Le Tour De France - Both of Them

Pro TDF: This years Tour has been the most exciting in the last 5 years! Especially when I checked the news in the morning and found out that Phonak's Floyd Landis was now in 3rd place overall!!!

With the playing field somehow leveled (no dopers maybe???) it seems like much more riders are in the action for the podium. After yesterday's painful ride by Floyd Landis, I honestly felt that there was absolutely NO WAY for him to even get close to the podium.

But that was where my rational thinking ended and his dream began. According to the reports, he felt as if he really let his team down and because of this, he decided to attack very early in today's stage. Axel Merckx, his teammate, told him not to give up and to attack! So on the first big climb today, that is exactly what he did. Being so early in the race, the main contenders figured they would give him a chance to fry himself thinking that it was a suicide move. But little did they know that it was going to be a special day for Floyd.

As you may have noticed, Floyd was riding with a Powertap since they need to actually ADD weight to his bike since it is under the UCI minimum weight. According to one of his coaches who can get the power data via telemetery, he put out about 330+ on the first climb, then about 360+ on the second, then about 390ish on the third, and probably about the same on the forth climb. Unreal!!!

In my own little personal tdf, I did my same 3x1 intervals on Tantalus yesterday and put out a measly 289 watts during the 3' on intervals. But, at least that was better than last week when I put out 282 during the 3' on portions. Yesterdays wattage averaged out to about 268 for the entire climb and a time of 25'13", about 40 seconds faster than last week. Kind of really puts the pro's wattage into perspective considering the wattage AND distance AND vertical their doing...Wow!

In my second hilly stage, today, I did 3 loops of Tripler at a easy recovery climbing pace...considering yesterdays Tantalus stage, I didn't want to burn any matches today :-)

Bike Loot and Tantalus

Here's the latest BIKE LOOT that I've got:

4 My TT Bike:

*Shimano Dura Ace 10 Barcons

*Shimano Dura Ace 10 11-23 Cassette (for flatish races)

*Shimano Brake Pad Inserts

4 My Road Bike:

*Shimano Dura Ace 10 Front Deraillure (Old 9 speed to TT Bike)

*Shimano Brake Pad Inserts

*Shimano 50/34 Compact Crankset (To be used for "special" races)

*Deda 215 Classic Bend Roadbar (Trying 42cm in place of my 44cm)

Slowly putting them on my bikes.


Btw, I did Tantalus this afternoon and there were a bunch of "kook" cars up there today. Please be careful when you ride up there as there are lots of crackheads and impatient dumba$$e$ (1 driving a white van - and NOT a tour van) up there nowadays. I hope they get the Manoa side open ASAP!

But on a good note, my new Ti road bike was absolutely awesome since I decided to do some medium hard big gear 3 min on, 1 min off intervals. Averaged about 280 without killing myself during the 6 on intervals and the stiffness of the new frame really helps when you are pushing a bigger gear.

New TT Machine

I've been spending this past week putting together my "new" TT bike. I'm using my old LOOK KX road frame and converting it over to a TT setup with all of my left over parts.

One big dilemma was whether to stick with 9 speed on this bike since I have a ton of 9 speed cassettes. But after considering what a pain it is to change cassettes to use my sole Powertap which is currently set up with 10 speed, I decided to bite the bullet and go with 10 on this bike too.

I actually test rode the bike this past Thursday and it feels really fast!!! Gotta love that slack 72.5 seattube angle;-)