Mostly warm and sunny with some slight rain. First 100k this year!
Tag: 100k
Borgå 110k
First 100k ride this year. After Söderkulla the long straights before Borgå are quite boring..
Thursday 100k
First 100+ k ride this year! A bit of rain in the middle and a steady headwind as usual 🙂
Sunday 110k
Another 100k ride, this time from west to east. Warm but breezy weather. Only one short stop to refill two water-bottles and eat an energy-gel.
Last 100k in 4h 17min (23.3 km/h)
Total 110k in 5h 2min.
Saturday Night Bike Ride
First longer bike ride this year.
To avoid the midday heat I started in the evening around 18:00 and finished late around 23:00 with barely enough light to ride. There is a nice newly built bike-path between espoonlahti and kirkkonummi.
There and back again
I rode a slow 116k to Tammisaari into a strong and steady headwind on Tuesday. Back home 113k on Friday with a much nicer back/side wind. With less weight in the bags and a bit more training a 200k brevet ride now seems more realistic than before.
Kyrkslätt 100k
101k in 5h 1min, avg 20.1km/h. Not exactly warm, around 9C with a cold wind.
Saturday 106k bike ride: Eskilom-Luumäki
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...)