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Archives for April 2009

Coughing up the dough

04.09.2009 by Ray Niekamp // 7 Comments

Just out of morbid curiosity, I started keeping tabs this year on how much money I spend to feed my biking habit.  It’s barely mid-April, and I’m surprised.  Here’s a quick rundown:

  • New helmet                          $33
  • Three tires @ $15 ea.         $45
  • Two tubes @ $4 ea.            $  8
  • New cassette                        $35
  • Ride entry                             $30 (for a ride I didn’t start because of illness)
  • Team jersey for MS 150    $70
  • Chamois creme                   $16
  • Total:                                  $237

The Ms 150 is a week away, and I know I’ll be incurring a lot of ancillary costs connected with that one.  This all seems like dribs and drabs here, but over $200 in just over three months?  It’s a good thing I’ve received a lot of biking items as gifts, because otherwise, I might have dropped even more money.

A lot of my purchases are impulse buys — oh, I gotta have one of those.  In other cases, they’re purchases of things I got along without, but being around biking and bikers, I realized they’re things I should have.  Shorts and jerseys probably fall into this category.

A biking friend told me he didn’t realize how much money he would spend once he got into riding.  He thought just getting on the old beater bike that was gathering dust in his garage and riding it longer distances would get him into better shape.  But he found the biking culture too, and soon was dropping money even more prodigiously than I account for above.

“What does a biking noob really need besides a bike, a helmet, shorts and shoes?” he asked me. “And is there any way to get quality at an affordable price?”

Good point. Your friendly LBS probably sells most of its stuff at retail. You might get a good price from some of the big catalogs, but sometimes the quality isn’t what you were hoping for.

If you were going to advise a new biker, what gear would you suggest they must have?  What gear could they get by without, at least until they decide that they’re in biking for the long haul?

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Categories // Accessories, Equipment Tags // Accessories, Equipment

Bar tape

04.07.2009 by Ray Niekamp // 13 Comments

As my MS 150 ride fast approaches — just a week and a half away — I’m giving some thought to improving the looks of my bike.  After all, I don’t want to be in the middle of thousands of other bikers on something that looks less than pristine, right?

It really should be replaced, don't you think?
It really should be replaced, don't you think?

When I bought the bike last year, it came with soft, squishy gel tape.  But my crash in November ruined the tape on the left handlebar.  I haven’t done anything about it, mainly because it stayed in place, and didn’t unravel like I thought it would.  But now, I’m getting over the “badge of honor” look, and I’m thinking about getting some new bar tape.

I’ve been down this road before.  On my old Raleigh, the cloth tape was all torn and ratty, so I replaced it — but with cheap cork tape.  I figured if I made a mess of the wrap job, I wouldn’t be out much money.  It looked pretty good when I finished, and then I found that I had wrapped it backward, from the middle out to the end, instead of from the end to the middle.  Hey, I found these instructions online, and I just followed them, you know?

It stayed together though, but it was firm tape.  I’m spoiled by the gel tape now.

I’ve noticed you can get gel inserts that glue onto the handlebar, then you wrap your tape over the inserts.  That looks interesting.

My other issue is color.  The bike came with blue bar tape.  While I like my bike, I’ve never been crazy about the blue and black color scheme.  So I’m leaning toward plain black tape.

Here’s your chance to weigh in on which way I should go.  Black gel tape?  Other ideas?  What brand?  Or, should I keep that “badge of honor” look, to remind me not to ride stupid?

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Categories // Accessories Tags // bar tape

Counting cadence

04.05.2009 by Ray Niekamp // 3 Comments

 

Here it is at the end of a recent ride.  16 mph avg speed, avg cadence 79 rpm, for 18.04 miles.
Here it is at the end of a recent ride. 16 mph avg speed, avg cadence 79 rpm, for 18.04 miles.

For my birthday last month, my son gave me a new cyclocomputer, a Cateye V2C.  It’s loaded with bells and whistles, and I’m still trying to figure out all the different functions.  But it also has one very important function I haven’t used up to now: cadence.

Since restarting biking in 2007, I’ve read that cyclists should strive to maintain 90 rpm as their cadence.  About the only time I ever attempted to gauge cadence was by setting the timer on my old unit, and when it hit a round number with a zero at the end, start counting rpms as I pedaled.  Count for six seconds, multiply by ten, and you have your cadence.

A fairly crude method, but it familiarized me with the fact that 90 rpms requires some quick pedaling.  Once I installed the new computer last weekend, I learned that first hand.  Just taking the bike around the block a few times to test the unit, I learned that I wasn’t pedaling any faster than 77 rpms.

I like the new unit’s physical setup — even tho it seems rather bulky.  On my last cyclocomputer, there was a cadence function, but the magnets were positioned too far from the sensors, and even when I shimmed them, I couldn’t get a reliable reading.  This one uses two large sensors.

puter2The big square thing is the speed sensor — the arm off to the left is the cadence sensor.

Now, I’ve had the chance to test it out on some road rides.  It’s true — to reach that magic 90 number, I have to pedal a lot faster than I’ve been used to.  I tended to settle into what I consider a comfortable pace, which turns out to be in the low 80s — 82 or so.  If I’m trying to maintain a pace of 90 rpm, I have to shift down and pedal faster.

But that’s fine.  I understand it will take awhile to get used to a faster cadence, and to the gears needed to keep the faster cadence comfortable.  Next, I’ll dig into all those functions on the gizmo.  Like an alarm bell that tells you when you’re out of your target cadence zone.  For me, that will be between 80-100 rpm.

One benefit of the higher cadence I’ve already noticed is that I travel at about the same speeds I did when mashing the large chainring — but my quadricep muscles still feel fresh after a ride.  That really came in handy on today’s club ride, where we faced a brutal and chilly northwest wind all the way back.

Does cadence play a role in your training?  Any tips on maintaining your target cadence zone?  Or is this cadence thing all overrated?

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Categories // Accessories, training Tags // cadence, training

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