Well another build cycle comes to an end and a welcome recovery week awaits me. Spoiled by a beautiful, Spring-like weekend the week prior, this past week I was not as lucky. I ended up doing a 2 hour trainer ride on Saturday which always tests your ability to handle monotony due to a fresh dumping of snow. I probably could have gotten out if I didn’t dilly-dally so much. But the dog won out with an early walk. It must be those big brown eyes following me around all morning.
It wasn’t totally a wash though. Sunday ended up being a decent day and I had a nice 1:40 run at the Ironton Rail Trail (IRT). I really like that trail since it is mostly flat, except for the gradual climb near the kilns, and protected. Sunday afternoon became a bit of sloth-fest though and my quads were a bit tanked. I might have pushed a little bit more than usual on my run knowing it was a recovery week approaching.
The training volumes are now starting to approach the higher volumes of last years half-ironman training weeks. Hopefully the weather will coincide with those long bike and runs coming soon. Also looking forward to the long swims at Dutch Springs too.
Playing Around With New Race Wheels
My new Reynolds carbon fiber clincher wheels arrived a week ago and I finally got around to putting them together this weekend. I wasn’t in a huge rush to get these on since I haven’t been able to ride outside much. Everything started out smoothly putting the rear cassette on. I thought this would be the more complicated. The problem came with the inner tube in believe it or not. I purchased tubes with 60mm presta valves, which was the largest they had. The tip was just barely visible in the hole opening in the rim. They provide you with these black “valve extenders” which are basically useless. You have to unscrew the base valve so you can get air in them and then screw on the extenders. The problem is that when you pump air in through the extenders it just comes back out again since the valve is just open. WTF???!!!
I did some searching online and found some that said to put plumbers tape on the valve and screw extension back on. This still did nothing since the valve is just open. So ridiculous. I did find some Continental valve extensions that have you unscrew the inner valve on the original valve stem, screw in the extension and then screw the original valve into the extension. This makes a bit more sense. Why would Reynolds provide such a lame solution? They didn’t even provide any instructions with the wheels on how things should be assembled. I went to their website but that was equally void of any helpful information as well. There also wasn’t even an email or support forum to ask them a question. What great customer service! Stay tuned for a more definitive blog post on this once I get it working.
Off to recovery land!
