Gettin' There

I visited the hardware store over the weekend and, in addition to two bags of forest brown cedar mulch, (one day you're living in a nice little apartment socking money away and buying bike parts made from the latest unobtainium, and the next day you've bought a house and find yourself dropping bucks on stuff you're going to throw on the ground outside, stuff that will eventually become dirt - what's up with that? I just spent good money on dirt), I picked up a couple of simple washers to work on my aerobar position. The Profile Carbon X bars are nice because they provide lots of positions for mounting the extensions, but you're left with these big honkin' brackets that pretty much do nothing except take up space. I got some washers of the same approximate surface area as the bracket mounts so that the load would be similarly distributed over the carbon fiber wing around the bolt hole. I then simply removed the top brackets and threaded the inner bolt through the hole in the armpad mounting arm. The effect was to lower my arm position a bit over 3cm, a nice drop.

I also raised my saddle almost 1cm. Just riding around, it was fine, but in an actual time trial at race cadence, I found myself forward on the saddle and pedaling more with toes down so my effective saddle height was quite low. With the saddle up, and the armpads down, my back is quite a bit more towards the horizontal than before, without me feeling cramped in the hips. I'm looking forward to some intervals this week to give me some more feedback.

We'll see how the power development is in this position. Opportunities for change I see immediately include shortening the aerobar extensions a bit to remove some of the possible pressure on the shoulders from being stretched out and to get the elbows closer to the knees for better air flow, and then I might start tweaking the saddle forward and up, trying to get the upper arms more vertical and getting the back flatter.

There's nothing much sexier in cycling than a decked-out time trial bike, in my opinion. Something about those wheels and the broad carbon frames, I guess. I have an opportunity to do the local club time trial on a brand new Trek Team Time Trial bike, and I can't wait to give it a try. Talk about sexy! It's not quite the level of eye candy of the Cervelo P3 carbon, but it's pretty close. I'm just hoping that it doesn't beat my personal best by a huge amount or else I'll be walking back into the bike shop with my credit card instead of the bike.

See you on the road!