September Morn
September’s been a dud as far as riding goes. It’s been unseasonably cold and rainy, I started the month still suffering from a summer cold, and to be honest even when the weather’s conducive I just haven’t had much desire to lay down the miles. Poop on that!
WPW Fall Rally: Morning on the Yough
WPW Fall Rally: Soutersville Train
I skipped the Pedal the Lakes century up in Mercer County due to a showery forecast and the organizers’ persistent refusal to provide GPS route data, something which has become de rigueur for everyone else.
I had the opportunity to do a 1am night-start 200k brevet, but just couldn’t motivate myself. It was a cold night, a very hilly route, I haven’t got the form, and it was Inna’s last night at home before a long trip. Having seen the weary finishers-all three of them!-I’m glad I gave it a pass.
That 200k ended at the Western PA Wheelmen’s fall rally, which I did go to (at a more respectable 9am). It was still cold and foggy, but it wasn’t dark, and I only had to pedal 35 miles instead of 135! I still went off course twice, and it was hilly enough to dissuade my lazy ass from undertaking an additional 32-mile route after lunch.
On the other hand, I saw the 200k riders finish, got to socialize with a bunch of folks, picked up the snazzy new argyley WPW jersey I’d ordered, and got a free (surplus) WPW “ride leader” tech tee and wind vest.
This month of poop gets even worse going forward, as I’m leaving to join Inna for a week in Seattle and Victoria. There goes what’s left of my late-season fitness!
Unfortunately, I could really use that fitness, because with the change of seasons comes the transition from endurance riding to obscenely steep and painful hill repeats in preparation for my first infamous Dirty Dozen ride. And if I get enough climbing in, I’m hoping to hit a quarter million feet of ascending by the end of the year. But in order to do any of that, I need to re-find my lost bikey mojo.
The sole bright spot has been new advances with my Edge 820 bike computer. First, I was able to wirelessly connect my new phone to my Di2 electronic shifters, download new firmware patches, and install those patches myself. Previously, you had to pay a bike shop to have their mechanics do all that; and even when Shimano’s hardware and firmware supported it, my old phone didn’t. Now, when Shimano introduces new functionality, I can just download and install it myself. So that’s quite a convenience.
And after posting an idea for a new data field on Garmin’s product forum, I found a guy who wrote a ConnectIQ app called AppBuilder that you can download to your bike computer and program to calculate your own data fields, which is exactly what I did. So now, in addition to the regular fields that Garmin supplies, my bike computer now displays how many feet of ascent I’ve done per mile for the current ride. That’s something I’ve been following since moving from flat Boston to hilly Pittsburgh, and having my cyclocomputer display it for the current ride is pretty darned cool.
But the reckoning is coming… DD minus 10 and a half weeks.