Category: Cycling

Two Million Meters

About 95k biked this week, which brings the grand total for 2011 up to 2000 km, or two million meters. Yay!

Here's a graph:

This shows that I have been riding about 85k per week from week 13 until now (week 37). The three >100k rides to/from Tammisaari show up as peaks, as well as the 2-day Luumäki trip. Week 29 is the only one with zero km's, because of the 24h rogaining trip/event. Extrapolating until the end of the year a 85k/week rate will bring the total over 3000 km, but we'll see how tough it gets with ice, snow, and winter-tires...

On the running side of things it would be nice to get up to 1000 km again, but I'm now about 50-70k behind last years schedule.

Critical Mass, 2011 September

Some 260 riders and a route along länsiväylä, the main motorway in to Helsinki from the west. Bikes on the motorway has prompted a number of news-stories:

Yle: http://www.yle.fi/alueet/helsinki/2011/09/lansivayla_halutaan_muuttaa_kaupunkibulevardiksi_2866429.html and http://yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2011/09/pyorailijat_valtasivat_moottoritien_helsingissa_2869090.html

HS: http://sange.fi/~otso/stuff/hs110913-kriittinen-l%C3%A4n%C3%A4ri.jpg or http://omakaupunki.hs.fi/paakaupunkiseutu/uutiset/pyorailykulkue_tukkii_moottoritien_kaistoja_illalla/

Some history and views: http://vesirajassa.blogspot.com/2011/09/lansimuuri.html

See also June11 and Aug11.

Sunday 100k

Another Sunday and another 100k ride - now in the west to east direction.

I guess one solution to the high-gear-problem is just to ride the bike faster 🙂

Wind from the back/side helped a lot. There's no 10k-segment in the pic at over 30km/h but there were many 4-5k stretches of flat or slight downhills where it was possible to keep a nice 30-32km/h. I rode this one non-stop with about 2L of fluids and one Toblerone chocolate-bar as fuel. Although there are bike-paths in Espoo - where you would think they make every effort to have the traffic flow smoothly - there are also traffic-lights which in fact slow you down significantly - thus the penultimate 10k is the slowest...

The spoke-magnet supplied with the Garmin Edge 800 on the back wheel came loose and broke at around 6km, so speed data is from the GPS only. The speed reading on the screen updates quite a bit slower when working only from GPS-signal without a cadence/speed sensor.

Bike Gears

 

Update: I had the wrong number of teeth for sprocket nr4, it should be 19T in fact, so the correct graph looks like this:

Turns out it's not exactly easy to find a 46T chainring for SRAM Rival on sale anywhere. The closest I found was a complete 46/38T cyclocross chainset.

I did my second 100k (well 108.2km to be exact) bike ride for the season on Sunday, now with newly bought Tubus Fly rack and a pair of Ortlieb panniers. Much better weather and fitness compared to last time meant that I finished in just over 5 hours.

Ride details: 108.2 km, 5 hours 2 min, avg-speed 21.5km/h, avg-cadence 76, avgHR 118, calories: 1669 kcal.

Riding with panniers full of stuff (heavy stuff!) really changes the feel of ridig quite a lot. Without any bags uphills can be attacked in the big chainring by standing up and pedaling hard. With bags the bike feels much heavier and even small uphills need to be dealt with by shifting down into the small chainring and spinning at 80-90 cadence while sitting down.

My bike came with a 50T/34T compact SRAM Rival chainset and a 12T-27T 10-speed cassette. I wonder if changing the big ring to a more "cylcocross-like" 46T ring would make for better gearing? This graph I made shows the bike-speed at 80-cadence in the different gears. I used 2099 mm as the distance the bike travels when the wheel turns one revolution, taken from the auto-calibration data of my Garmin Edge 800. Changing to a 46T would give four gears in the 25-31 km/h bracket, instead of three currently. It's not like I need the 42 km/h top-speed that the 50T ring gives anyway.

Have updated to WordPress 3.2. The look of the admin-panel has changed slightly, otherwise hope everything is OK (the comment-settings usually get messed up when updating...)