About four pedal strokes

That's how long it took me to decide that riding Monday was a bad idea. More rest was needed. I don't think it was just Foxboro that kicked my ass. The past few weeks, although my total training hours haven't been all that high, the consistency of effort has been there. Friday night I did a lot of jumping, bounding, squatting stuff in the gym, and was pretty wasted within an hour. Saturday I braved the 20 degree temps and put in two hours out on the road, followed by the requisite 5k runoff. All of this, capped by the 10 mile race and 3 miles of warmup/cooldown Sunday, and very few full rest days recently added up and even though Monday was a day off work, it was a day off workouts too.

Instead I got some work done on my bikes. Anyone who has been doing their own work for a number of years knows what this means - hours spent rummaging around looking for shit and organizing parts, wondering where the hell all your short stack crank bolts went, hunting for that elusive chainring, and marveling at the stuff you bought years ago and forgot you had, along with about forty-five minutes of actually working on your bike. OK, maybe I got a bit more done than that, but you get the idea. At least I know Gewilli does.

The end result was I got the 56x17/170 cranks on the "track" bike swapped out to a 53x19/175 combo. Kind of a big jump down in gearing, but the chain was low miles and I did not feel like breaking it. The frame is just my old Rossin road frame, so even though it has old school horizontal dropouts, the adjustment range is pretty limited. I did not have an 18 cog. I had everything from 13 to 17 in 3/32, and then a 19, 20, and 21 in 1/8. Luckily the chain that was on there was a 1/8. Sure, all my rings are 3/32, but that works fine with the wide chain, trust me. With the 56x17 on there, the axle was pretty far forward in the dropouts, far enough in fact that when I put the 19 on, it just did not have enough bite for me to be comfortable with. And I'm a hack, so you can imagine. I had to swap the crank anyway, so after finding another set of short stack bolts (I found four Campy and four cheap aluminum BMX ones. I vaguely remember snapping one of those in the past. Not sure where the 5th Campy one went, but I went with the 4 + 1 combo, thus not needing to disassemble the 170/56, just in case I ever make it up to the track this summer. Are you following this?), then it was a quest to find my 54 Campy chainring. I have a lot of chainrings, and for the most part I'm pretty organized. Yet I can't find my 54 Campy. Eventually it turns up on the old TT bike, ugghh, too much work to take it off, I have a nice low miles 53 here, that will do. On it goes, and low and behold, I get good chain tension with a few mm of dropout slot to spare.

Will 53x19 be too easy for the rollers? Who cares? Spinning was easy with the 170s, but cranking fast was too much effort for my easy days. A quick trip to the gear chart reveals 90 rpm with be almost 32 kph. That won't be too easy. So there's one nice thing about a fixed gear that I'll admit to: you don't need a cadence meter if you have a speed sensor. I rigged one up, nice and easy front wheel setup, which is what is cool about rollers. Now I'm good to go. I even tested the setup... for about four pedal strokes. Thanks for reading.