Pre-Race Rubber Ritual

Tires, tires, tires. If you ask me the tire is certainly the most important component after the frame and brakes. I'm an over-thinking, note taking, Excel crunching, relentlessly habitual offender when it comes to my tires. I always take close note of  how they do on particular genres of trail, different weather conditions, pressures, courses, ect. I track my mileage on my tires, my results with tires, my feelings towards them...their behaviors, likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses. I know everything there is to know about everything regarding my tires. I stress each race about which tires to run-fast or slow, safe or fast, gonzo or grandma. So what's with my decidophobia come race day?

It's come to my attention that 100% of the time come race day I have erred on the side of "better safe then sorry" and run my go to combo for pretty much anything any course can throw my way. For the umpteenth time I spent yesterday and today weighing the pros and cons, asking around about conditions in Ellicottville, reading over their weather history for the past week, mulling my options, ect. Once again last minute I finally made the decision to leave the Renegade home and run my  Captain/FastTrak combo. Then it hit me a few minutes ago while making my weekly tire shuffle-"You dumb ass you do this every week!"

Ellicottville tomorrow morning for my first Duathlon, the Dirty Duathlon. I'm pretty excited. My teammate Doug's gonna have some extra fast for breakfast and rip out the run portion, then I get to shred a couple laps with my mtb on a glorious course to finish it out for us. Hopefully we'll do pretty well. It's kind of funny...two mtber's showing up at a Duathlon on the same team...but hey, we should do twice as well on the mtb part right?!?!

Garmin Edge Meets Rock

Yesterday I was riding to my trails when out of nowhere a rock was thrown up by a truck, ricocheted off of my helmet's chin guard, and then struck my Garmin Edge with so much force that it actually cracked the screen. The Edges, especially this particular model-the old skule 305-are freakishly durable as i've experienced first hand while taking this one to hell and back, so I could not be more surprised by the damage that was done. Just glad I was wearing my helmet or else that crack would probably be on my face!

After everything we've been through together it certainly doesn't owe me anything-it spent about 20 hours per week in sub freezing temps for the winter (some days it would be 100% iced over), has been dropped, smashed into trees and rocks, submerged in salt water, head butted at full speed while wrecking, heck-I even ran it over in a rock garden once...another story for another day lol.

Luckily Garmin's an excellent company to deal with, and when it comes to their repair/refurb program they seem to actually understand how vital these computers can be to the athletes that use them. They actually care about getting their customers squared away as efficiently and as cost effectively as possible (for real) so i'll just drop it in the mail this fall after my season dies down a little.

Sunny Day