Gear Talk #2

Today is the turn of the bikes. The second leg of triathlon is the bike leg, and over the last 20 odd years bikes have evolved in many aspects to arrive to what we know today as the tri specific bike, or flying machine. There isn’t a perfect tri bike, although my heart is with the Canadian born Cervelos. The theory suggests that the tri bike geometry and setting allows for a good aerodynamic position, which will economize effort that we later will use for running. What we’re looking at is, distance between seat and handlebars, seat post angle, and head set length. They all need to be supportive of our back and core so we don’t cramp up any muscles. About 75% of any triathlon field will be sporting these nice ox’s for their second legs.

My first triathlon I did on a borrowed road bike, the second, third and fourth one I did on my own aluminium road bike, which was also known as treka. Later on, I bought a full carbon bike and that lasted for a year until the frame cracked on a fall. We went together for many miles of training, and a couple of half iroman among other things and overall I many good memories of them both.

The replacement frame is my current bike, an Avanti Quantum 2, nice and stiff full carbon road bike. It is a great bike to do club racing and general road riding, but as soon as I want to go onto a more aerodynamic position trouble starts, because the geometry allows only for a small change. I went to Worlds last year on it, and it was a bit of a problem, but not much different than having a niggle during your run.

The “downside” of the tri bikes is that they can some times be very very pricy. I am still working my head around on how to get hold of a tri bike that will help me to save 3 minutes on the 40km bike leg in Budapest, it’s about 3000 New Zealand Dollars, that one grand a minute, funny, aye?

So far the above reasoning has kept me honest to the reason I race for, and what is important and what is not when deciding how to allocate my pennies. Don’t get me wrong, I love riding, and I’d lover to have a tri bike, but at this point all I can do is to talk about it, ha ha ha.

 

Today it was back to a tuesday indoor training session close to home, we usually do a lil' run off the bike, more to come on that soon.

 

Date: 11 May

Sport: Bike /// Run

Time: 60min /// 14min

Dist: n/a /// 3km and a bit

Comment: I forgot how much I could sweat, awful sight : )