Another moment of bike-geekery took place while over at the place more relatives were staying. The SO of the daughter on the other side of the family dragged me down to the garage to check out his new bicycle. He is a serious triathelete. Not one of the middle-o-the-pack enthusiasts down at the local 1/4 mile swim/20 bike/ 10K run circuit. Nope. He’s trying to qualify for The Ironman in Hawaii. It would seem there’s a good chance he will, if his feet keep intact (coming back from a broken foot) and everything goes as planned.
He’d just finished a five hour ride that day, a little sheepish because he had climbed for 3 minutes more than planned in his workout (he’d wanted to take a photo of his bike against the Mt. Ashland Ski Area sign, which was another 1/2 mile up the road.) The day before he’d ridden six (that’s hours, not miles). So, the guy can put in distances, in case that isn’t obvious.
Anyway, he figured quite correctly that I’d appreciate his setup. And it was hard not to. Leaning against the wall was a Cannondale Slice Hi Mod with an SRM unit he’d scored on a used deal. Just so you understand the neighborhood we were in, the NIB version with fully aero wheels sells in the $12K range. His had a more standard wheelset - a set of Ksyriums which had the bladed spokes, but no aero shape to the rim profile. It sounded like some of his training buddies had given him a certain amount of crap for not running the fully aero and lower spoke count wheels (such as shown here). But, he said he preferred the reliability of the higher spoke count wheels. They were 20 and 24. Bobbishness is relative.
Goddess help me, when I looked at the setup, the first thought in my head was, “well, you ain’t rigging fenders on that bike…” In my defense, it had been raining that day, and I’d been congratulating myself for bringing up the fender-rigged Quickbeam rather than the open-wheeled Hilsen.
But, I am enough of a bike geek to appreciate what lay before me, and I poked at it, observed a few things and asked some questions. You don’t argue that a thoroughbred can’t pull a plow - you point it at the finish and let it fly. This bike looked fast just sitting there.
It was pretty interesting to speak with him. Several times on the ride, he’d nearly been blown off the roadway by crosswinds, and I shared with him some tricks for staying on track. But, if you want to talk about running a wind sail from the side, this bike was it. Aero frames have to make up for narrow bits with the perehelion of the elipse.
From the front, it presents about as much surface area as a thread. Everything curves and tapers. It is a testament to computer aided design of laminar flow. You can almost see how happily the wind would politely curve around this bicycle.
But, from the side, it just sits up and asks for the slappy hand of the wind. Add to that the position of the rider - saddle fully forward, weight rooted on the aerobars - and you realize how much of a bronco ride that bicycle would be to handle
in any kind of weather.
When I’m pushed from the side, I kick my butt back and relax my lee side arm. This lets the countersteering force me back against the wind. With the saddle setup kicked so far forward on his rig, it would be significantly twitchier to do so, but I tried to explain the idea of using the countersteering, rather than his method of turning into the wind. I think he had that good moment of insight - when you understand that bicycles only steer by countersteering. I hope it helps him a bit. He’s got a motor I’d seriously enjoy. To put it bluntly, on good years, I’m a fast mule. This guy is a thoroughbred. You’ve got to admit that when you see it.
He admits easily that his bike handling is not good. He runs like a wild horse and swims as though dolphins carry him along. The cycling, he came to much later. He’s a bit spooked by the handling of the bike (and I would be, too), and has had three tumbles from it since getting it (one was an over the bars “Oh. My. Those brakes work well!” panic-stop endo when it was brand new, so that doesn’t really count. I mean, the longest nose wheelie I ever rode was in the large parking lot at a shop when I tried the new Schwinn Homegrown with a disc front brake which had been set up for hair-trigger response. A car started at me from the side, I grabbed a whole handful of brake, popped the bike onto its front wheel, popped my eyes out of their sockets and somehow managed to lean back and ever-so-slowly get the back wheel on the ground again. And that was on a mountain bike. If my center of gravity had been a millimeter further forward, it would not have been pretty.) We talked a little more about handing, though it’s a whole different equation on a bike like that. I found that his rear brake was about to detach from the frame, talked a bit about the “bounce test” to find things like that.
It was a helluva fast looking bike, though.
Later, during dinner, we got back on the bike topic, and people asked about the rides I do. It made me realize that brevets and cyclocross are equally hard to explain in any rational manner to most normal folks. But, I spoke about the challenges of riding a 200K, and sense of pleasure you get at times when you are just rolling along, things are working well and strangely, you feel really good.
He commented that he’d found himself smiling on his ride today, which is something he almost never does.
For me, though I didn’t say it outright, I cannot recall a ride on which I didn’t spend most of the time smiling.
June 18th, 2010 at 10:24 am And you’re not going to post a photo of said bike? :-)
June 18th, 2010 at 10:46 am Didn’t have the camera at the time…
It was this, without the Zipp wheels and with a different saddle:
http://aroadbike4u.com/product/cannondale-slice-hi-mod-ultimate-srm-58757-1.htm
The Ox probably has a picture or two of it, eh?