The Kitchen Scales

“Why are the kitchen scales on top of the radiator?” asks my wife.

“I was using them to weigh my 12-25 cassette.”

“Oh, really.” She looks either disinterested, disgusted or both.

“Yes, it weighs 212g, the 11-23 only weighs 182g.”

She has already left.

My bike: Bianchi SL3

So here it is, my bike. I got this one in 2003 when my very first road bike which was also a Bianchi developed a crack in the frame. The shop here in France was good enough to change the frame despite it being out of guarantee , and even let me upgrade to an SL3 from an ML.

Back in 2003, the bike had all the parts from the old bike put on it, namely a mix of Campag Veloce, Mirage and even Avanti parts. Over the years from then I have upgraded it everywhere. The groupset is now all Record or Chorus, and I bought some new wheels in 2004, Campag Neutrons. In fact the only original parts from that old bike is the handlebars and the seat post (the seat post in the picture is a campag chorus but I have put back the old seatpost as I couldn’t get the postition right with the chorus one).

It has served me very well this bike, I’ve done all my cyclosportifs on it, including La Marmotte, and all in all, in about 3.5 years I have ridden it 21000km. It probably has just the one cyclo left in it; Sundays 1000 Bosses, after which my new Cervélo should be here, and this bike will from then on be known as my winter / training / trainer / spare bike.

The Garmin Edge springs to life

Well I carried out a fair bit of research on the malfunctioning HR monitor / strap on the Edge. First I tried the Garmin strap with all my other HR monitors. It didn’t work with any! Then I tried my almost identical Sigma HR strap with all my HR monitors, it worked with all of them except the Garmin. I thought that was curtains. Finally, as a last resort I swapped the batteries around in the two straps. And lo, the Garmin strap and Edge worked! It seems the Garmin strap will only work with the Garmin Edge, which is a bit strange since the Sigma strap works with HR monitors from Sigma (obviously), Polar and Tacx. Nevertheless, I have at last got the HR sorted out. Mind you, its a bit poor for a brand new device to come with a flat battery.

Garmin Edge 305HR a review on first impressions

There’s nothing like a new piece of gadgetry equipment to get the bike riding urges going, so as you can imagine I was pretty excited when my Garmin Edge 305 arrived. It comes in a neat little cubic box that promises great things, which when you open it up you find the unit itself, an HR chest strap, a USB cable, 2 bike mounts (one for the crossbar, one for the stem), training center software and the manual.

Setting it up is a synch, though you need 3 hours to charge up the battery before you are up and running, but then before long you have your Edge hooked up to your bike, your user profile entered and are ready to roll. The first thing you notice is the altimeter is very variable, the first day’s ride I set off supposedly at 4m and arrived back at the same spot at 28m, and the second day I set off at -75m and came home to 25m!! I know my house is actually at 33m elevation. One cause for this is that you really need to wait a minute or so for the device to find the satellites, I was a bit too eager to get going and was wondering why my speed stayed down at 0. Patience boy, patience. Nevertheless, the altimeter is very variable, and more of a guide to particular climbs than a perfect reflection of a days riding. The total ascent feature is neat though, so when your legs are getting tired you can look down and hopefully see why. You can even see a graphical view of your days efforts, which is neat.

It gives you lots of info, all you would ever want, and you can choose what to display, I chose, elapsed time, speed, distance, HR, elevation, time (day) and total ascent. Unfortunately, after two rides I am yet to get the HR to work at all. I always have trouble with HR straps, I think because I am so narrow bodied. The strap looks EXACTLY the same as the strap with my Sigma HR which works quite well, so I am going to do some testing on that.

The software was a pain for me as I have French PC and it AUTOMATICALLY defaulted to the French language version, and I couldn’t change it (and I am quite techy). It’s good software though, once you download the free mapsource you get a little (but a bit pathetic) map of your route, and all the data you want, height, speed, incline, and heart rate. Well of course I don’t have heart rate and to be honest the speed and incline stuff is pretty erratic looking, so the best part is the altitude and that’s a bit ropey as I said before. But all your rides are neatly organised in a calendar format. And you can export it to google earth, using a nifty little program called Foreconv. Except, I think its because of the version of training center I am using, it exports ok, but no path appears in Google Earth. More work needed on that too.

I’m not making it sound very good am I? But I imagine these are all teething troubles. I mean its great except the altimeter is a bit dodgy, the heart rate monitor doesn’t work yet, the free map is crap and the export to google earth doesn’t work! Oh and you do still need your speedo if you want to be sure of all your distance data I guess. Well, I am reluctant to lose it so far. The Garmin only ways 88g so for all you weight weenies out there, that’s pretty good. I haven’t tried some of the “ace’ features like setting up a route and then racing yourself against your last ride on that route, or setting up any of the training sessions with intervals and such like. So clearly there is a lot more to come.

I’ll come back when I have some success with the thing!

New bike update

I decided to ask the bike shop to redo the quote, and revert back to the R3 (pictured above). To be honest I only went for the R3SL at the last minute because it was all black! Not really for the fact it was 100g lighter. And at least I know the R3 has been fully road tested by the pros (which is just about the only good thing left in pro cycling, but that’s another story), such as in the Paris-Roubaix, whilst the R3SL no-one has actually seen but for a few shiny frames at the bike shows. And I can’t wait until June or perhaps later for my new bike, I need it for the summer cyclosportifs. So hopefully it will be arriving in the near future!

New bike delay

I got an email from the bike shop this morning, saying there is a delay on the supply of frames for my new bike. I was expecting delivery at the end of this month, but now it will be May or even June!! I could go back to my original spec. and order the Cervélo R3 instead of the R3 SL. I was going a bit mad with the SL anyway, and all because I thought the SL (pictured) looked a bit nicer and was all of 100g lighter. At least with the R3 I know its been properly road tested, seeing as CSC used it and won Paris-Roubaix last season. I do need, o.k. need is a bit strong, let me rephrase that, I would really like my new bike for the summer cyclosportifs, and I am thinking of riding one in Morzine in June. Decisions, decisions.