Last week I bought and set up hosting for BicycleClimbs.com. Thanks to all that recommended hosting services – I ended up at webhost4life, and it’s been pretty painless so fair, with good tech support when I’ve needed it.

The site is a slightly-improved version of my original site – the display now includes a list of climbs (expanded), and I’ve added an RSS feed that lists the climbs, so you can find out when new ones are added.

I plan on doing dynamic generation of the pages in the future, when I get some free time to figure things out. How do you generate an XML file from within ASP.NET, anyway?

I’ve also looked at Virtual Earth, but haven’t seen an API show up yet.

Our vacation was, to put it succinctly, fabulous. Bicycle Adventures did a great job, our guides were great, and we had lots of fun. While some of their other tours require more bicycling ability, you could do the Columbia Gorge Family Tour even if you aren’t in great bike shape, as the low end is around 80 miles for the week (actually, the low end is zero miles – you can ride in the van the whole time if you’d like, but that kindof defeats the purpose of the vacation).

This is a multi-sport vacation – while you do ride 4 out of 5 days, we also got in a morning of white-water rafting, an afternoon of windsurfing, and a night of stargazing. In this tour, you stay in real accomodations (ie no camping), and eat well. This was the inaugural edition of this tour as a family tour (there’s an “adult” version with more mileage), and we were about split between adults and children, with the youngest kid being 5, and the oldest being 17. One family is from Seattle, one from Southern California, one from Houston, and another from back east.

I took my Trek, and my wife and daughter took their Burley Duet tandem. Though they took really good care of my bike, I’d consider my rain bike if I did it again, as having your pretty new bike go up and down on top of the van multiple times tends to increase your anxiety level a bit.

We drove down to Portland on Sunday and stayed at McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale, east of Portland. This hotel was originally a poor farm, and now features European-style rooms (ie there’s no bathrooom “en suite”, as they say on the continent (well, technically, I’ve never heard them say that)), and a 8 pounds of funkiness stuffed into a 5 pound bag, in the form of pubs, wine tasting, and lots of artwork.

Monday, we got picked up by the BA van, loaded some other passengers, and headed over to Washington to climb Beacon Rock. Well, to be fair, “walk up” is a better term for how we assaulted this 600 foot monster – “climb” should be reserved for those who climb the rock. Great views. We ate lunch at a nearby campground (sandwiches), and then vanned over to our first drop-off point for our ride for the day. This set up a typical pattern – ride in the van someplace, get out the bikes, ride to somewhere else, often for lunch, but not always. The ride was mostly downhill (as most of the rides were), and about 14 miles in length.  Our destination was the Flying L Ranch, our home for the next few days. After securing spousal approval, I rabbited off the front and rode most of the way to the ranch, realized that Kim and Sam would not be happy with the headwind, turned around, and went back and pulled them into town. Here’s a typical example of the views that you are subjected to on this ride:

That’s Mount Adams, one of the nicer Cascade volcanos. It used to be overshadowed by its neighbor to the west because of the startling symmetry of the neighbor, now it is still overshadowed because of the neighbor’s fiery reputation.

Adams is one of my favorite mountains. Not as big as Rainier, but very nice to look at. If you turned around at this point, you might be able to see the tip of Mount Hood peeking over the hills, if you managed not to be blown off your bicycle at that point.

The Flying L is a great place to stay – except for a couple of other guests, we had the whole ranch to ourselves, and were able to hang out, get to know each other, and relax while looking at the mountain.

That night the local astronomy club brought by two of their nice scopes, and we did some stargazing. The conditions unfortunately weren’t great – we could see Jupiter and the Galilean moons, but they were a bit fuzzy. I did see the Ring Nebula for the first time, helped out by the on-board index of deep sky objects built into the scope.

Tuesday morning, we vanned to Zoller’s Outdoor Odysseys for our rafting trip down the White Salmon River (which, due to a dam, is unfortunately devoid of its namesake), a class 3-4 river (a detail which I include to sound impressive). Zoller’s is located on the banks above the gorge, so after getting wet-suited, helmeted, and some brief instructions, we headed down about 100 steep steps to the boat. I’d never been rafting before – I swim very well, but haven’t wanted to risk losing my contacts and/or deal with the hassle of dealing with my very thick glasses – so I was wondering how things would go. After 5 minutes of instruction from our guide, we pushed off, and were in the rapids. While the forward momentum that you provide by paddling is important to the guide, the real reason that you do it is to keep your mind off of what you’re about to do. This trip does not disappoint – lots of rapids, and we lost one child overboard for about 35 seconds. Near the bottom of the run, you have the option of going over a 15′ waterfall if you’re an adult. We shuffled kids to get rafts full of adults, and headed out. You paddle hard for a few seconds, the guide says, “down and hold on”, you sit in the bottom of the raft, go over the waterfall and…

Well, things get a bit hazy at that point, but the result ends up with an enormous amount of water in the still-right-side-up boat. I’m in the middle on the left side in the pictures.

After the waterfall, there were a few more small rapids, where our guide Casey tried to toss the two fathers out of the boat (I teetered on the edge as I heard the other father fall in), and then a boring but tranquil float to the pull-out point. Highly recommended.

This brings us to one of the great features of this tour. When we’ve gone to vacation in Hawaii, after we got there, you have to decide what activities you want to do, and then pay for them individually. On this tour, however, the activities are paid for up front, so the cost doesn’t intrude into the experience. I’ve noticed the same effect with a ski pass – it hurts to pay up front, but when you actually go up, the cost doesn’t detract from the experience.

Wednesday is a transit day – we headed across the Columbia into Oregon, and on a short ride to the east to the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center. The ride is about 15 miles, with a few reasonable climbs, and a tail wind. That’s fine, until you hit it as a 20MPH sidewind. The tandem does fine, but the Trek gets really squirrely, and I need to slow down quite a bit through that section. After lunch, we head back to the hotel – the Hood River Inn – for the optional wind surfing lesson. Kim begs off because her back has been bothering her, but Sam and I go in for the three hour lesson. You start with a simulation session on the land, then you learn to do a 180 turn on the water, then you get your own rig.

At least, that’s the theory. What really happens is you do the simulator part, you do one 180 turn, and then you spend a couple of hours flirting with competence while not actually ever reaching it. This was complicated by the 20 MPH wind with gusts that differed across the course, but it’s mostly due to my lack of skills. I did, however, get really good at pulling up the sail. After a couple of hours, my shins were bruised and I lacked the motor control to go much further, though I was still quite good at the falling off part.

Lots of fun… But… I need another hobby like I need a hole in the head.

Thursday took us up onto the northern flanks of Mount Hood, for about a 20 mile ride down to lunch. After a few climbs – on an optional loop – I started the descent, with about 20 minutes at over 25MPH, and 10 minutes over 30MPH. A nice descent, but the valley we rode into was about 90 degrees, so it was a little tiring to get into lunch. And, due to unforeseen circumstances, the pool at the park was closed, so instead of playing in the pool, the kids got to ride another 20 miles. Fine for me, but everybody else was a bit toasted.

That night, the kids went with two of the guides for pizza and ice cream, and the adults to a nice restaurant in Hood river for adult food.

Friday found us up on Mount Hood for one last ride, this time a bit to the West. Another nice descent, plus an ugly (and optional) loop with about a 12% climb in it, and then lunch in the park. Afterwards, a quick stop at Multnomah falls, and then home.

I’m taking next week off, going on a cycling tour along the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon (well, between Oregon and Washington).

We had considered going back to Maui – which I love – but decided to go for something different this year. This is one of those “ease into it” cycling tours – the riding is really pretty minimal (15 miles/day) and you don’t camp. This does make it quite a bit pricier than versions where you camp, but considering what airfare, lodging and food cost in Hawaii, I’m sure it will be cheaper in the long run.

My wife and daughter will be on their Burley Tandem, for their first big ride of the year (they would have done the 25 mile Flying Wheels route, but softball got in the way).

Jim posted a comment on my century ride, talking about what I ate. He totalled up what I ate during that time period, and remarked on how small it was. I agree, though I get a number that’s even smaller than the one he got:

Input:
330 calories in Clif Bars
520 calories in Accelerade
250 calories bagel
55 calories Newton
250 calories pretzels
____
1400 ingested

That takes us onto the calories that I expended. The only good way to measure this is with something like a PowerTap, which is a wheel hub that measures how much force you’re putting into your back wheel. Integrate that over time, and you get power, and you can make a good estimate of how much energy you expended.

Without that – and I don’t think I’m likely to spend the money for a PowerTap or other power-measuring system, at least in the near future – you’re stuck with estimates, which suck. The number of calories you expend vary depending on the speed you’re riding, whether you’re riding in a group, whether it’s hilly, etc. I’m going to choose 500 cal/hour as a ballpark estimate. That means that for 5.5 hours, I spent:

5.5 * 500 = 2750 expended.

That doesn’t seem so different from what I ingested, though I didn’t eat my regular meals during that time (I ate less for breakfast and didn’t eat lunch), which adds something like 900 calories.

2750 + 900 = 3650 expended.

for a net of:

3650 – 1400 = 2250.

So, where did the extra come from? It came from my fat stores. I’ve been doing some reading on this – Chris Carmichael’s “Food for Fitness” (very good, by the way) and a few research studies – and it turns out that fat transport can supply a lot of calories over a long period, under two conditions.

The first is that the system is trained. The second is that there’s sufficient glucose available to keep things going. To simplify, you need a constant supply of glucose to keep your metabolism going and your brain happy – if you get low on glucose, your brain will hoard it and you performance will tank, with the dreaded “Bonk”.

Making another assumption – that I was getting approximately 80% of my energy from fat and 20% from carbohydrate, you’d expect that of the 3650 calories, 2920 came from fat and 730 from carbohydrates (okay, there’s some in there from protein, but not a large proportion).

With the exception of the Clif bars, most of what I ate is at least 75% carbohydrate, so there’s plenty of carbs to keep me going, assumming that it can get into the bloodstream quickly enough. That’s where the Accelerade helps.

At this point, I should note that I’m not an expert at these things *and* that I’ve made a ton of simplifications along the way. For example, the brain uses a fair amount of carbohydrate, but that use can be supplied by conversion from fat to carbohydrate, so the carbs that I took in didn’t need to support that part of my base metabolism, and were therefore free to be used towards the exercise.

Yesterday, I participated in my first Century of the year, a hilly 100-miler (hence the term “century”) known as the Flying Wheels Summer Century (alternately known as the “Screamin Thighs Summer Century”).

In last year’s edition, I rode by myself and finished in 6:49:22, averaging about 15 MPH.

This year, I was hoping to do better. Though I had only broken the 50 mile once this year, I had been riding hard with some faster riders, I had a new bike (“the beauty”) that was nearly 10 pounds lighter than my last bike (the rain bike, aka “the beast”).

I did the 50 mile version with a group a week ago, and then rested my legs for the week. I prepared Friday night by getting about 3 hours of sleep and arose Saturday at 6 feeling groggy, dehydrated, and a bit queasy. The almond Clif bar and 16 oz of water I had for breakfast did nothing to improve the situation, but at least I made it to the starting line with all my gear, including my shoes.

We ended up with a group of about 12 riders, and headed out. The first section of the ride (about an hour or so) takes you on two major climbs, and I wasn’t feeling much better at the first food stop. I drank a large chunk of my Accelerade, and we headed out in a paceline across the valley towards Duvall at a bit over 20 mph. I wheel-sucked mercilessly, as there was no way I was going to be doing a turn at the front the way I was feeling. By the time we got to the third climb at Stillwater hill, I was feeling okay, and I spun up it in my lowest gear (yes, buying the triple chainring was a good choice, even though it’s not quite as manly) with one of my friends. We worked our way past a detour, and then flew back downhill on the descent down Cherry Valley Road. The 19th century pavement combined with the high redneck quotient make this an exciting section, especially when there are a hundred riders on it and you’re trying to pass them, but it was better than last year, and we made it to the next water stop.

At that point, I decided I might just live, so I at half a Clif bar and mixed another bottle of Acclerade. We headed north on High Bridge Road, which is when things started to deteriorate a bit.

There’s an interesting feature of group rides. If you’ve watched racing on TV, you’ll know that the big breaks happen on the climbs, so you might expect that the climbs would break apart the groups, but nearly all groups have a “regroup at the top” policy where you wait until the group gets together. If you don’t do this, you end up without a group, as a good hill spread out the group pretty well.

It’s rolling hills that break up a group, mostly because of the way that pacelines work. The lead rider is trying to maintain a steady pace, warn the group of hazards/turns/stops, and not puke his lungs out. The second rider has an easy job – he drafts closely behind the first rider usually at around half a wheel diameter. Because the lead rider’s speed isn’t constant, he needs to adjust his speed up and down,  but that’s pretty easy to do – you pedal a bit harder, or soft pedal. It’s a cushy place to be, except that you know that in a short period of time – somewhere between 2-10 minutes – the lead rider will peel off, and you’ll put in your time.

The third rider has a harder job, as he keys off of the second rider, so instead of the small speed variations of the leader, he has the larger variations of the second rider to work with.

And so on, back through the paceline. As you get farther back, you have to make harder efforts to stay on the wheel of the rider in front of you, and you also have to be more careful not to hit the person in front of you. Ideally, you never use brakes in a paceline, but realistically, if pulling a bit to the side to slow you down (from the wind) isn’t enough, you sometimes have to feather your brakes.

Obviously, the longer the paceline, the harder it is to stay one, and we had 12 people at that point. If there’s a short climb, and your leader doesn’t drop the pace a little at the top, you’ll break off 3 or 4 people on the back. They then need to regroup and try to get back to the lead group, but 1) it’s 4 people vs 8 people at that point and 2) a couple of those people likely just finished their turn at the front.

That happened twice on the hilly part to Snohomish, as there were a few people pushing the pace (ie 23-24 mph). After the second break, our group of 3 or 4 decided not to bother chasing, and took a slightly more sedate pace into Snohomish. I pulled a section at about 20-21MPH, though it was near the airport and my wireless computer couldn’t decide whether my speed was 20, 45, or 67. We picked up a couple more people in Snohomish, and went about 20-22 into Monroe, which is a pretty good speed as it’s very flat.

This put us just a hair over halfway through the ride, and with the exception of the ominous “it’s going to rain really hard very soon” raindrops, we were doing fairly well. We took a 15 minute break, I made my last bottle of Accelerade, and we headed out. The first part of this section is flat, and we cruised at around 21MPH. Steven (one of the organizers of the group) took a turn, I took a second turn on the flat part, and then as I pulled off the front as we came to a short hill, one of the fast guys came to the front, sped things up, and the group rode both Steven and I off the back, leaving us to ride by ourselves to the next rest stop.

We were not amused.

It’s not that we were ridden off the back of the group. I don’t begrudge the fast guys their speed, and I know what it’s like to be with a group that’s riding slower than you want to. It happens to me all the time… Well, occaisionally… Okay, I read about it in a book.

So guys pulling fast at the front is not a problem. What is a problem is that there were a few people who were curiously absent from the front of the group for the whole ride. Because of the distances and times between stops, if you grab the 7th or 8th position consistently and put your effort in on hills to maintain that position, you can hang back and not do any of the hard work.

This behavior may be acceptable, depending on the group. If you have one or two riders who aren’t up to speed that day but you want to keep them in the group, the rest of the riders may not mind carrying them along. I’ve certainly done that on some of our Wednesday rides.

The underlying problem was the size of the group. If we could split our group in half, the fast guys could ride at a speed they were comfortable with, and we could ride a bit slower. Steven and I decided that it made sense to split the group, and we told people that we thought it was a good idea to break into smaller groups, and that the two of us were going to ride a bit slower.

We’d hoped that a few others would join us, but nobody did, so we headed off towards Fall City at around 19MPH, a bit faster when Steven was on the front, a bit slower when I was there. Before the final hill in Fall City, we met up with three more guys who’d decided the fast group was a bit too fast for their liking (without Steven and I keeping the speed down at the front, they’d picked up their pace), and we headed up the hill, hit the last rest stop, and ended up with 4 of us for the spin back into Redmond along East Lake Sammamish.

A great ride overall. Given that my goal was to finish in around 6 hours and I felt so bad at the beginning, a great day.

Statistics:

Distance:            100 miles
Time:                  5:34
Average Speed:  18 MPH
Elevation Gain:    5375 feet

The elevation gain at Flying Wheels is usually given as 3200′ of vertical. One of our group had a GPS with him, and he came up with 5400′ of vertical. I did the route in Topo USA, and came up with 5375′ for the course.

My guess is that this is the difference between measuring elevation gain with a barometric altimeter and a GPS or topo mapping program. My guess is that the barometric sensor is doing a lot more data smoothing, and is missing a lot of the little ups and downs.

Food:

1.5 Clif bars
56 oz Accelerade
1 bagel
1 newton
33 pretzels
70(ish) oz water

The switch to Accelerade has been a huge success. It really doesn’t have that many calories – only about 10 per ounce – but they are very easily accessible. The Accelerade gave me enough glucose to keep going, and the rest of the energy came from my fat stores.

• General comments and suggestions
• New climbs to add, both on the eastside and in Seattle and elsewhere
• Better data for maximum gradients
• Descriptions for the climbs.
• Rankings for the climbs. I currently have green, yellow, and red. I’m going to add something beyond red for climbs like the zoo, but if you think I’m off on the relative ranking of climbs, let me know.

This morning, I went on the 7 Hills of Kirkland ride. I had been planning on riding with a co-worker, but he got scared and decided to crash his bike on Thursday night so that he wouldn’t have to go. Okay, that’s not what he *claims*, but I’m pretty sure it’s the truth.

There are three options on this ride:

Those are hard rides. As a comparison, the Flying Wheels Summer Century has a similar elevation gain, but spreads it over 100 miles. I was there to ride the 40 mile version.

The day started poorly. I got up, drove to Kirkland, pulled the bike out, sat down to put on my… shoes… where are my shoes?

They’re sitting back in the kitchen.

Argh. So, once I picked up my shoes and got back, the other riders I had hoped to ride with had already left, so I did the ride solo.

What’s the ride like? Well, it’s hilly. Or, to be more correct, you spend lots of time going uphill, followed by short and fast descents, with little time going flat. The worst hills are the third one (seminary hill) and the sixth one (winery hill). As your turn onto the last pitch on Seminary hill, you can see (and hear) a lone bagpiper playing at the top of the climb. Pretty cool.

40 miles
2:32
15.8 MPH

7 Hills Elevation Profile (from Topo USA)

I took advantage of the nice April weather that we’re having in Seattle to go on a lunchtime ride. There’s a traditional Wednesday ride at Microsoft that the faster riders go on, where “faster riders” == “riders who also race”, which means they’re anywhere from pretty fast to really fast. But, with rain expected tommorrow, I decided to bring my bike in today and have a go.

The first 4 or 5 miles was fairly calm as we wound through Marymoor park and east on highway 202, and it was easy to stay on the back of the pack (drafting can save up to around 30% of your effort, though I don’t generally ride close enough to see that much benefit). But as we turned south and started climbing, the pack broke apart a bit more. I blew up a bit (ie exceeded my aerobic threshold) on the climb up 244th Avenue, but rode with another rider who was waiting for me. Turns out, however, that I was faster up the hill than he was, so after a weave through some repaving, I crested the hill and joined the rest of the group. We rode down to NE 8th, turned right, rode a bit more, and then descended down the 12% grade of Inglewood hill, ending up back on East Lake Sammamish going north. At that point, I latched on the rear wheel of another rider and held on for 7 or 8 minutes until I got dropped off the back. A regroup at the end of Eastlake, back through Marymoor, and then up 40th to the campus.

Overall, a pretty good ride. I did have to draft to stay with the group, but could do so with a little trouble. It helped a bunch that this is early season and these guys aren’t close to how fast they’ll be in 3 months or so, but my aerobic fitness is better than I expected, though I’m down quite a bit on strength.

The new bike worked pretty well, and I’ve gotten the seat adjusted to where I like it. My back and right wrist hurt a bit, which either means that I’ll need to raise the bars (or perhaps shorten the stem), or merely that my overuse injuries are showing up. The difference between the new bike and the old bike is pretty drastic – I did 28 miles on Sunday morning on the old bike, and averaged about 13.5 MPH. Today, with a bit of drafting help, I did 19 miles in around 68 minutes, which is pretty darn fast for considering there were a couple of steep hills, and I didn’t quite spin out on the downhills. So, the verdict on the bike is “great” so far. Oh, and I may have finally found a seat that my butt can tolerate well.

Two of the guys on the ride showed up of fixies – bikes that are fixed-gear. Not only do they only have a single speed, they have no freewheel, so you can’t coast – you pedal all the time, both up and down the hills. That they can ride both up and down the hills in a single gear is pretty impressive, and on the steep downhills they’ll be spinning their cranks at something like 150RPM, or even a bit faster.

I should also mention that all the other riders are really nice guys and quite tolerant at having less experienced guys along for the ride.

Last fall, I wrote a post about being an aspiring Fred, where a “Fred” is someone with more bike than rider. Apologies to anybody named “Fred” – I’m not the one who coined the term .

I had gotten tired of my LeMond Tourmalet, whose decidedly midrange components have seen better days, and whose main claim to fame is “heavy”.

I rode bikes made of steel and titanium, but it was the carbon fiber Trek that I fell in love with. It’s certainly not as live of a feel as the metallic bikes that I rode, but it doesn’t feel mushy either. Just sort of muted, a marked opposite to the Litespeed TI bike I rode (their entry-level bike, to be fair), which was a bit springy. I was either going to buy the 5000 or the 5200, the chief difference being that the 5200 comes with full Ultegra (Shimano’s second-best line of bicycle components), and that 5000 comes with some Ultegra, some 105.

My first Fred post got a comment from SeanB, where he pointed me to Trek’s ProjectOne website. On this site, you can choose a model, a paint job, and then customize parts of the bike. You can choose color, saddle, wheels, component group (to varying degrees based on the bike), seatpost, bars, etc. When you order, you can specify a stem and crank length as well.

I first test rode the 5200 in 58cm (the frame size), doing some hills outside of Greggs. I found two things – that I loved the feel, and the 58 was too small for me. They ordered in a 60, and I rode that, and it was pretty much perfect. I decided to go the project one route, did my customizing, and had them order the bike. As part of their model year switch, Trek is changing their line, and the 5200 is being replaced by the 5.2 Madone, which is just like the 5200, except it has the fin behind the seat post (for improved aero above 23 MPH, I have heard). Oh, and it’s about $150 more expensive, though that also corresponds to the change from a 9-speed cassette in the rear to the new Ultegra 10 speed cassette, so it’s not just the frame change. Coupled with the triple up front, that gives me 30 different gear combinations (brief aside – you can’t really use all 30. First of all, there’s lots of overlap, and second, if you ran the large ring on the front and the large on the back, the angle could lead to noise, wear, or even chain breakage. But more speeds gives you more chance to find the exact one you want).

The paint job is the project one “Deep South” motif – bright red with some yellow accents on. I’d considered getting “Pave Flambe”, but it was a little too muted for my taste. Notice the flowing curves of the carbon fiber frame.

The bike arrived in good condition, except that it came with a carbon seatpost (I wanted aluminum because I sometimes run a seatpost rack, and carbon seatposts don’t hold up to that), and Gregg’s had put a 2″ x 3″ silver sticker right on the bottom of the downtube. The seatpost will get re-ordered, and the sticker came off fairly easily.

Unfortunately, it’s been cold and wet here, so I haven’t been able to go on a real ride yet, but I did go out on Saturday for 5 or 6 miles. I’m not sure how fast it is, since I don’t have a computer yet, but it’s definitely faster on the flats, and felt really nice on the one hill that I threw at it.

On, and here’s a picture of “Fred” next to his bike. The shorts are normally black/silver, but the retro-reflective fabric really shows up in the flash. Oh, and what were they thinking with the blue bar tape? I can handle the saddle being blue, but blue bars on a red bike?

I took advantage of the wonderful early October weather today to do some more test riding.

I’d plannd on going to Bicycle Center of Issaquah, but today was “keep people away from our businesses” day at Issaquah, so after spending 20 minutes in traffic and 10 minutes on my bike trying to get to the store, I gave up, and drove into Seattle to Greggs at Greenlake.

After doing the usual “what are you interested in dance”, the salesman pulled out three bikes for me to ride:

• A Specialized Roubaix (Elite Triple, I’m fairly sure)
• A Trek Madone 5.2 (Treks replacement for last year’s 5200)
• A steel-framed Bianchi (apparently no bike shop has a nice Bianchi in my size to ride – this is the second shop that put me on a $1500 bike when I’m riding other bikes that are quite a bit pricier).

I rode the Roubaix first. After a short trip out and back when I re-discovered that the standard method for determining the proper seat height works poorly for me (felt like I was sitting on the seat tube), I headed out for a quick loop, up some hills. The Roubaix frame uses aluminum for most tubes, except for the fork (hard to buy a bike without a carbon fork these days), and the downtubes in the back triangle. This results in a frame that is very responsive – I could sprint very well, and it felt really good up a short hill. The problem is that the frame is pretty stiff, and – to me at least – leads to a ride that is harsh. Its not as bad as the ride of the all-aluminum bikes that I rode about 7 years ago, but it’s still enough to be objectionable. Sprinting perforance isn’t high on my list of requirements right now, so my overall rating wasn’t very high on the Roubaix. Better than my current bike, certainly, but too harsh.

I rode the Trek next. Trek is, as far as I can tell, one of the few manufacturers to bring the carbon fiber frame to the masses, and the bulk of the feedback I’ve heard has been quite positive. It is, however, about $800 more than the Roubaix, so it’s going to need to be pretty good. Unfortunately, Gregg’s only had it in a 58cm frame, and a 60 is closer to what I’ve been riding, but I took it out anyway.

I took it out on the same route as the Roubaix. It only took about a block for me to start smiling, and I continued smiling up the hill, down the hill, and then back up the hill on a different route. It’s not quite as stiff as the Roubaix was when sprinting, but the ride is incredibly good. All the low-level “road rumble” is soaked up by the frame, and the edges are taken off the harder bumps. For me, it seemed to climb about as well as the Roubaix, and I did the hill twice to see how it would do on th steeper stuff. The geometry is much quicker than the Roubaix, and while that means you have to pay more attention, it makes it more responsive, which I like.

With the exception of the price, there’s really wasn’t anything I didn’t like.

I next rode the Bianchi. It’s pretty close in the feel to my current bike, but with a harsher ride. Blech. Though the bike is only 4 pounds heavier than the Trek (22 pounds vs 18 pounds), it rides like it’s lots heavier. Though the fact it was my fourth trip up the hill may have been a factor, this time the climb was *work*, rather than fun. Given the price differential, it’s really not a fair comparison, but it did reinforce to me that I don’t want a steel frame.

So, that’s two more bikes off my “must ride list”. I’m getting a 60cm of the Trek to ride in a few weeks, and I want to ride the Giant before I make a final decision. If I do go with the Trek, I have one final decision to make. Trek has an option called “Project One” where you can, for a few $$$ more, customize a few things on your bike, including the paint job. For example, I could get a bike that looks like this:

My big surprise today was how much difference I could tell between the bikes.