March 9: Week 5 wrapup
Back into proper effort at the gym this week. The guy who runs the Monday strength class has started to recognize me, and give me advice to improve my technique (good) or just give me extra weights (bad).
Likewise the spin classes have raised some numbers, and it’s harder work now. In addition, the schedule calls for 20min of core strength exercises after each class. So it’s all going up a level.
I do these core strength exercises by following a video on my phone, with earphones. On Tuesday another spin class started while I was planking and stretching; if you’ve been to one of these you’ll know that they play 90bpm dance music to get everyone hyped and set the cadence. (The bpm thing is not a coincidence, 90 pedal rpm is a good default pace.) The problem is that the music gets turned up for the high-intensity sections, and the workout area in the gym has a big speaker overhead. My earphones couldn’t compete; and I missed some of the exercise changes. Keeping the difficulty level up I guess…
Lots of bike components have arrived: frame bag, handlebar bag, pannier rack, and water bottle cage. The two bags attach with velcro and I wish everything else worked this well.
The pannier rack was complicated and annoying: there were three subtly different kinds of screws, and a few assemblies which simply fall apart when loose. One screw on the lefthand side was especially uncooperative and I was a bit worried it’d got cross-threaded.
There’s also the handlebar mount for the water bottle holder. This is, on reflection, pure evil. There’s no hint of this on the packaging: but the sizing is limited to fixed increments, and changes require taking it apart. To be clear, the reason it’s pure evil is that it’s not possible to tighten it: the tension you have when you assemble it can’t be changed. So the size options are “not tight enough” or “doesn’t fit”; by design it’s simply not possible to get it tight. To make things more really annoying, the handlebars change diameter slightly so it will jiggle over to the thinner part and then flop. The cage fits the bottle really tightly, so getting it back in once it’s started to swing free with just one hand is a challenge you might call … evil. There’s no other good places to mount a waterbottle, but it’s got to go.
So I went looking for advice on less evil ways to keep hydrated, and I found George Washington had some insight: "drink is the source of all evil". Maybe it’s time to apply that to cycling?
