An inauspicious start

After much negotiation (and an agreement to get an automatic Volvo), Jill let me get a road bike! It took me about a week to decide on what I wanted and how to outfit it, but in the end I got a Focus Variado. Much to Rob's chagrin, I actually ordered a bike online without ever having test-ridden it. But from my perspective, my lack of experience wasn't going to tell me anything in a 10 minute test-ride anyway. So late last week it was finally delivered.


It's a beautiful bike, but boy have things changed since I last rode a bike like this. Can someone tell me where the gear leavers are?!


And of course, I had to get my mascots on the bike ASAP to make sure that I was going as fast as I possibly could.


I excitedly bolted on the clipless pedals (you know, the kind you clip into...) and went on a shakedown ride on Friday evening. A nice relaxed 10K and everything seemed to work nicely.

Fast forward to this morning, my first long ride on the road bike and Adrian has a special route all lined up for the christening. We start the ride at Rob's house and I make it about 500 meters before falling over in the middle of the road. As you'd expect I was caught out by the pedals. We pulled up to an intersection and I unclipped my left foot... and promptly fell over to the right. Do'h! I was a little embarrassed but totally unhurt. I bounced back up ready to ride on. As we started back off, I felt a little out of sorts. I was working really really hard to keep up on the flat parts and Rob and Adrian would drop me on the hills in about 30 seconds. My heart rate was racing and I was sweating buckets. They on the other hand weren't even breathing hard. At first I thought my heart was just racing after the adrenaline of the fall, but we went further and further and I just couldn't catch my breath. In the end, I felt like I just wasn't going to make it 70K or 80K and aborted the ride thinking that I was coming down with something. You can see on the telemetry from that my average speed was a paltry 16.9kph which is slower than what I typically ride on the uphill bit to work with my Hybrid bike.


You can also see that even on the flat parts of the trip my heart was redlined just trying to keep up.


Even as hard as I was working it took a full hour to do just 17km. Needless to say, I was exhausted. But as I arrive home and dismounted, I noticed something odd. I tried to roll the bike without me on it and the front wheel wouldn't roll. I did a little examining and noticed that the front brake was heavily out of alignment and holding the wheel. 10 seconds of fiddling and everything rolled perfectly. It hit me then, that my problem was that I'd essentially been riding with the brakes on the whole time.

I still felt pretty bad after the exertion of the ride, so I took it easy for the rest of the day and did some light cleaning and such. But as the weather came and went and the sun got lower in the sky, the fact that I didn't complete my first ride really gnawed at me. I wondered if it'd actually been the brake or if I'd just overestimated how much better the road bike would be. So I did the only thing I could do. I strapped on my shoes and took the bike back out to run the same route I did in the morning. Lo and behold, an average speed of 27.5kph which is 5kph faster than my return home on the hybrid (which has a long stretch over 45kph in it).


Even better was that my heart rate modulated with the speed and gradient and this time I rode 20km in 43 minutes!


So in the end, it wasn't me and it wasn't really the bike either. This thing is just as fast as I dreamed it would be and I can't wait to get out on the road again next Sunday. Here's hoping no more falls.