Give to me sweet secret bliss

Last night I didn't get out on the bike until around 7:30 pm. The joys of June. Even under heavily overcast skies, the daylight shone enough for a safe ride of just under an hour. Despite my lumps, bumps, and bruises, I felt absolutely great on the bike! All the right sensations, as the pros say. The only problem was that I was only going 25 kph and the entire ride was in zones 0 and 1. No wonder it felt so sweet.

Not to worry though; I couldn't help but notice the signs of good form starting to blossom. My battered shoulder also loosened up during the ride, and a rigorous post-ride stretch seemed to help my knee out too. The impact wounds were still sore, but the tightness and clicking I'd been experiencing even prior to the MTB spills subsided a bit.

My new bottom bracket arrived yesterday too, but oddly enough there was no clicking and creaking on last night's ride. Maybe all the noise I was hearing with every pedal stroke was actually my knee... I got some new tires too, 700x23 Michelin Megamiums, which look to me to be just like the Pro Race except with a more generous allotment of tread than the skimpy and short-lived lightweights. I scored these, as well as a pair of 700x25 wire bead Conti Grand Prix for $24 each. Now I have to mount (huh-huh) them. The Pro Race were really a bitch on the Shimano rims. Contis always seem perfect, not too tight, not too loose.

GeWilli posted a link to yet another interesting blog yesterday. SlowYourRoll has some good stuff and is well written, and looks to be in the same circle of blogs as BKW, which Ge recently infiltrated. I don't put each and every blog in my links. Don't consider this a diss, I simply believe it's right, proper, and more fun to let you navigate to someone else first, see what they have, and then go from there. That way Ge can get excited that I check his page 100 times a day, even though only 50 of them are to actually check his content (I run a lot of code searches at work, and these take 2-3 minutes to go through my entire application, so it's an ideal wait time for making the blog rounds). So anyway, SlowYourRoll has a blip a few posts down from the top about how shallow drop bars are beginning to reappear in the EuroPro peloton. I'm not sure if this was the point the guy was already trying to make, but I think the shallow drops are being used because the semi-retarded turned up hoods position that started to be all the rage last year results in difficulty reaching the shifters from deep drops. The post and comments go on to extol the comfort virtues of shallow drops. My two cents on this one is that I guess the pros, with their routine seven hour days, must have some reason to like the turned up hoods. Today's integrated levers have mammoth hoods, and you can see where it would be comfy. Furthermore, if your bars are low enough (in relation to the saddle height), this position mimics a TT cowhorn or an MTB bar extension almost exactly. This could be great for climbing while standing. The low bars aspect may have been missed in SYR's commentary. With such a setup, shallow drops start to make more sense.

Personally, I don't want my hoods angled up. I don't have my bars set super low, but I do like to have to reach down a bit for the hoods when standing, as extending my arms allows better breathing and leverage than having them more bent does. I also prefer a flatter wrist position. Keep in mind that I was also one of the last converts to "anatomic" bar bend, which I'm pretty happy with now that I've given it a chance. On the shallow drops though, my opinion is a bit stronger. I grew up on Cinelli 64s, and thought people who used the deep drop 66's were crazy. Until I tried them, that is. My position (pun intended) on this is that the deeper drops are more comfortable, because they provide a more significant change in position from the tops/hoods where you do most of your riding. Nobody spends hours in the drops anyway, and I find that giving yourself a chance to reach down a bit and make an appreciable change in the angle of your back provides a nice stretch and more comfort when things slow down and you return to the tops. YMMV. Thanks for reading, and don't forget to sign up for Monson. It's a great race.