Can't catch up with the working crowd

It's 6:10 am. KL just rolled out the door in the dawn's early light for her ride into work. The drone of truck tires on nearby I-93 breaks the morning silence, but other than that it's pretty quiet and isolated here at the KL North Training Center. The house is surrounded by woods, although the front yard is pretty big. I can almost take a full swing with a sand wedge and not reach the far side. That's right, I can hit golf balls right here at home. Of course, I have a better chance of finding the ones that I do drill into the woods than most of those that were lost yesterday at Crotched Mountain Golf Resort. Let's just say my A-game was nowhere to be found, and the thick undergrowth which fills the woods along the exclusively off-camber fairways did not give back anything. Ugly, ugly, golf.

This morning I reviewed the blog log and found many new visitors, as well as the usual suspects have been stopping by to find nothing new. The four computer-free days at GMSR inspired me to try and keep it up for most of this week too, and this vacation will be short enough as it is, but I can't let you down completely. There really hasn't been too much to report. I was pretty tired on Monday. Tuesday morning, it took me almost three hours to clean and lube the bikes. We've been having lube wars around here lately (there's a visual for you). KL has decreed that Pedro's Syn Lube attracts too much dirt and leads to filthy chains, so she has been using some sort of White Lightning stuff. Before D2R2 I cleaned up everything and generously applied some Pedro's Ice Wax to the chains on both cross bikes, and that seemed to work out well. There is a downside though; since it is water-based, everything has to be totally clean before applying it. The other issues I've found is that as a cable lube, the wax has too much stiction and causes issues with shifting.

Last month I got a bunch of Shimano-branded lube syringes from Nashbar for 99 cents each. I'm not sure what the lube is, but the applicators are terrific. Lubing up the cables and pivot points on the components is a piece of cake, very easy to get the lube where you want it, and keep it off anywhere you don't. Nice. Bad news is I forgot to bring one of these with me. Not to fear, as during the same purchasing experiment, I broke my aerosol boycott and picked up two cans of Finish Line Teflon dry lube. This is what I used on the chains and components Tuesday. I'd given each bike a rare, but needed, detergent scrubbing, leaving everything bare metal. The FL lube comes out of the tube quite thin, but it doesn't foam up, nor fly out like a jet the way some aerosol lubes do. Actually, it was quite easy to liberally apply it to the chains without getting it all over the place.

Once everything was done, I tooled on over to Laconia to visit Myles at MC Cycle Sport for some new brake pads. The drivetrain felt amazing! Everything was silky smooth and quiet. Maybe if I'd done this before GMSR, I'd have made top 65 in the prologue instead of top 75... Anyway, Myles was an official bike shop for the Timberman Half Ironman tri a few weeks ago, and he'd struck some kind of deal with race sponsor Aegis. His small shop was crammed with high end bikes, both Aegis' and Felts. He had a demo felt TT bike there that looked about my size, very tempting... He fixed up my brake pads and sent me on my way, fortunately without any damage to the plastic...

I felt OK on the ride home, but clearly my legs were still pretty cooked. There's not a lot of flat road around here, and I felt fast, with a good spin on the downhills, but seated climbing was, errr, painful. This made the decision to stay off the bike and just golf yesterday easy. Today I'm not quite sure what to do. We are planning on heading over to the Nascar track in Loudon tonight to race in the New Hampshire Cycling Club training series. The race will run on the road course, with its nine turns and two hills, including the infamous high speed "bowl" turn. I've not been there to race in several years, so it should be fun. It is run as a points race, with sprints every three 1.6 mile laps, and I should have a few BOB mates there too. Today, I'm tempted to go out on the quiet local roads here for a nice, long, relaxing morning ride. I'm just not sure whether all this would be too much. I hate to pass up the opportunity to ride in this area, and what the hell, I'm on vacation. I'll just have to see how I feel when I get out there. This might also be a good day to start running, but right now it looks like that is not going to happen.

Tommorow will bring a trip back to Mass, and some more golf. The prereg list for the Haverhill crit is not filling up too fast. I hope we get a respectable turnout. The weather looks pretty good. The start of cross season keeps getting earlier and earlier, and this seems to be hurting the end of season road races. The calendar is super crowded the next two months. We want to put together another epic group ride from here up to Tripoli Road and Waterville Valley sometime soon, but finding a suitable date could prove difficult. We'll do it though. That settles it, I'm heading out to scout some routes so that we can turn the ride into a legitimate 100 miler, as the direct path only comes to about 75. Thanks for reading.