Friday, February 29, 2008

A comfy ass is a happy ass (and mine is not happy)

Having ridden a recumbent quite a bit for the last three years, I had gotten used to not having post ride pain in my sit bones. I even rode a lot of miles on my single speed last year and never had an issue with sore sit bones or, as some of my coworkers call it, "numbus junkus". That all changed on last weekend's gravel century. I started having some soreness around mile 45 that just got worse and worse until I finally had to call it a day early. I've ridden the same seat on the same bike all winter on the local trails with no issues, albeit on snow most of the time. Took a few days off the bike, and yesterday's 6 mile round trip was still making me more sore than I should be. This morning I swapped seats from my skinny tire gravel rig over to the Monkey. Ride to work was fine. Took off early to get a longer loop in before the sun went down. 14 miles later and I'm sore again. More riding on the horizon for tomorrow as I head downtown to volunteer at the Des Moines Bike Kollective. Not sure what to do at this point. I'm going to try a different pair of shorts tomorrow and see if it appears to help any. I know chamois wears out, and these are my favorite shorts, but I think that I should be able to get more than a year out of a reasonably not cheap pair of Pearl-Izumi's.

Thoughts from anyone reading this appreciated.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Commute and bikes

Rode the Monkey to work today. Felt good to finally not drive to work for a change. Even though my commutes have been short, under 9 miles each way at the old house and right at 3 miles each way from our new place, those miles start to add up over the months. Commuting is a good way for me to make sure I get some miles in each week. I also tend to ride the commutes fairly hard, which is a big difference from the long slow rides that I normally like to take, and is good for me as well. Over the last year I've mainly used my Cayne Single speed as my commute bike. Even though it's steel, it's fairly light, and it's easy enough to just hop on and go. I'm thinking that I might take the old Schwinn that I bought and turn it into a single speed commuter. It would take some weight off the bike and with the wider tires, and fenders it would be a better bike for bad weather. My other option is to donate it to the newly formed Des Moines Bike Kollective, and then buy a used Surly LHT that I've had my eyes on for the last couple of weeks. As long as one bike leaves when another one arrives, I'll probably be able to get away with that.