Hey, a deal's a deal.

A facebook friend is selling her 2008 Specialized Allez road bike. It was only ridden for one year, never crashed, and has been gathering dust in her living room since 2009. She's got the same pedals that I use (the Look-style), and is including spare tubes and tires, 6 CO2 cartridges, a bento box, etc..

All for $600. Since just the bike goes for about $800, I'm seriously considering it.

It's not that I want to replace Gary, it's just that I start getting all funny when there's a really good deal offered up. 

I'll go and test ride it, have a look at the components, and see if I either come to my senses or try to cram one more bike into my already crowded living room.

Or, should I save my pennies and get a real time trial bike?

In other news, I've been using Cytomax as my sport drink of choice for quite some time now, and it's always worked well, except lately it's started to cause considerable intestinal distress, which is a polite way of stating that it causes me to feel nauseous, fart uncontrollably (which I guess would discourage drafters), and then spend an hour on the pot cursing the day I was born.

The Accelerade looks and tastes like Windex, doesn't work very well, and gives me gas (although not as bad as the Cytomax), so that's out.

Everyone else seems to like the Hammer Perpetuem, so I got a single serving packet at REI (for $2.50! That stuff better be made with unicorn tears and all-organic glitter), and I'll try it out next longish workout.

If you're in the Southern California area and would like a 30 serving jar of Accelerade that's only had two servings taken out, let me know. I swear I haven't spit in it, farted on it, or poisoned it. Much.

UPDATE: After reviewing my financial situation and then having a good cry, I have decided that I simply don't have a half-dozen spare Benjamins to spend on a bike when I already have a perfectly good road bike. 

Beer me!

I'm not normally a beer drinker - I don't like the taste of it very much, and it's too, well, beery for me. I'd rather drink wine, sake, vodka, etc..

But a strange thing happened the other day. I was scheduled to do a 30 mile training ride, so I decided to do it on the commuter bike and make a stop at a farmer's market that's about 8 miles away from me in Culver City.

So I headed out, figuring I'd do a couple of loops on the Ballona Creek bike path, hit the market really quick as I knew what I wanted from a particular vendor (he sells seedlings for $1.50, and I needed some more tomato plants for my garden), and then book it back home.

Of course I forgot about the strong winds we have this time of year, and since the commuter bike doesn't have drop bars, I was really fighting the wind for most of the ride. On an 80 degree day, a nice brisk wind coming from the ocean should be refreshing, but in reality it was just exhausting.

When I got back home (after doing a tad under 30 miles), I had, for the first time in probably my entire life, an insatiable craving for beer. Not a heavy dark beer, either, but a light pilsner. I hiked up to the local bar, downed two glasses, and felt better.

I didn't continue to want beer and I haven't had the craving since. In fact, I'm back to thinking beer is yucky.

I've been riding in the heat for *coughcough* years and this has never happened before.

I wonder what it was?

Ah, hot tub. How I love you.

My friend, the beautiful and talented Jenna Phillips, leads an indoor Mission: Possible at the Sports Club LA.

Since I'm not a member of one of the most expensive gyms in the city, I have to beg Jenna to put me on the club's guest list for the class.

When she can, it's great. Jenna's Mission: Possible workouts are fun and extremely challenging, and afterwards I get to sit in the club's hot tub. 

While my gym is nice, they don't have a hot tub and the bathtub in my apartment is too small to get more than a third of me in there, so getting to soak my entire self in overheated water while getting a back massage is a rare treat.

I know it's bad for me, but it feels so good.

So after an ass-kicking Mission (push up tabatas. Ouch), I swam a few laps in the club's beautiful pool to get the lactic acid out of my limbs, lolled on the sun deck with the rich people, then retired to the locker room where I soaked in the glorious hot tub. 


When I started to feel like an overcooked noodle, I got out, hit the shower , then strolled over to the clubs in-house restaurant and had a happy hour pepperoni pizza (personal sized, not a giant one) and a beer. I then biked about a mile home while chanting "shut up, legs"

This morning, I'm only moderately sore, but I am feeling a little bloated from the salt.

It was worth it.

Gary's about to get a lot girlier!

Baby pink handlebar tape for the low, low price of $6, with free shipping. I love you, eBay.

The Laws of Physics

Today was a team ride, doing what's called the Amalfi Loop on the Westside.

It's a great training ride, because it's a steep hill with some switchbacks - one of which is a hairpin turn to the right on a steep hill. Said turn is excessively banked, so when one is riding it, the bike tries to veer to the left, thus requiring the rider to lean right to correct.

When I was halfway through said turn, I chose a spectacularly bad moment to reach - with my left arm - down to grab my water bottle, and, of course, started to fall over. Also of course, since I'm usually accustomed to unclipping the right foot first, that's the foot that I got unclipped first.

Unfortunately, I was falling to the left and turning to the right so not only was the wrong foot unclipped, the combination of my weight, the turn, and the angle of the hill meant that I got up close and personal with the pavement, resulting in a really nice scrape on my left knee and a chainring mark on my right calf. Like so:

Gary bit me

This was taken at the end of the ride after I had washed the blood off my shin

This resulted in high fives from my teammates, and a lecture from the well-meaning sports massage guy (who was there to give promo massages and get us all hooked) about how I should better learn to use my clipless pedals.

He really did mean well, so I just smiled, nodded and refrained from trying to tell him that the reason I fell was because the laws of physics, not because of my ineptitude with the clipless pedals.

Massage guy turned out to be very knowledgeable about vintage bicycles,and may be able to help me locate a stem bolt for Gary, since the one he currently has is stripped, making any height adjustment of the handlebars impossible.

Massage guy also gave me a discount card (and a free sample of BioFreeze), so a sports massage may be in my future.

Team in Training Blog update, week 7!

In which I wax poetic (sort of), about group workouts and how I've been a big fundraising slacker lump.

http://pages.teamintraining.org/los/malibutr11/rachelwells

Look what's arrived!

 That's right. My replacement chest strap for my HRM that Polar sent me.

My old chest strap was a long hard piece of plastic that went across the front of the chest with a thin elastic across the back. This one's softer and wider, and the transmitter snaps onto it for ease of washing and replacement.

At some point during my swim, I forgot I had it on,  it's so very nice and comfy. It lost signal right when I got in the water, but picked it back up and I never got the dreaded 00 after that.

It also came with a hard plastic something that looks like a bike mount for the wrist band. I might use it during a spin class, but God knows I've already got enough crap clipped to Gary's handlebars when I ride, so I'll be keeping the wrist band on my wrist for rides.

This is an excellent example of a company creating customer loyalty with good service. Because of this, Polar have definitely won my loyalty. Yay, Polar!

In other news, it's getting hot around here, and while it's great fun to ride along the beach bike path, I'm having a terrible time getting the sand out of Gary's chain after said beach rides. I'm going to have to switch out his cassette (I'm currently riding on whatever six gear was laying on the table at Bikerowave when I was working on Gary, but I really want to go back to a 7 speed), so when I do that I'll pull the chain off and give it a good scrubbing.

I had one of those chain washer things that Park Tool makes, but it got broken when I moved so I'm back to scrubbing the chain the old fashioned way.

Okay, fine. So I don't hate Polar. I love Polar.

Never let it be said that the squeaky wheel doesn't get greased. Or something like that.

After my bitching and moaning,  I woke up this morning to a message from a very nice rep from Polar offering me a new, improved chest strap for my HRM. It'll be here in a few days.

Now that's customer service. I'm impressed.

I hate my HRM

Several years ago, when I was shopping for a heart rate monitor, I settled on the Polar F6. Mainly for cost reasons, but also because my gym had a workout rewards program that would read that particular monitor (one year later, I got four free personal training sessions because I logged so many workouts).

It's been an annoyance from day one, though. My main issue with it is that it loses signal at least every five minutes, so when I look down to see what my heart rate is, it reads 250 bpm or something.

"Oh, that's great", I think. "My heart's going to explode. Hope I paid my life insurance bill this month."

Then, I look down a minute later and see that my heart rate  now reads 00.

"Awesome. I'm dead. But I'm still running, so that must make me a zombie. Which is kind of cool, but I don't really like brains, so what's a girl to do? Do they make zombie mojitos?"

"Oh, wait... 155. Good to know I'm not dead. Yet."

The older the Polar has gotten, the worse this losing signal thing has become, so now I'm logging workouts like this:

Duration: 1.5 hours. Max heart rate: 240. Average heart rate: 50. Calories burned: 12.

I've replaced both batteries (the one in the wrist band and the one in the chest strap), and have come to the conclusion that it just sucks and I'd love to replace it. Unfortunately, there's no money around here for a new one, so I'm just going to have to deal.

But when I do come into some funds, I want to get one of those fancy HRMs that have a GPS and can balance my checkbook for me. 

DISCLAIMER: I don't drink mojitos, but maybe I would were I a zombie. Who knows?

Did someone send around a memo?

I live near the West LA Veteran's Administration, and that's where I usually do my runs. It's got a nice hill (I hate it when I run it, but it's great for training) and a built in cheering section from the resident veterans ("you go girl!"), plus unsolicited advice on form from the peanut gallery as I wheeze by.

It's lots of fun, which is why I keep going back.

There are normally one or two folks smoking, but for some reason, yesterday was "smoke 'em if you got 'em" day at the VA. Seriously, every single person I ran by had a cigarette. I have enough trouble breathing when my heart rate's at 180 because of that damn hill. I don't need cancer sticks as an additional obstacle.

I began to wonder if there had been some sort of conference call that I'd missed or something. I ended up running on the streets around the VA, where there was less smoke, but no cheering section.

Good for the lungs, bad for the morale.