A Bad Week in Life, an OK Weekend for Cycling

Well what can I say? Bad week indeed.....my 7-month old son was hospitalized, diagnosed with Kawasaki's disease. Yes I know, wtf is that??? Well its not common but not rare as well. Its cause is still not known and there is no direct way to diagnose it....just by the prolonged fever and a couple of other symptoms. Read it up if you have kids!!! He's ok now but we are worried sick right now on that the long term effect (aftermath) of this disease will leave on his health; his heart in particular. We are going for a first scan to tomorrow (2D Echogram). Pray for us and our little boy....

Back to cycling...did a quick ride on Sat...managed to complete the usual course (about 29km) in about 64 minutes. Was really struggling to get up to speed along Changi Coast Road and tried really hard to keep at 30km/h....the aim was to do it in less that an hour! Well I failed. Only managed an average of 27.5km/h for the entire ride.

Prior to the ride I had a niggling stiff neck and weird nerve discomfort (from my butt to my right calf). I'm guessing the stiff neck is probably due to my positioning. So I did some adjustments come Sat afternoon. I did the plumb bob thing (ok I tied an earphone wire to a stapler) and find that my knee is way forward compared to the pedal axle (about an inch and a half). So I moved my seat as far back as I can to get (very close) to so-called ideal position. Thank goodness for the massive set-back avaialble on the Campy Centaur Seat Post!

Also pulled back my rear wheel position a little (about 1cm) on the horizontal dropout. This should effectively increase the wheelbase. So they say its better for long distance comfort and stability but not for speed. Hell, at this point confort is still more important!

So Sunday ride was good. I still had the pain when I started though so had to bear with it. The Banesto was leading with me trailing and on the way we passed a small group of 2 guys....one I recall on a Ti bike and the other on a BMC (prolly carbon). We were behind them on the turn to the straight Changi Coast road. They were going a leisurely 30km/h and so we decided to overtake them.....well well, you could tell the Ti guy (he was leading) was not really happy and was consistently staring at us as we passed them...at that point we were doing close to 35km/h.

Guess he was not too happy that 2 guys on old bikes passed him? Not sure cos within a minute, he raced in front of us. Well we could not be bothered anyway, didn't even look at him as he passed....who cares right? Well I did! So we trailed them for a bit and noticed they were slowing down to 32-33km/h, so we thought wtf?? well we shot through him again....and he stared again....this time we went up to 38km/h upon passing and settled at 35km/h. At this point we were slight over half way of the straight stretch. Well my stiff neck is not really helping at all and I could not maintain that speed for long, neither did my Pina friend cos we were quite zonked physically.

At 35km/h, the Ti guy sprinted passed us and we let off.....midway we tried to sprint to catch up but decided that it was too much effort given our condition. I can tell you, on a good day, minus all these aches....we would have ruined the guy's day :) A good run and very enjoyable. Hope we do battle again.

Well regarding the new setup...not bad...more comfy for sure. Leg movement seems to be less restricted. However, I'm still do wish I could bring the stem up a bit (1cm?) but the darn Shimano 600 stem is already at its limit!!