The Equipment

MONDAY 19th NOVEMBER - 33 weeks to go

Weight : 16st 3lbs (-4lbs)
Miles last week : 60 (30 road, 30 indoor)

Good week for weight, bad week for cycling. Tried to drink vodka, lime and soda instead of beer, unfortunatly need to drink from a pint glass so need doubles... supposed to be much less calorific. Busy at work and could not get a cycle in on Saturday so only road ride on sunday of 30 miles, did two very windy laps of Richmond Park. Saw the Richmond Park challenge on the Cyclosports forum - do three laps in under an hour. Way outside that with two laps in 45 minutes (it was windy and I did do two for the London Duoathlon in 43 minutes, still a bit of improvement to go!)

Bad week coming up I fear, as I am 50 tomorrow... 20th November.

Anyway, back to the subject of this week's mumblings - the equipment...

When you are as unfit and weigh as much as I do then you tend to put more reliance and hope on your equipment than usual. There is a mythical hate figure in all Mountain Bike magazines (avg reading age 14) - the Lite Bike Fat Git. I am proud to be that man, whatever money I can throw at equipment in a futile attempt to level the playing fields I am happy to do.

First, my bike... its my first road bike and I bought it from Evans in Waterloo. I'd done my extensive research by pouring over their mail order brochure and had whittled my choice down to two bikes (a) Trek, because Lance Armstrong rides it and (b) Bianchi, because I like the colour. A quick test ride over Waterloo Bridge for appearance sake and I plumped for the Bianchi.

Only thing is, I wanted a triple ring on the front and while Trek know their market very well and supply all their bikes with a tripple at no extra cost, Bianchi could not concieve of someone buying one of their more expensive bikes who needed a tripple. Nice chaps at Evans saved the day by ordering the frame and building my own bike... for the same cost as a factory built one. Just goes to show what buying power Evans has.

However, I have a funny feeling I will have to buy a new bike for the Tour, watch this space...

So that's the bike sorted, but what about those cold winter nights? Well nothing for it but to get an indoor trainer. Without too much research it became apparent there are two choices (arn't there always) each with its pros and cons and I had to choose. Turbo trainer or Indoor bike? Turbo trainer looked attractive, more realistic and, more importantly, all sorts of extra gadgets to buy - PC based simulations/ability to race other sad people on the internet etc... however, I realised that the nuisance of taking wheels off carting it into the house would soon be too much, plus I think they are pretty noisy. So, I plumped for a Cyclops Indoor spinning bike with power measurement (of course!), another set of statistics to show out of condition I am. I've been happily training on it and getting 250 watts average with highs of 600 watts for milliseconds - thought this was pretty good with nothing to compare against, until I saw that Tom Boonen gets up to 1,600 watts in a sprint finish :-(

And then, of course, is the essential Edge 305 GPS bike computer! There's nothing like collecting data on heart rate/speed/distance/cadence and being able to plot them on a map.. only trouble is you can waste hours of time when you should be cycling. Apparently there is a new colour model coming out after Christmas, Edge 705, in the UK...

Finally, its very important to look good up on that bike. None of the garish team colours for me... bibs of choice are Assos which are unbelively confortable compared to the Santini items I used to have, and tops are all from Rapha - expensive but great quality and no dayglo colours.