Fitness

Welcome to all who have an interest in anything cycling of any kind.( road, mountain, commuting, stationary, whatever).

This is the place to come to ask that question you have been wanting to ask,

or tell that story about your latest adventure riding your bike,

find out how to use cycling to get in better shape, or anything else you can think of.

So, to start, tell us, what you ride, where you ride and what type of riding you enjoy.

Come back often too check out what's going on and see what's on everyones mind or add your knowledge to the group. 

 

Athena: Check the WABA website.  They periodically run a bike market where you can buy and sell used equipment.  You could try ebay or the Washington Post.

The club ride today was Bob's Birthday Watermelon Ride.  The B group screamed out of the parking lot at 20 mph (as opposed to the nominal 15 mph).  It took me 2 miles to catch up with Holly, who is considering riding the Century with me next month.  After that we (Holly and I) maintained a nice 17 to 20 mph (16.9 mph avg) for about 25 miles.  Then I took a wrong turn and rode a mile before I realized that I was all by myself.  Got completely lost but was able to use my GPS and a little help from some friendly locals at a 7-11 to navigate back to my car.  It was good learning experience but a disappointing ending to a pretty good ride.

Well, it was an "interesting" ride tonight. I set out to ride to Slippery Rock and back, but I never made it. I was riding a slight downhill at about 27mph and I hit something I didn't see, which cut my rear tire and gave me a blowout. Fortunately, I didn't crash (got my weight back to control the fishtailing and got stopped front brakes only), but I wasn't sure if the piece of duct tape in my patch kit would be enough to hold the tire together to get home.

Fortunately, a kid in a pickup truck stopped and gave me a lift home.

nice save behanna! a few weeks ago jane was asking about what to do in the case of a blowout while cruising downhill, there's her answer.

i did get out for an hour tonight, just on the loop around my neighborhood. i'll take what i can get! i was going into withdrawal. they say the rain has lifted, so hopefully that means it's time for texas to dry out for the summer.

behanna and carrihound, yes, that is a great fear of mine. Thanks for showing me it is possible to recover, behanna.

athena_tavener, the thought of riding without trainingwheels scares Christopher to death so I think I will have to ease him into it.

No riding at all today for me, but I did meet some of the riders from the ride Dan was talking about (including him).

Hubby is actually thinking about getting a bike. That would be soooo great if the whole family could go on rides together. We could even bring our lazy dog if she would just learn to run nicely (fat chance of that ever happening, lol)

Tomorrow I intend to spend 4 hours on my bike. I don't even care how far I go as long as I am pedaling away. When Christopher is done with summer school, I have arranged for a sitter to come 3 times per week in the mornings so that I can still get out there.

Jane

Well I made my first commute this morning... not a full one but just from the volvo dealer to my office... about 3 miles with traffic.  Nicely the tips on triggering lights worked fine.  I broke only a couple cardinal sins of bicycling on the road.  One was running a red light.  I stopped for it after moving to the front... then just decided to go on.  The other sin was just moving all the way to the far right for people passing.   Everything was cool.  No close calls at all.

I have to go back in probably an hour or so to get the car.

My third eye mirror didn't work out 100% perfect like all the commuters on bikeforums.net praised it to be.  It did work, but I had to tuck my shirt in tight so it didn't flap in the way and I had to tweak it about 4 times to get it to an angle where I could kind of make out stuff behind me.  Vibration from wind killed the accuracy though... I still had to look twice before doing anything.

Oh and the road seemed worse by car than by bike.   I didn't expect that.

Time to work.   I'm training for a 5K, so my bike time is going to be cut down significantly for the next month.   That's life though.  I want to be able to do very well in the 5K.

nightc1, what an inspiration!!! You made it!

I went for my long ride this morning but the road takes me by my in-laws house and I ended up stopping for a visit so I can't really say I did too good. It is soooo hot out there.

Since I took yesterday off, I came back with a vengance. The rest really did me good and I discovered that I was able to tackle the hills much better. Someone told me to do 5 days on and 2 days off. Any thoughts on that?

Jane

Lol, it was only 3 miles... the distance even for the full commute (18 to 19 miles) wasn't much of an issue before .. just dealing with traffic got to me.   But hey yeah that's 3 of the miles I would have rode on the full commute.  Now to aim to try the whole thing again.

No call from the dealer yet on my car.   It's getting close to lunch time... I didn't bring lunch today since I didn't think this would take long at all.   I may have to bike over to wendy's and get something... or hey Sonic is really close and I know I could make it there and back without issue.

We went to our vacation home over the weekend. It's my partner's boyhood home in southeastern Iowa. I wanted to ride over the weekend but we don't have a bike carrier for the van yet. The van's contents include 3 dogs, 2 of them in cages so the bikes wouldn't fit in the van either. Anyway I managed to find a used bike to ride in the area. So now I have one there too. It's just a 21 speed Schwinn, probably originally from Walmart. I lubricated it's chain, gears, etc. and disconnected it's brakes and rerouted them correctly (I wonder what happened there?) then re-connected them, and it worked marvellously. I added a gel seat cover on Sunday because the saddle is hard.

I discovered a bike trail in and near the town of Fort Madison called the MRT (I take it the Mississippi River Trail) which goes through and around the town of Ft Madison. It has a wonderful view of a valley of farms, meadows, pheasant habitat and the river. It's a hilly climb, so I was actually using the other gears on the bike.

In fact, I ran into a problem. This bike has grip shifters and my  hands were getting sweaty (it was a fairly toasty 92F) and I was finding it very difficult to shift. I had to walk my bike up a few of the hills as a result.

The trail also has benches every so often which was nice so I could get off the saddle, sit down and drink some of my water every now and again.

The trail isn't very long. Starting from my place, it's only 4.7 miles to the end then 4.7 miles back (unless I want to bike on a US highway, which I don't right now) at least according to mapmyride.com. I look forward to many more Iowa rides as it's much more peaceful and scenic than city riding.

Aovermy: Invest in a pair of gloves.  They might be 25 bucks at a bike store.  I got my first pair from Modell's, a sporting goods store, for 10 bucks and my last pair from Performance Bikes (on-line) for 5 bucks or so.  Not only will they help with the sweaty hands problem, they will protect your hands when you fall.

You didn't mention a helmet.  If you don't have one, you should invest in one of those as well.

Other than that, it sounds like you found a good solution for your away from home riding.

jc343,

Thanks for the glove suggestion. I'll see about getting some. Yes, I have a helmet at both places. When I was a teenager, I took a nasty fall (peddle crank broke while I was flying downhill) and got a concussion. I'm not willing to repeat that so my rule is no helmet, no ride.

nightc1, 3 miles in heavy traffic can be quite a challenge. Are you going to try for the full commute? My ride to and from work is a total of 12 miles. I have to take 2 different routes because of afternoon traffic on one of the roads.

aovermy, I took a nasty spill like that when I was 7. I was trying to get over a curb up on to the sidewalk and slid about 10 feet. Ended up with a concussion (maybe that is why I have so many blonde moments, lol). The scariest thing was that an adult man was walking right in front of me when it happened. He just turned around, looked at me, and kept walking.

Jane

Jane, I'm working up to it.  19 miles each way is a chunk of a ride... 12 of that in traffic (all backroads so not full on hardcore traffic, but still... traffic). I'm either going to find somewhere to park that's a little further from work and build up to the full commute, or split shift it and drive in one day, ride my bike home that evening, then bike in the morning and drive home that evening.   Whatever I do I don't think I'm ready for a full round trip yet.  And the rain here has been pretty steady in the afternoons for about 3 weeks now :O

It's funny, we went from a huge drought to near daily rain.  No telling though how much of the rain has helped the drought problem... but atleast my grass is green.

Ugh, we are having the same drought thing up here, nightc1.

Rain and commuting can be a problem. Showing up soaked for work kind of ruins the day. I like your idea of splitting  up the ride like that.

I went swimming with Christopher this afternoon. For some reason I am more pooped from that than from riding my bike.

Jane

ok now I am getting really ticked off at myself. I have been riding an average of 27-30 miles almost every day. I have not been keeping track of speed or time since it was just a matter of endurance. Now I am starting to work on the whole average speed and cadence and that good stuff. So I took a little ride up to work and back. It is a 12 mile ride all together. It took me 1 hour and 10 minutes. I can't even maintain an average of 12 mph!!!! Of course I am not taking into account the red lights and stop signs, but still... I have some serious work to do.

Is it just a matter of practise or is there something specific I can do to improve my time?

Jane

I set my cyclocomputer into auto-pause mode. It senses when the wheel isn't turning, and stops the clock, so that I get my time-while-moving on the bike, thus cutting out the time lost at traffic controls.

I think if you do something similar, you'll see an average closer to 13 or 14mph.

As for stuff you can do to boost your average speed, the first thing you do is to build up a big aerobic base. I wouldn't worry about speed-specific work until you have at least 2000 miles under your wheels. Once you get past that, then you start looking at stuff like intervals and tempo.

Thank you behanna. That makes me feel better. I may be getting a little ahead of myself here. After all I have been riding for not even 2 months. I did do a search on cadence and found some good tips on gear shifting and all that. For now I will just concentrate on pedaling away without having to rest my legs.

On my ride up to work I just stopped and knocked on the drive-thru window and yelled for them to get me a big diet pepsi. Well, the stupid cup didn't fit in my holder so when I took a drink and put the cup back it ripped and I spilled pop all over my bike and myself. My shoes and socks are now soaked with diet pepsi and at least two cars got a nice little laugh. Glad to provide the world with smiles!!!!

Jane

Jane all you need to do is keep putting in the miles as your fitness level improves and your weight drops off you will get faster.

Nighc1 I equate riding in heavy traffic the same as running with the bulls. Nothing keeps you going like being out on road in those conditions.

I treated my bike to some new tires today. This will be the 3rd set this season. I splurged a bit and put a set of 700 x 25 IRC Restorms on. I have heard that I should get at least 2k miles out of them before I need to replace them. I'll see how that goes.

hello... can i ask some technical questions on this forum??? i have a bike a stock trek 1500 '06 model no modifications or what so ever.. am always hearing this squeking sound specially when on an uphill. just don't know where it is coming from..any suggetions on how to remove this irritating squeking sound from my bike..  can you also add me to the group... many thanks..

dragonpaddler, welcome aboard, nice to have you along for the ride!  As for the squeek, do you use clipless pedals? I'm sure others will have some ideas where to look as well.

Jane I did the coke thing with a cup of coffee once, won't try and ride a bike and drink coffee again, LOL! I know some books you could look into for training, I'll get the titles later for you. Just to put things in perspective, it has taken my wife a good two years to get where she is now, she averages around 17 on most rides.

gmule, that's a lot of tires to go through! I have riden about 6000 miles this year(between two different bikes) and I'm still on the ones I put on this spring and they still look pretty good. I use bontager hard case.

DAN

Geez guys, this one tops it all. Today when I was on the last strech of my ride I got pretty much hit by a car. It zoomed by me so close that it took out my mirror! When I looked up it was a police car!!!!! No kidding. Didn't slow down or nothing. I didn't get any identification on the car but I am going to give Medina Township police a little call since it was definitely one of their cars. Unbelievable - that's all I can say.

Thank you all for the encouraging words on my slow speed. I will keep at it and keep reminding myself that Rome wasn't built in one day.

Good grief, is it hot out there.

Jane