Spring Ahead

This is the time of the year when things change and change fast! It was just last week that I was still dealing with winter hours at my job at the bike shop, getting off early in the afternoon and going in late in the morning. Yesterday, I pulled my first nine hour shift of the season. It was just a week or so ago that Mr. 24 was still out there training and shooting video on his new digi-cam, and now he is telling stories of his first event! The nut has turned. This coming weekend, daylight savings time starts here for us. Evenings will have more light. Roadies will take to the county roads for the traditional Tuesday and Thursday night training rides. Off we go again! Busy as bees with no time to get things done like we want.

Part of the wake up call for Jeff, Carl, and I is the shop's annual spring sale which starts today. Crazy! Repairs start coming in. People start getting tense. People taking in jobs get too "promise happy", and cause me grief. Work speeds up a notch......no, make that three notches! Did I mention that people start getting tense?

On a much more fun note: I took delivery of my On One Inbred 29"er fork yesterday. Wahoo! Now I can start getting more of that bike assembled. Brake order is going in today, (The rather pedestrian but effective Avid BB-7 discs) along with an order for compressionless housings. Still up in the air about handlebars as some of the ones I'm interested in are on back order or out of stock. Drat! At any rate, I'll be getting some build progress pictures up soon! ( Anybody out there got any Jones H-Bars they want to part with, by chance?)

Something that I'm interested in finding out about is how crank length is going to affect my single speeding capabilities on my 29"ers. Here are the specifics. First, I currently am running 177.5mm Cooks cranks with a 37 X 20 ratio on Bontrager 2.2 X29" tires. I am going to be running 180mm cranks on the Inbred. I also have 170mm cranks that I can swap out to for another comparison. Here's what I'm thinking of doing. I could quite easily set up the three cranksets with the same size rings, use the same freewheel out back, and the same wheelset. I then could use the different cranks on a training route, and possibly guage the difference in effort, and see how my legs and body get along with the differing crank lengths. Sound crazy? I'm thinking this might be fun, so let me know if that's an interesting thing or not.

That's today's post for ya! I hope it's spring already where you are and that your out riding more. Enjoy it while you can!