Jeff Greene

I absolutely love Daylight Savings time!  2 more hours of daylight means getting to bike outside and not having to stay indoors on the Trainer. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Computrainer(CT), but I just love hitting the outdoors.  I was able to hit the Tobacco Trail several times after work, this first week of DST.  What an awesome place to ride!

For the past 3 months my new Cervelo has been in the garage on the CT.  I’ve put nearly 600 miles on it using the CT, so with spring in the air, I was really looking forward to getting the Cervelo out on the road for a nice long ride on Saturday.

Fast Forward to Saturday….The forecast called for perfectly sunny skies, mid 70’s, 0 wind; just a perfect day!

Our weekend workout was supposed to look like this.

     Saturday               Sunday

The following series of events that prevented us for getting any workout in on Saturday is utterly preposterous and ridiculous.

• My wife and I had a larger than normal number of errands to accomplish.  You can’t deny that it’s faster to crank out 45 mile on the trainer than it is to load up the bikes on the car and trek out to Jordan Lake for some decent cycling. My wife had just gotten her bike back from the shop the previous evening for some minor adjustments.  Keep in mind we had both purchased new bikes about 3 months ago and we have both solely used them on the trainer indoors.

This is important because when my wife went to the store, she had “Skewer A” and returned home with “Skewer B” on the back wheel. The problem here is that “Skewer B” does not fit the Trainer b/c there is no knob for the trainer to hold onto.

Sweet!! This means we HAVE TO ride outside on this perfect first day of spring. 

• So I load up all the gear, bikes, etc on the car and get ready to drive out to Jordan Lake so we can both just enjoy the day with a 45 mile bike and an easy 2 mile run cool down.  Prior to leaving, I noted that since purchasing our new bikes, we only had 1 water bottle cage each.  I then noted that I never bothered to buy spare 700c tubes for my bike(previous tri bike, 10yrs old, with 650c wheels…remember way back when).

So who cares, we’ll just do a good loop out there and park the car on the loop with extra water bottles and grab them if needed.  And spare tubes…who needs spare tubes?  I mean how often do you really get a flat tire?  So we go anyway! Awesome!

So, I grabbed this photo off a quick google search for Jordan Lake b/c I didn’t have my camera handy. Anyway we were finally out of all the traffic in Raleigh, pulled off on the side of the road and READY TO ROLL!!!

• Like I said, READY TO ROLL!!  The only problem here was that my back wheel was not READY TO ROLL.  It wouldn’t roll at all.  What the heck!  I’ve been riding this bike on the trainer for nearly 600 miles in the past 3 months and now it just doesn’t even roll.  After closer inspection I can see that the tire is actually rubbing up against the curved part of the frame.  See below how there is a uniform amount of daylight between the tire and frame.  This was not the case when we were at above location.

If you take off the wheel, you will see 2 little tiny screws protruding from the bottom bracket in the direction of the arrow by the “VROOMEN”. Just back out these screws a bit, to fix the problem.  That’s easy If I would have bothered to bring a screwdriver to Jordan Lake.  I have no idea how this happened since I just rode the bike the other day on the trainer. 

• Ok, so scratch the long ride for today, but we can still get in a quick run while out at Jordan Lake.  That is if I had bothered to bring a lock for the bikes so they would be secure while we were out.

So there you go…Saturday end up being our Rest Day for the week.  In the end we went back to Inside Out Sports(Cary) to retrieve the skewer for my wife’s bike, get some 700c tubes, and get my back wheel spinning again.  How ridiculous is all that?  All you can do is laugh.  Next time we’ll be more prepared.

Tip: Just get all of your stuff ready to go the night before.  All your gear, water bottles, bike pump, tubes, etc.  You want to enjoy the long rides.  The best way to do that is to start out the morning with everything ready.

Today is Sunday and we’re going for a long run…….

Note: Sometimes if you follow the above tip, it just doesn’t matter.  Sometimes all the preparation in the world won’t make a difference if you are absent minded….so I just laugh it off and move on….

So with Saturday’s fiasco behind us, today’s workout calls for a 7 mile easy pace run over at Umstead State Park.

You may be asking yourself why would you start your run at Umstead, and just run around Harrison Ave by the shopping center.  Well as it would turn out through a series of unfortunate events that I would lock my keys as well as my wife’s keys in the car….CRAP!!! Yep, wallet, phone, keys, all in the car.  So I ended up having to jog over to the Kangaroo store to call AAA.  A nice African guy there was happy to lend me his cell phone.  I was very thankful for nice folks like him.  Anyway AAA was out there about an hour later to unlock the door, which took them all of 30 seconds.  The downside was that we had to skip the run b/c of lack of time and head over to the pool for a 3000yd swim.

The one good part of the weekend was that I was able to do a test swim with my new wetsuit that I got earlier in the week.  The new wetsuit rocks!  In the fullsuit I was absolutely faster than my old sleeveless wetsuit.  I swam 3000yds in 53min, and didn’t even feel like I had done anything.  More on the wetsuit in a later post.  Oh yeah, I even managed to forget my swimsuit.  Good thing this was just a test swim in the wetsuit.