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Re: Hey, great to hear from you, Joe!

64.12.107.23

Posted by Joe Rosen on June 28, 2002 at 03:27:21

In Reply to: Hey, great to hear from you, Joe! posted by Ivan303 on June 27, 2002 at 05:59:16:

Hi Ivan,
Check out my posting times: They're just about as insane as yours...We're hacking away when the smarter inmates know better and get some shut-eye, instead!
Yeah, riding the bike. Slow start this year, I was going insane and getting all depressed. We had a really wet & cold spring, summer didn't break out until the second week of this month! Just as well, I had this incredibly WICKED case of bronchial flu that laid me out for 3 weeks! I only weigh 132lbs., so losing over 7lbs. wasn't very much fun...Imagine sleep deprivation on top of total exhaustion ON TOP of the rest of it! My sinuses were a sticky mess (both of them!), so I couldn't breathe through my nose at all, and every time I put my exhausted head down I started to choke on my own phlegm, and it hurt to cough because my bronchial passages were so raw! So I couldn't sleep, and I ran a 101 degree fever for around a week, I was just sticking to the sheets! You know that one, you wake up out of the semi-coma to discover that you've straight-jacketed yourself and can't move until you perform all the arcane manoevres that got you into this mess...in exact reverse order!
I've been over that for two weeks, and a if on cue, the weather suddenly remembered what season we're supposed to be in! And maybe even overcompensated, thank you veddy much...
Now we've got this glorious tropical heat wave thing going, its making me manic! Did my second 37.5km run tonight, half of it in the dark, in an increasing weird misty drizzle of a rain. I would hardly call it rain, the particulates were so bloody fine! More like 110% humidity, rising occasionally to 120%??? Really neat experience, on a rural 2-lane highway the whole way, not much traffic and beautiful pastoral scenery mixed with a bit of evergreen forest, too.
Got a Carbon-Fibre 5200-series Trek racer for this season, along with an Aluminum Pinarello mountain bike. I hate mountain bikes...
Almost everything else in the "fleet" is running, save my Maxam hybrid POS (needs a back rim now, more a case of what HAVEN'T I replaced on this Taiwanese Shi*mano-equipped oil-tanker of a ride? A hybrid is supposed to be half mountain bike, half road cruiser. Really, just a fat Bugger's suburban curb-jumper, not good at either thing!)and the poor old Gianni Motta (vintage bikes, anybody?) which donated many lovely old Campagnolo drivetrain bits to make the Trek come together...
That includes an ancient and rusting Torpado (25 years old now, my first real racer!) with drivetrain parts that it barely deserves (think Lada Signet with Lancia Integrale EVO drivetrain & chassis mods! Or for Americans, think BMW 2002 upgraded with a bunch of M3 mods, and then some. For bike junkies, how about Campagnolo's top tubular rim on the front, with a Clement Criterium silk tubular racing tire? Or the C-Record crank, Campy's best ever IMO, Nuovo Record shifter at the rear, utterly indestructable and ageless, Campy record hubs, Selle Italia "Rolls" saddle, just as luxurious and overweight as the name suggests! Oh, Nishiki forks, its THIRD set, and a Mavic rear rim with an ultra-skinny Continental Kevlar/Silk clincher tire, a 5-cog Maillard 700 rear derailleur, hey, it IS a 25-year old bike! Only 10 speeds! Front derailleur is the original Campy "Valentino", the alloy cage long since disintegrated and replaced with a cheapo French "Simplex" chromoly one, and the only other original parts, the Universal Model 61 centre-pull brakes! An insanely eclectic mix of parts), a Merlin titanium job with more lightening mods than is probably legal, and my tried-and-true 15-year old Pinarello "Treviso" (Columbus SL steel frame).
With all the neato hi-tech Yankee framesets, I must be just jones-ing to ride them, right?
Can't figure it, must be the vintage audio guy in me...nothing fits you like quite like a Pinarello, regardless of body type. They are typically Italian: They only look really good when they are new, the paint job is sh**, the decals fall off in the most insulting & vulgar fashion after a few seasons, the welding is indifferent and the Columbus frames and lousy paint conspire to make for a rusty bike...
And you know what? Even a rusty old Ferrari still looks and feels SPECIAL, so you learn to love the patina of age on these classic framesets. The Trek is like riding on the rims, the Merlin is amazing and very refined, like riding on glass. But the geometry isn't QUITE there, I fidget too much on the thing!
On the Pinarello, you just stretch out, relax, and FLY...
Not in shape yet, last two rides of the same distance had wildly disparate average speeds: This ride was 27.4km/hr., last ride was more downhill and the wind was on my back instead of in my face, so 33.5km/hr...
I've done this ride before on the Merlin, before I could even walk properly again after my accident. This was last summer. Wicked wind on my back, I averaged 42km/hr.! Probably could have gone faster, ran out of gears...
To think that you might end up crippled, and you love riding as much as you love audio...And you discover that hey, maybe you can't walk without a bad limp, but you can still ride like a fiend even on just 1-1/2 legs! I'm not exactly a religious person, but I was thanking god and my orthopedic surgeons who performed this miracle for me.
Ivan, I'm MANIC when the hot weater finally arrives in the Great White North! Gotta ride! GOTTA ride! So I GO! The mouth is open wide the whole time, and for once, I ain't blabbing with it! I suck in as much air as my lungs can handle without exploding, and I pedal as fast as I can without turning blue for as long as I can take it...and once I'm in decent shape, that means for at least 100kms. (160kms, or 100 miles, was more like it when I was in my late 20's and early 30's. I hope maybe to be able to do this this year, but then again, I've said that one before. But I am going to TRY).
See you all on the road, and PLAY NICE!

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Kimber Kable

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