Single Speeding

My ’67 Schwinn Supersport single speed bike has been getting a significant amount of use of the course of the last few weeks.  As noted in my previous blog, I managed to crack the right rear seat stay on my 2010 Trek Madone 6.9 during the first race of the Tour of America’s Dairyland.  The picture below is slightly hard to see but the crack is between the “R” and the “E” of Trek.

Extreme Ski & Bike sent my frame back to Trek for analysis on June 27^th.  Trek, being the best bicycle company in the industry, is warranting my frame and has currently has the frame in the paint department.  Yup, the paint department!  Trek is going further out of their way to put my ProjectOne yellow and black colors on the Madone.  This type of customer service has definitely won me over and I will only be riding a Trek road bike for the rest of my life.  The new frame should be arriving in the near future; however, my patience is starting to wane because of not having a geared road bike for almost 3 weeks during the middle of the racing season.

Being without a geared bike for 3 weeks left me with little options on how to precede with training after late June, so my vintage single speed bike became the training tool of choice.  Whether it was a good choice or not is currently up for debate though.  Riding a single speed is good for smoothing out and increasing cadence; however, is not a good training method for keeping up fitness for criterium racing.  I suppose that a short period of time training solely on the single speed would be beneficial, may a week or so, but after about 2 weeks the point of diminishing returns is established.  

Yesterday I participated in my first race during the month of July.  I borrowed a teammate bike and tried to set up my fit dimensions on the bike to help ensure a bit of comfort.  Race started out fine but by half way through I could tell my fitness level had decreased.  Turning a big gear over like I was used to has become a bit of a struggle.  Sluggish muscles didn’t allow for an easy race, even one in which most of the time we didn’t work that hard.  Any hard acceleration had me going from the front to the back because of having to take a while to wind up the speed.  Finished mid-pack, did even try to contest.  Good race nonetheless to open the legs up a bit.

A few good races are coming up this weekend with the Downer Classic in MKE on Saturday and the Evanston Grand Prix near Chicago on Sunday.  Should be a good time and an enjoyable weekend in the racing community with my best supporters, my wife Amy and my son William!