The Damage Toll

Well Saturday was Capital Punishment...and well boy did me & the bike get punished here are a couple of photos till I can get my head together to right a full report of the torture session.

Brake Pads. Swiss Stop Formula Oro. As you can see I pushed them way past where a maybe a more sensible person would stop. Note the middle one has half the backing gone!


Pile of dead parts. Rear derailleur, chain, and bottom bracket. Rear derailleur was half dead anyway so not crying over that.


Note the teeth on the bottom pulley...maybe this is why the shifting sucked?

Current damage bill $300....
-rear dearailleur
-bottom bracket
-chain
-new cables
-new brake pads

Thank god I do all my own repairs. Otherwise I think there would be another $80-$100 for labour on top of that!

Not good for your lungs or bike

One of the parting comments after finishing the Nowra 8hr was how bad the dust was and how it had stuck to everything.

Me somewhere later in the race, notice the grime.
Copyright Kelvin

During the race my rear shock never felt right and while I had a fiddle with the rebound it just wasn't happening. So after the 8hr I sent it back to Dirtworks for them to have a look at and they discovered something like this...



The oil in the shock was black and used as though it hadn't been serviced for a couple of years, not 3 months ago. Also it was in a sealed portion of the shock this crap shouldn't have been able to get to.

So Dirtworks are going to re-service the shock as in there opinion something weird has happened to it and I a bit happier knowing that it wasn't me making things up because I was tired and getting sloppy during the race.

Nowra 8 and a bit hr

Well better late then never...
Last sunday was the second in the NSW enduro series an 8hr event at Nowra on the Coast(not that I saw any water).

I had another early start to get down there and setup before the 8am kick off. The drive down was uneventful and I got to drive through Kangaroo Valley I place I haven't visited before with some interesting roads.

I got to the course about 6.45am am and after being directed to park as far away from transition as posible hauled my crap all the way back. Going for the simple setup of multiple bottles and gel flasks I was soon good to go. Off to registration, where I realised wifey still had my licence from the race the previous week. But the cool people at rego let me through because I did the rego on-line through MTBA.

The race briefing was at 7.45 before we were directed back down the fire road for the start. Getting all lined up before told that we needed to move then not making it back to the front when the organised suddenly screamed go wasn't really the best way to start the race.

Frmo here it would take be till the fourth lap or 2hrs to clear traffic (this was probably) a good thing and settle in for the long haul. Sometime about the 4hr mark I had an incident passing a slower rider due to hitting something hidden off the side of the track and going over the bars.

Again mid-race I went through a couple of laps where I was just generally hating life and would have been quite happy to pull the pin but again things picked up at the 6hr mark as everything was starting to wind down.

Somewhere in here I worked out there was a big plasma to see my on track placing and I found out I was sitting in about 15th spot, and started to seriously work on moving up.... (well it only took me a few hours!)

So come 7.4hr mark I knew I had at least one more lap to do and maybe a spare as well. I asked Jase's wife Kylie to try and work out whether I needed to do the spare to keep my position of 14th or whether I could wind the clock down as it would be close to the 8hr mark.

I roll in at 7.56hr and Kylie lets me know that on the previous lap the gap to 15th was maybe 3.5 minutes but the gap to guy in front was only a minute...also she wasn;t sure whether he and gone out on another. After about 10seconds thinking I clip back in and am off on the final final lap of the day...and trying to hunt down the rider in front.

After half the lap I realise that he mustn't have gone out on the lap and only need to make sure that the guy behind doesn't get me.

So after 8.5hrs riding I cross for 13th place on the day amongest a field that was more stacked then the previous race.

All up I'm happy with the result given the limited amount of training over the last couple of months...but a top 10 would have been nice.


Data

So looking at the numbers from the day, showns that the course required alot more pedalling than the previous round. Also I put out ~3w(yes standing ovation required!) more than the last race despite riding for an extra 15 minutes.




As well the MMP curve was alot flatter than the previous race showing improvement over the longer time periods.



Also this previous week I learn't this ltttle trick of creating a MFA of laps within a workout for comparsion. So below is the data for the 15 laps completed on the day.



So overall, despite my currently lower training load (through work constraints, and placing driver with wifey) I am actually showing some progress.

Wrong Wrong Wrong

Another horrible setup spied via the internet



(And yes I do need to do the write up for last week)

Worst Bike Setups Continued

I was probably a bit harsh on Ben Day in my previous post... its' bad but not the worst.
Yes folks, here it is, the thing that should never be!



Steve Bauer's "funny bike"

And yes this has not been stretched in photoshop. He somehow thought this was a good idea???

The Wost Pro Setup

And the award goes to....


Ben Day

(For the MTber's who can't work out the problem look at his levers!)

Something a Little Bit Special

I placed an order last week to stock up some items I was running low on in my spares collection. The store didn't have any of my beloved XTR chains in stock, but they did have these for just a little bit more....I couldn't resist!

Shimano Yumeya Chain



"Yumeya" translates to dream workshop...basically fruity bits for your XTR or Dura-ace groupset. I've not been interested in any other of the bits but thought the chain was "interesting". The chain has Titanium Nitride inner plates the are "supposed" to help with oil retention.

If the hype is just that, then I bought a couple of cool coloured chains, time will tell.

Follow up FSA Cranks

So I have had 4 rides and clocked over 10hrs on the new cranks including 1x XXC race. It’s time to give a further update on their performance.
Firstly I have not had to touch the front derailleur alignment since set up, it really has been set and forget even though it is mounted too high.
I have had one dropped chain, and that was sprinting against a truck at +50kph from the lights. It was dropped to the outside not inside which is unusual. There have been no drops to the inside which is where you normally have it throw off.
Despite hammering through Pork Barrel multiple times and yesterdays rough XCC race, the chain has not bounced off the rings which I have had happen in the past with the XTR cranks.
At the moment the biggest issue is probably the 12-36 cassette. It could do with more in the way of mid-range cogs and the jumps can be a bit extreme at times but this is unrelated to the cranks themselves.
Given FSA’s poor reputation with cranks and chain rings in the past I am pleasantly surprised with how well everything is working out. I think that at the present moment, this crank set is the best value option for someone looking at heading down the two by option of front chain rings. I am sure this will change later in the year as SRAM release more of their range with double chain ring options.

tale of the Lost GPS

Last Sunday I was out round Stromlo thrashing the new cranks (yes I know I need to do the follow up...) and somewhere around the back my Garmin 705 flew out of it's mount and either onto the track or into the bushes at the side of the trail.

By the time I realised it was missing I had no idea where over the last 7k or so it would have detached itself. So I had a real problem, I had to be back home by 11AM for a kids birthday party on pain of death and I knew I couldn't ride the trails backwards without causing and accident. So going at Mach 5 around to the last place I had looked at it before slowing to a crawl to try and scan the track for the GPS.

When I had covered about 1/2 of the 7k's I mentally had written the unit off as lost and was thinking whether I wanted to shell out another $500 for a replacement. I got back to the trail without sighting the GPS and it was off home for fun and games with a bunch of kids for the afternoon.

During the week I mentioned to Big Jase I had lost the GPS and I got the normal commiserations and the rest, but two days later I get a text from him saying a mate of his Garry had found my GPS and I could get it back this weekend.

So I met up with Jase before the race and he told me the story, "Apparently a couple of riders had found the GPS and given it to Garry because he had one and might be able to work out who it belongs to. So Garry scrolled through the history on the Garmin and found that all the files had power data attached to them. At that point he phoned Jase because he knew he trained with a power meter and might know if someone had lost one."

So I got it back today, a couple of extra scratches and I checked the ride file and it looks as though the thing died after about 17.5hrs....longer then what Garmin quotes for battery life. So a big thank you to everyone that passed on the lost unit!