out of tubes and CO2. I tried using the hand pump but the tire was not holding the air…

So, about four miles from the local bike shop, I started walking. In my Shimano ‘duck shoes’. A fellow biker stops to help. Turns out it’s my friend Chris from the Palm Beach Road Runners. He offers his tube and CO2 but I’ve decided at this point to go back to the local bike shop so I thank him and keep walking. He also gave me some good advice about foam rollers (he’s a doctor) and didn’t charge me a co pay. What a great guy!

Thank You Jupiter Police Department

About 200 yards from when Chris leaves I flag down a Jupiter Police officer. He can’t help because his trunk is full of guns or something so he calls a fellow officer who has a bike rack on his Police SUV and this officer saves the day. He drove me to the local bike shop (the air conditioned air was awesome) and we shared some bike stories.

In and out with two fully-inflated, non-leaking tubes. Yeah!

Fast to Faster: It Is About the Bike

So about the time trial bike… I freakin love it! I guess it’s the geometry. It kind of feels like you are in a very aggressive position. Almost as if you are going to fall over the handlebars. It uses a completely different set of leg muscles. I felt as though I was really pushing and driving down on the pedals compared to the road bike.

At any rate, my legs felt awesome and I felt (although I can’t compare since I had no computer) as though I was going much faster. And much smoother. No parts of my body went numb, either… The shifters are right at the thumbs and they move up and down, so the shifting is really easy and smooth. The shifter, that changes the ring you are on, is a resistance shifter and is WAY better than what I’ve got on the road bike. For me, that is. It only has two chain rings but I never needed the highest or the lowest. It was a very nice ride considering the circumstances. I have a new love for this type of ride. Completely different experience and one that I prefer over the road bike.

I’ll have to check with some Tri peeps to see if it is a good idea to change this close to the MiamiMan. Since it is different muscles and I’ve spent the last six months building the ones that I won’t be using anymore, I wonder if it is a good idea… If it won’t completely screw up my training, I will own a Tri bike within the next couple weeks… :-)

All in all, I went from my house to Coral Cove Park and back in 3.5 hours. With two flats and a ride in a police car, that’s not too bad…

As sweet as the Felt sounds, I’m a big fan of Scott’s second choice. It even has his name already written on the frame…

Are you selling your triathlon bike and want to pitch it to Scott? Know anything about the Felt? Like another brand or style better? Got any ideas how to go faster? Let us know in the comments below. —Matt

During my normal Saturday morning ride, I started getting less and less comfortable. Ten or so miles in, my knees felt as though they were going to hit my chin when I was in the drops. What was happening?

Simple answer: my seat was slipping down.

By the time I got off the bike to see what was going on a few miles later, I had lost nearly two inches of the seat post down the tube. Not good but fairly typical of an old, steel bike.

Steel Bikes Go Soft and Stretch with Age

My bike and I both are going soft with age. As you can see from the picture, the top of the frame where the seat post sits is touching. There should be an air gap there when the post is tight. As the frame ages and stretches, you loose the ability to really clamp down on the seat post.

(Also note that the rubbing of the bike bag has worn away at least two layers of paint.)

Might Makes Right — Or, Not

Being a well-prepared cyclist, I had the right size hex wrench in my bag. Until I had a chance to shim out the seat post with a cut-up aluminum soda can, I could just really crank down on the clamp and it would hold this one last time.

My bike had other ideas. It was tired and it wasn’t going to take it anymore. When I give the bolt a half-twist, it shattered and shot nearly eight feet away.

Crap.

I’m fifteen miles from the starting point and my seat is now flush with the frame. This is a six-inch difference from where I would normally ride. Not fun. The nearest bike shop is seven miles. I couldn’t think of anywhere nearby that would have a bolt at eight in the morning.

J-Town Bikes and Ace Hardware to the Rescue

Fortunately, I ran into Richard who works at J-Town Bikes. He biked up into the same Circle-K parking lot as I was sitting. He suggested I try the Ace Hardware store not two blocks away. I never would have known it was there. (Richard also was the one that gave me the soda can idea for the permanent fix.)

Sure enough, the Ace Hardware had a bolt that would work until I could fix the bike for good. The bolt and a hex wrench in the new size cost $2.09 and that included tax.

So, you’d think I’d fix the bike as soon as possible to avoid any additional problems, right? That would be he most responsible thing to do.

Three weeks later, I’m still riding with the temporary bolt and without the seat post shimmed out. It still slides a little over the course of a 30-mile ride.

I’m writing today in the hopes that with this public admission that I’ll guilt myself into doing the right thing and getting the bike fixed before this weekend.

Check in with me Monday.

—Matt

My new, used 2001 Bianchi Talladega is an awesome bike and a huge step up from my frankensteined Trek 7300.

First, a few words about the Trek 7300. I bought it in 1998 shortly after moving to Orlando. I didn't know anyone in town and figured that with an empty social calendar I could get some exercise. I stopped by the local bike shop (Bike Works, MetroWest location) and told them what I wanted — a low-end road bike. When they told me that would cost $800, I asked them what they had for $500. That brought me to the Trek 7300. I swapped out the straight bars for drop bars and rode it for the next ten years. After eight years, the head tube cracked and Trek replaced the frame (under warranty) with a Trek 7700 frame. I even managed to do a century on the bike.

Still, it was a beast of a bike. Naked, it weighed in at 22 pounds. Add in the lights, rack, generator hub, ham radio, MP3 player with handlebar-mounted speakers and whatnot and it must be 40 pounds. My fault, I know. Still, heavy and slow. It was no road bike.

I had never seriously considered upgrading since all the bikes I lusted after were more than $2,000 and I really had no excuse to spend money on a bike that I rode ostensibly for exercise.

That was, until my (now favorite) Uncle Mark borrowed a full carbon bike for the Tour of Rural Southern Vistas (TOSRV). After tearing up the road on a bike that was lighter than air, he was hooked. Not too long after he got home, he bought a 2008 Trek Madone 5.5. Good for him and better for me. The fine Italian road bike on which he had put more than 25,000 miles, a 2001 Bianchi Talladega, was put out to pasture. (Read about Mark's Bike in his own words.)

After weeks of negotiation, begging, whining and small unmarked bills, Uncle Mark put the bike in a box and it showed up at my office. Continue reading “2001 Bianchi Talladega — My New, Used Bike”