Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Phat Thunderstorm, NOT!

Thunderstorms Roll Through

All day long there were threats of a Thunderstorm occurring during the time frame of the ride. I kept an eye on the radar all day on my-cast.com. There were scattered ones rolling through. A particularly strong one rolled through about 20 miles south of the ride less than an hour from start time. There were warnings of hail and severe winds and lightening.

We even heard thunder nearby as we got ready in the parking lot at about 5:45 PM. I checked the radar on my cell phone and saw that a cell had popped up just east of us and was headed further east. Whew...

We hit dry roads and sunny skies for the entire ride :-)

Clean Bike

This is the first ride for me since my bike went into the shop two weeks ago. I took some pictures of my new components so I know how clean I should try and keep them :-)

New Rear Cassett
New Rear Cassett, originally uploaded by Martinator.

That is one clean rear cassette. That is what they look like brand new. Now the challenge is to keep it looking that shiny...

New Chain Rings
New Chain Rings, originally uploaded by Martinator.

Nice clean chain and chain rings. I actually wiped them down after the ride.

Good First Half, Slow Second Half

It had been over two weeks since I had ridden last. Well, there was the ~25 miles back and forth from the car dealership on my Mountain Bike. Anyway, my overall time and average speed was down for the Phat Tuesday Ride. I thought that was odd since I remember rolling into the halfway point averaging ~19 mph. Hmmmm...

When I got home I uploaded my ride data and compared it to my other rides viw the Dot Race feature on Motionbased.com. I saw that compared to my fasted ride to date this year, I kicked butt on the first half. Then I tanked on the second half.

Going over the numbers in more detail, I can confirm that I tanked on the second half.

Earlier in the month, I averaged 15.4 mph on the second half (mile 13 to the end) and last night I only averaged 13.3 mph along the same segment. The biggest difference between last night and earlier in the month was that I didn't hook up with a group of riders coming out of the rest stop last night. that and my chain derailed, but that shouldn't really have had much of an impact.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The bike looks great.
Perhaps to help keep the rear cassette looking shiny you could try never changing gears. At least that way you would only have one sprocket to clean :-)

Martinator said...

@thePig: That would make it a very expensive "Single Speed" ;-)