Pummelled

Last night I dragged my fat ass out onto the road for my first group ride in almost 2 years. They haven't gotten any easier, and I got my ass handed to me.

There was a good group of 11 riders, which is always fun. We started out heading North into the wind, and I could tell within 25 minutes of riding that my great idea to build a road bike that mimicked my track sprinting position was not going to go well. I was way too far over the bottom bracket and my knees and quads were screaming at me (more on that at the end of this post).

I got a flat about an hour into the ride and ended up with a group of 4 trying to chase back onto the rest of the pack. Matt and Slick (who was on a freakin' Poprad) popped me off the back on a couple of the climbs, but I didn't do nearly as poorly and I imagined I would. Hopefully everyone else was hurting, too. I, unfortunately, had to endure the shame of being the first one to crack. Even Franz dropped me once, and he's got 17.4% body fat. Sad.

We ended up unkowingly taking a different route than the rest of the group and were still trying to catch them, so we did about 2 hours of tempo riding. Not my tempo, mind you. The tempo of skinny Cat 1/2 roadies. Ouch.

I'm pretty sure I offended Doc. To be fair, I was only repeating some vulgar phrases that someone else had said, but I forgot he's such a square. Oops. Anyway, after that, I let a gap open up and he had to close it. I'm kind of a dick.

OK, so back to my bike situation. I'm getting rid of the fucker. I still don't like the SRAM components and the fit doesn't work for rides of any appreciable length. Plus, the super-stiff frame beats the shit out of me.

I'm leaning toward a Giant TCR Advanced 3, but I'm open to other suggestions. I was originally going to buy the frame only, but I want to switch back to Shimano components, so I'll likely buy the complete bike.

Which brings me to my current bike. What do I do with it? I can't really sell it as-is, because who the hell wants a tri frame set up like a road bike? I could put aerobars on it and sell it as a tri bike, but the SRAM bar-end shifters are expensive, and I'm not sure I would get my money back out of it. I could keep it, but I doubt I'd ride it very much. Hmmm...