Déjà Vu

Today’s ride—my 100th this year—brought my mileage total to 3,100 and that’s exactly where I was on this date last year.  But let’s hope history doesn’t repeat tomorrow: on Aug. 6, 2010, I crashed and separated my shoulder.  That injury kept me off the bike for 10 days and pretty much wiped out my goal of a 5,000-mile season.

This year, reaching 5,000 miles is still possible.  That’s especially true because working from home will allow me to ride earlier in the day in September and October when I used to waste the last 45 minutes of daylight just driving back from the office.

But—and I’ll keep repeating this until I convince myself—August will be more about performance than about miles.  I have competition goals, especially the Kirke Vei Time Trial.  Yesterday I had a little setback: another broken spoke.  To say that I have fallen out of love with my Easton EA70s would be an understatement.  But to be fair, I’m probably a little too heavy for them.  Today I went back to the Mavic Aksium wheelset that came with my Raleigh.  It’s heavier but it should be stronger.  That will be fine for training, but I don’t know how I’ll like it in competition.  For what it’s worth, tonight I rode 42 solo miles on familiar, rolling roads, averaging 17.3 mph.  That’s a very normal Friday night pace; I didn’t feel like I worked harder to overcome the 315g difference in the wheelsets.  But we’ll see.  They do spin up slower.  I’m looking at my options, as ideally I would like to put the Aksiums on my Giant FCR3 where they would be a big upgrade to the no-name stock wheels.