Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Air Caddy It Up

I apologize to all my loyal blog followers that I haven't been posting regularly, but I have been busy training for the half-marathon which is now only 17 days away!! Today I bought the Air Caddy to use for transporting my bike across the country for our trip. Apparently the company is changing specs on the Caddy due to the shipping companies concerns over the high price of fuel so the companies wanted smaller boxes. Anyway the Caddy should be here by mid-May. Also as Mike previously posted we went on our first training ride two weekends ago. It takes awhile for your ass to heal after being in the saddle for 28 miles and the first ride of the season. It was a good ride until we saw the steep hill signs and knew we would have to climb back all the fun hills we went down. Hopefully after the half is over I hope to ride 3-4 times per week (work permitting). Also, big thanks to everyone that has supported Mike and my efforts to raise money to find a cure for Juvenile Diabetes. If you haven't donated and want to there is still time left. The links to our rider pages are provided in Mike's post below. Thanks again for all your help.

TREK 520 Info

Below is a link for the spects on my new wheels.

http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/2008/road/520/520/

NEW BIKE! (Duh)

If you don't already know, the Trek 1500 is no more. I've sold it as last week I've moved on to bigger, better, slower and heavier things.

Last week after going on a ride through the Schenectady Bike Path along the beautiful Mohawk River in Upstate NY, I decided to go to a local bike shop (LBS) that I had heard about. I walked into the shop and was immediately impressed by their huge selection, the warehouse style shop was several thousand square feet filled with different types of bicyles and more so they were the brands that I love, Trek, Cannondale, Giant, etc.

After a few minutes of walking around I asked an employee if they had any touring bikes for example the Trek 520, (which I had been lusting after for months). He informed me they did have one that they got in last week. And he showed it to me. As I had done my research and knew that I was likely to best fit the 21inch frame as that is a 53.3 cm frame. To my delight they had that frame in stock. I immediately took it for a test ride.

Upon my return from the test ride, It was of course obvious that I had to have the bike. I attempted to trade in my bike for the new one, but the shop was only able to offer me $100 so I kept it (and eventually sold it the following day on Craigslist). Even so, I haggled a bit with the store employee and reached a price that was acceptable to me and bought the bike.

Since the purchase I have taken the bike out on the streets of Albany, and am loving the 700c X 32 tires as they are much thicker than the ones on the 1500. The bike is heavy steel and doesn't flex or give when I hit a pothole. The riding position is more upright and I can even comfortably use the drop handlebars. All in all it is amazing. More observations to come.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

First training ride of the sesaon

Earlier today Mitch and I went out for our first training ride this Spring. We rode from Fort Lee, NJ, near the George Washington Bridge, up to Piermont, NY and back. We rode a total of 28 miles through mostly rolling hills and some steep ones once we entered Rockland County. We were going to ride all the way to the Tappan Zee Bridge but once we started seeing those "trucks use low gear" signs we saw all over Vermont we figured since it was our first time out we shouldn't kill ourselves and turned around.