Training

Relating to Training

V1 Octalink? 105 or Dura Ace, you choose!

August 17, 2009 in Bikes, Mark, New York, Training by Mark Beattie | No comments

I found this awesome quote in rec.bicycles.tech while looking for setup tips on the old Dura-Ace 7700 Bottom Bracket:

The Octalink crank attachment, its feet of clay, has no preload
between the facets of the square spline and therefore frets (tiny
motion] elastically, even if it has no actual backlash in torque.
Aluminum parts against steel are a classic of this syndrome because
the softer aluminum frets on the steel, and instead of developing
rouge as steel-on-steel does, it makes (hard) aluminum oxide whose
repeated fracture often makes a sharp click.

I haven’t heard your BB, but I have heard such clicks. This may be
your problem and the reason why Shimano gave up on Octalink. Elastic
backlash (absence of press fit) is a phenomenon that escapes
recognition in various mechanical devices and gets passed over in
time, even when the reason is not recognized.

Jobst Brandt
So there you have it from JB himself – Octalinks may develop clicking due to their design. We’ll see. I’m not sure if the weight savings and extra $30 are worth it for the DA BB-7700 vs the BB-5500 but I’m partial to designs that allow rebuild and proper setup/adjustment, so I think I just might go for it paired with a Sugino Cospea compact crankset. In my heart of hearts I want a triple with that 12-21 cassette I’m running, something like a 28-38-48 perhaps. The current 34/44 setup is fine considering I don’t often find myself needing much bigger of a gear than 28+ mph but on downhills it is lacking. The other issue being crossover gears where I often find myself running 34 x 12-13-14 and realize I need something slightly bigger.

Sugino Cospea Cranks

Hanka where are those SRAM Double Tap™ shifters?

November 13, 2008 in Bikes, Cyclo-cross, Mark, Racing, Training by Mark Beattie | 1 comment

So I got the 2009 Trek XO2 working with my old gear from the Salsa. I am still uncertain about keeping the Campy Chorus Carbon 10 levers, I mean I like them well enough, but as it stands I don’t see myself converting to a Campy drivetrain and if I upgrade to 10 speed I’d rather go SRAM or Shimano. And currently the 2009 SRAM Rival group looks like the best deal going. The only question that remains is one of gearing. I’m not hoping to make this bike a full time ‘cross racer, more of a light off road touring & dirt buddy if you will, so even in that context carbon shifters seem like a bad idea. I know, I know, bar-end shifters and aero brake levers are always an option. But so are flatbars and a set of cheap SRAM gripshifts.

The real crux of the build, besides which shifters to go with, is just how compact of a chainset I want. Alex Wetmore has a great page talking about the pros and cons of 110 vs 94 BCD cranksets and how compact doubles, especially when you go with something like 46/32 or a 44/31, can actually give you more reasonable chain crossover. When I was looking at gearing tables for 2 x 9 mountain bikes, I pretty much came to the same conclusion. It seems most 2 x 9 mountain drive trains run something like 44 x 29 up front and an 11-34 in the back. Some racers will bump that front chainring to a 46 I guess (or down to a 42) depending on the speed of the course. A 44 x 11 gear gives 104 inches development and a 29 x 34 gives 22 inches (on 26 x 2.1″ tires w/ 175mm cranks). I mean that’s a pretty good spread for off road I’d think.

SO, I’m leaning towards using the more common 110 BCD crankset with a 46/34 up front, unless I happen to win a set of sweet 8 year old Race Face square taper Turbine cranks in a 94 BCD double configuration (or vintage Ritchey Logics) I would say that the advantage of something like a 44/31 setup using an 11-28 cogset gives almost the same range. On my Jake the Snake when we rode across the US I ran a 50/40/30 triple with a 12-32 8 speed cassette in the back and Rivendell “Silver” friction barend shifters. That worked fine. I didn’t find myself fully loaded in 1st gear very often. I’d say I spent most of my time on that trip in the middle 40 tooth ring switching between 24 to 12 on the back (45-90″ development). And as I recall, the real problem was when I shifted up to the 50 tooth ring I really only got two more gears using 50×14 and 50×12 (96″ and 112″ respectively). We generally didn’t go over 18 mph, and as I recall there were only a couple of days when I remember us using having a tailwind and actually using those big rings.

And when Hanka and Katie battled it out for 1st at Pijnacker this past weekend? Well sadly the Rainbow Colors didn’t win it on SRAM Double Tap technology, but it was a good battle nonetheless.

Future computers, cyclo-cross and dreams

November 6, 2008 in Backups, Computer, Cyclo-cross, Leopard, Mark, Racing, Training by Mark Beattie | No comments

Apparently Apple is getting back into the Chip manufacturing game again. We can only hope as x86 PC users go, that they don’t abandon Intel’s architecture completely in the near future so that we can still dual boot and run Virtual Machines like Parallels and boot alternatives like Ubuntu. What is more likely, if we’re going to play the speculation game, utilizing PA Semi Apple plans to continue to push the envelope with mobile computing implementing low power parallel processors to the point where Intel chips are not relevant. This seems possible. If you consider the computing shift from massive mainframes, to workstations and now laptops, the future of computing is largely OS and processor agnostic. The excitement over so called ‘Netbooks isn’t just that you can “hack” a $400 MSI Wind Laptop and make it run OS X Leopard it’s that the model is shifting from proprietary systems and dedicated hardware moving computing straight into the ether. Which begs the point that the iPhone is only the beginning of Apple’s mobile computing strategy and that in 10 years time the current generation of MacBook’s with their svelte machined aluminum uni-body enclosures will seem elephantine.

For the record, I did get the 7200 RPM Seagate 320GB hard drive to fit the MBP and upgraded the Airport mini PCI card to 802.11n Extreme. It goes pretty well over the Time Capsule for backup with Leopard’s Time Machine. Yes, I upgraded to Leopard too. And it boots way way faster than Tiger ever did for whatever reason (not just the 7200 RPMs). I slip-streamed XP Service Pack 3 and then did the whole Boot Camp installation on a 100 GB partition, SolidWorks Student Edition worked fine which was something of a relief for me.

Also, I have a new 2009 Trek XO2 frame to ride off the pavement of New York. There are a few more ‘cross races this season and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make them all as they tend to be 1-2 hours away in Jersey and it’s like $30 per race. My hopes are to ride the Croatan Aqueduct trail, do the mountain bike loop in High Bridge Park in Harlem, and perhaps take Metro North and ride some of the trails in the Hudson River Valley. There is a race weekend in the Hampton’s and with entry to a citizen’s race your number is entered to the raffle for a Richard Sachs’ custom cyclo-cross bicycle complete with full SRAM kit (so as to skip the 7 year waiting list and selling of kidney).

My new ride the Trek XO2

Richard Sachs - The best of handmade steel

Friday Night 3AM, Prostitutes on Clinton

June 28, 2008 in Bikes, Mark, New York, Racing, Training by Mark Beattie | No comments

I’ve spent what feels like the last two months working either splits or overnights. Last night was under the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan side, one of Olafur Eliasson’s waterfalls is fully visible, but at night the LEDs seem somewhat dim.

Riding up East Broadway to Clinton on my way to the W’burg Bridge I nearly ran over a hooker who had positioned herself in the bike lane presumably for callers in motorized transport. Granted, I am only speculating she was a woman of the night, but there was a man nearby who I believe was her pimp and he did holler some indecipherable at me as I passed.

As I climbed the bridge’s bikepath I had various thoughts, namely how many Johns actually solicit while riding their bicycles? Which led me to think about bearded potbellied men on recumbents, tandem recumbents more prcisely, trolling the LES and Chinatown late at night with an empty seat hoping to score. It’s a funny image I think. And surely a boon to the image of large bearded men on recumbents everywhere.

A final thought: riding my bicycle is faster than taking the subway. I supposed I knew this, and most nights my excuse has been that I was so tired, why would I want to ride home? But the best reply to this is twofold: 1) after a long night riding home is a good way to unwind 2) there is literally no traffic in NY city at 5am. Seriously, I had some beautiful rides home coming up through the damp verdant jungle that is the east side of Prospect Park Brooklyn, riding home from Church Ave. Also at 5am, if you are lucky, there will be passed out tight jeans fix’sters on the Williamsburg Bridge who just couldn’t quite make it home from a debaucherous night out in the LES.

So yes, commuting on bicycle has somehow renewed my faith in humanity, even if NY is still far too automobile-centric. My hope, and perhaps it’s closer than we realize is 1000$ per barrel oil and every road a bike lane.

Out of the way old man!

May 29, 2008 in Bikes, Mark, New York, Training by Mark Beattie | No comments

Maggie was in town briefly before heading to work at a clinic in Bolivia for a few weeks. We were walking through Central Park near Umpire Rock and there is this a middle aged man time-trialing his Cervelo Carbon P3 with matching Zip 404 front and 808 disc (yes a disc! in Central Park!) wheels. So of course he hits the corner with the intersection path that goes to Columbus Circle at top speed and expects everyone to get out of his way, because you know when you get to carriages and the smell of horse dung, that will really motivate him. He nearly ran over an old guy riding his huffy. It was really an American Psycho moment. I hope when he does race his triathlon that he is training for he gets run off the road by a pack of wild dogs. That’s the least we can pray for really.

The Texans are coming!!

January 19, 2005 in Training by Jared | No comments

What happens to a cowboy when his hat accumulates too much snow? That’s the mix we’re seeing. More and more steel toed boots and wide brimmed hats are riding the metro these days. And the good lord almighty, our saviour, a proud american, decided to dump a few inches of the white stuff on us.

So what did we do? We ran. 40 minutes around the city. Asa met Mark and I at my house then we trucked along the progressive sidewalks of Mt. Pleasant, over hispanic laden Columbia Rd., and down the urban chic 18th St into the Dupont area where the Republicans were dressed to be seen and happy to sparkle.

We said bye to Asa at his office just off the circle then slid our way down a wooded path into Rock Creek Park. Yep, just me and Mark, running in mild darkness under the quiet, snow dressed archways of winter branches, following the cross country ski marks along the path wedged between creek and parkway.

As always, we had to go uphill to get back to 1745 Park Rd. The ingrediants of grade, cold air, and my lingering cough came together in another body wrenching, dry heaving seizure performance. Funny how the girl who walked by let out a giggle and not an offer of assistance or even a glance of empathy. Ah well, progressiveness takes many forms. I mean, at least it wasn’t a Texas snarl and contemptuous request for my quarantine.