Wednesday 24 December 2008

Dyslexics of The World, Untie!

When you want to build a wheel, it pays to realize that 287mm spokes are not the same thing as 278mm spokes. I got through all of the outbound lacing before the "zoinks, Scoob, somethin' ain't right here" moment. Normally, about the time you are finishing the outbounds, threading the nipples onto the spokes gets real challenging and I resort to the 'drop the nipple in the hole and then tweak the spoke into the nipple' routine. Well when you add an extra 10mm to the spokes, that really just isn't necessary. Nor is continuing with the build. Rerun the spokes calculator program and, alas - 278, not 287. Dummy.

In light of this situation, I have no idea how the new Powertap Pro+ works. It sure looks neato as all getout. No wires is cool. The head works on HRM mode when you aren't using the hub, so I guess you can download your HR profile from races where you don't use the PT hub. Having no bike mounted pick up, it doesn't work as a cycle computer without the hub. You can buy a separate sensor for that, but what's the use? Not using the PT almost definitely means you were racing, which means you know how long the course is and you know from the HR thing how long it took, so that pretty much does it, n'est ce pas? It's a LOT lighter than the old Pro, but still kind of a brick. The HR monitor takes kind of a long time to zone in on your strap and give a reading, which I guess is due to all the 2.4 coding nonsense.

Pretty hectic at work the next few weeks as we deliver this building on time, even with the flood. It's going to be cool to be done with it. This will be the first thing I've built that I will ever spend the night in. Definitely going full scale dinner and booze up plus spa treatment and night in the hotel when it's all over. Hopefully the restaurant operation fires up and starts doing test seatings while I'm still here on a daily basis. Frites and cheese are sure to fuel the mammoth workouts. Once the little retail shop opens up, all you hounds of Belgian beer in Alexandria will have a place to call home. Someone ought to hit the joint up to sponsor a CX race, right?

Surprisingly, training is going pretty well through all of this shite. My prescribed workouts have shall we say a contained volume level at this point - certainly nothing like Nate's epic quests of 13 hours on the rollers at 376 watts. Get on, get warm, get sweaty, get off. All of the lifting I've done for the past several months has had a pretty profound effect. The stacks of weight that I lift up are nothing short of freaky to me. Working with a trainer was actually really beneficial. Not something I feel the need to do on a continuous basis, as what I really needed him for was to teach me how to lift effectively without getting hurt, which has been accomplished, but definitely befeficial.

Four days off, then the hard, hard push to the end of the project. Probably seven days a week until the end, but that will only be like a month. After, I'll go on an overnight drunk and then go and kill the shark that ate my friend.

My wife got me an iPhone. It's mint.

2 comments:

Jim said...

Boy. That terrible is a dyslexia thing to have.

Drew Armstrong said...

The difference is that I paid somebody to build my wheels wrong...