floyd - the truth is out there

In 2006, after Floyd Landis won a crazy mountain stage in the Tour de France (the Tour that he would win and then have taken away due to doping), I wrote a very sentimental and melodramatic post about Floyd's mountain climbing ability, and about mountain climbing in general.



Despite positive doping tests from that Tour, Floyd would deny drug use for four years. He even set up the Floyd Fairness Fund (or the longer title Fund to Fight for Fair Treatment for Floyd Landis and Advocate Advances in Best Practice in Anti-Doping in Sport. Basically - you were meant to donate to the fund to help Floyd clear his name and also help protect other athletes from every being tarnished in this way.

Well the truth is now out of the bag - Floyd has confessed, and he's saying that Lance was involved in the doping.

I don't really care about Lance. What gets me is the indignant, holier than thou, "how dare you accuse me of doping" attitude that Floyd (and McGwire and Bonds etc) put on for as long as they possibly can, until something makes them realize that it's pointless and they might as well confess. And to go so far as to set up a Floyd Fairness Fund?!? That's ridiculous. In his confession, Floyd should have also added "I would like to announce that anyone who contributed to my fund is welcome to come and punch me in the face."

It's such a shame. Those mountain stages in the Tour and other cycling races are so inspiring and dramatic. To hear - a few weeks or months or years later - that the dudes providing the drama were flat out cheating.... well... it just ruins it, doesn't it?

Last day of mini-vacation

The Trek road bike mentioned below has sold. Thanks to my buddy for selling it for me and to everyone who inquired about it. I hope the buyer enjoys many long summer rides on it.



It's mid-May and my thoughts are more about gardening right now than biking. The photo above comes at the end of a nice day here in central-Ontario - the plants and vegetables in the foreground will soon be in our garden this weekend hopefully, and the bike out in the lawn was deposited there by my wife after a "gotta ride my bike in this sunshine" outing along the lakeshore trails.



The cats spent most of the day under a bench.

babies and baby blue bikes

So I obviously haven't been blogging much these last few months. One of my reasons is this little cutie - who is now six weeks old.



The new baby and an early spring here in central Ontario has got me in a "spring cleaning" frame of mind, and one outcome of this is that I'm going to sell my road bike, and not having much time for this, I'm going to sell it through a bike-saavy friend in Toronto. Contact him at duncanvolk [at] yahoo.com.

A dozen pictures are viewable in a set over at Flicker. I'll provide a couple here though as well:



The specs are still viewable in the Trek Bike Archives. Look for the 2006 Road bikes, and then the Trek 5000. This link should get you there.

Before I forget - this is a 54cm frame.

The differences, as the pictures at Flickr will demonstrate, are these:
Wheelset - Easton Circuit
Tires - Front: Specialized Pro / Rear: Michelin Orion
Brakes - Ultegra
Front Derailleur - Dura Ace
Bar Tape - Specialized Gel tape (called S Wrap I think)

Although there is an old Selle Italia saddle on the bike in the pictures, I'm going to put the stock Bontrager saddle back on for the buyer. The Italia is my beaten up old favourite saddle.
Also - the current pedals are Time Impacts. I'd rather keep them, but if the buyer doesn't have his/her own pedal system and wants the Times, I can sell them and my cleats for an extra $30.00 bucks or so.



Here's the brief story:

I bought the bike in April 2008. It was originally owned by another central Ontario cyclist who told me he'd taken the Shimano gears off the bike and ridden it with SRAM parts. After I bought it, I had my local bike shop do various things - replaced the wheelset with Easton Circuits, which are high up in the "value" range of road wheels. They were often sold anywhere from $400 to $600.00 a set by themselves. I had the bikeshop redo the bartape for me, and at one of my visits they offered me a good price on the Dura-Ace front derailleur which is now on the bike, and I took them up on it.

That's how the bike came to be fairly differently spec'd from what you'll see on the Trek site. To my mind all these changes are upgrades - especially the wheels (and I guess the front derailleur).

The mileage is hard to guesstimate. I've had it for two summers and really only rode it maybe 10 to 12 times a summer at the most, and not being in shape anymore those would have been 30 to 60km rides at the maximum. I can't vouch for how much mileage was put onto the bike by the guy before me.... but since he rode SRAM gears, and since I changed the wheelset... any mileage put on by that guy really only refers to the frame and fork etc... not the parts which usually suffer from the most wear and tear.

There are a few reasons I'm selling, primarily:
a) at 5'7 I've always been at the low end of people who could ride 54cm frames. My previous two road bikes were both 54s, but this Trek is a bit different and a bit too big for me. As I see myself getting older and less fit, the size problem will just get worse and worse.

b) With the new baby mentioned above I don't think I'll really need a road bike for a few summers. I mainly find myself reaching for my 'cross bike these days anyway, and so I figured I'd sell while the bike is still fairly new and I could get a respectable price for it.

One more note: see post below for a review from Bicycling Magazine for the 2004 model of the Trek 5000.

Review of Trek 5000

In the post to follow, I describe my 2006 Trek 5000 road bike which is for sale. I thought I would post a review from Bicycling Magazine of the 2004 version of this bike. The 2004 I believe was the first year the Trek 5000 was produced.


-----
Tour trickledown.(bicycles)(Product/Service Evaluation).

Bicycling 45.7 (August 2004): p85. (1733 words)

Trek 5000

PRICE: $2,200 WEIGHT: 18.0 lb. (56cm w/o pedals) YAY: Smooth, feathery frame NAY: Paying more than two grand and settling for a few ho-hum Shimano 105 parts FRAME AND FORK: Trek OCLV 120 carbon fiber; fork has alloy steerer tube SIZES: 50, 52, 54, 56 (tested), 58, 60, 62cm COMPONENT HIGHLIGHTS: Shimano Ultegra shifters, cranks, rear derailleur, 105 brakes and front derailleur; Bontrager wheels, bar, stem, saddle, seatpost CONTACT: 920/478-4678; www.trekbikes.com

To appreciate the 5000, let's look at what Lance rides...and has ridden since signing with Trek in 1997. For his first two Tour wins (1999 and 2000), Armstrong used a 58cm frame identical to that of the 5000. The next year, Lance piloted what's now the 5900 SL, which uses a slightly lighter weave of carbon fiber (110 grams per square meter instead of 120 grams). The savings in weight was a mighty slim 60 grams. Last year, Lance used the new Madone which, at a weight similar to a 5900 SL, is a whisker more aerodynamic.

A frame that won two Tours and is a few gulps of water heavier than the latest and greatest? Fine by us. Frame aside, Lance wasn't riding a $2,200 rig in the Tour-his bike was decked with top-of-the-line Dura-Ace parts. To bring the price down, the 5000 gets dressed with a mix of Shimano Ultegra and 105, backed by a spread of Trek's house-brand Bontrager components, including wheels. All work without complaint, even if outclassed by the yellow-jersey winning frame.

Hop on the 5000 and enjoy the quiet, no-buzz ride that carbon-fiber frames-and Trek's decade-old OCLV models in particular-are famous for. With the requisite carbon-fiber fork up front, all-day comfort abounds, but there's still stoutness for torquing in town-line sprints. Thankfully, steering leans toward precise and stable rather than quick and twitchy-perfect for those secret, two-handed victory salutes when, alone on some back road, you're playing Armstrong.

We have a peak oil date...

When I first started this blog, I had recently seen The End of Suburbia, and I was commuting daily on a bike through Canada's auto-manufacturing heartland, and when you add these plus some other things together, you end up with a guy who couldn't help but blog endlessly about peak oil. Some of these old posts can be found here and here and here and here.

Oh yeah, and if you haven't heard the phrase "peak oil" before, try this site for some background.

So I was blogging and blogging about peak oil and except for that blip when oil prices rose for stock market reasons (as opposed to resource depletion reasons), nothing really happened. In fact... for a while now I've been wondering if advances in technology (hybrid engines for example), the recession lowering demand for oil, and general environmental awareness, would succeed in pushing back the peak oil date for many decades.

But now, in the Dec. 12-18 issue of http://www.economist.com/The Economist, Fatih Birol (chief economist of the International Energy Agency), says the date is 2020.
The reasons are not hard to find. After analysing the historical production trends of 800 individual oilfields in 2008, the IEA came to the conclusion that the decline in annual output from fields that are past their prime could average 8.6% in 2030. “Even if oil demand were to remain flat, the world would need to find more than 40m barrels per day of gross new capacity—equal to four new Saudi Arabias—just to offset this decline,” says Mr Birol.

So even if China and India DON'T acquire the North American appetite for cars (which they will), the world will need to find 4 new Saudi Arabias by 2030 just to offset the decline in production from existing oil fields.

What does this tie into? Canada's absolutely atrocious reputation at the Copenhagen Climate Talks of course! Because conventional oil is fast running out, the economic worth of Alberta's tar sands is about to skyrocket. Unfortunately getting oil from the tar sands is one of the most polluting and carbon intensive industries on earth. So, to protect the economic value of the tar sands in an era of green activism, here's what you do (if you're the federal conservative government):

a) Create a smokescreen: say that you're committed to reducing Canadian carbon emissions 20% below their 2006 levels by 2020. Sounds great until you realize that the rest of the world is talking about reducing carbon emissions by at least 20% below their 1990 levels by 2020.

b) Just say screw it and throw away most carbon reduction targets for the oil sands.

So - the age of skyrocketing oil prices is only ten years away, and Canada is moving to cash in on this phenomenon, at the cost of its international reputation and (with only a little bit of hyperbole here), the planet.

Norco Monterey SL

My wife hosted a charity garage sale at our house last weekend. That sounds innocent enough, but I discovered that hosting a garage sale means that everybody and their uncle comes by your house with crap they no longer want and you end up with your backyard and garage full of knickknacks and trinkets to try and assign prices to.



The good news is that three bikes were donated, and at the end of the day - for $20.00 - one remained with me. I now own a Norco Monterey SL. I can't really find a date for it, but it seems like it was probably made in the 1980s. If anyone can give a good date estimate for this bike, I'd be curious to hear it.



When I first spotted the bike in our garage, my first thought was "should be a singlespeed". Now that I own it and have ridden it to work twice, I've realized that the gears actually work perfectly, so I think I'll leave them alone. The wheels are also pretty good, and the bottom bracket seems pretty smooth, so all in all it is a pretty solid bike. I am going to make a few changes though.



I've ordered a new seat for the bike, and I'm going to put on some knobby cross tires. I'm going to cut and flip the handlebars as well, creating that bullhorn look. I've also ordered two new sets of pedals, and after swapping some pedals around on different bikes in the household, this Norco will eventually have the basic pedals from my Kona Dew Deluxe.

The pedals that came on this Norco were Japanese made KKT Pro Vic II. This is the second time I've had a pair of these pedals in my life - the first time when they came on an old Fleetwing bike that a Toronto cyclist named Geoffrey gave to me.

Who the hell designed these pedals? And why did companies like Norco think it was a good idea to equip their bikes with them? Wow do they ever suck. On neither side do you get a flat surface under your foot. They bulge in the middle on one side, so the ball of your foot feels like it is kind of balancing on an egg shaped marble, and on the other the edges are higher than the middle so your foot makes contact on the edges but no contact in the middle.



Anyway - I'm mostly going to leave this bike alone, but some other guys have done really cool things with Norco Montereys that they've picked up.

At some point in the future maybe I'll do something like this, or this.

Looping around Tudhope Park

It starts snowing in Orillia in early November. Heavy wet snow that is designed to break your back when you are shovelling every single morning.

I'll probably look back on this ride pretty fondly in a few months.




P.S. - the cuss word near the end wasn't uttered by me - it was the annoyed cyclist coming towards me.

The places your Jamis will go

I was recently told about a trail that runs from the end of Carlyon Line (which is north of Orillia) up to the Trent Severn waterway. Thinking it'd be fun to explore, I took a ride up it this morning with my Jamis Nova cross bike.



For any Orillia area cyclists who think they might want to try this, the above map shows where you're going. It was fine on a cross bike, but it'd be better on a mountain bike. It's about 20 km one way to the Trent-Severn waterway (from the end of Carlyon Line).

And before I get to the photos, here's a short video taken on the trail:



From the beginning to the end of the ride, here are some photos from the day's ride (if you click on the photos, you'll be taken to enlarged versions over on Flickr):



A river wandering through farmland on my journey north out of town.



Looking south and taking a picture of Carlyon Line.



Marsh about halfway up the trail to the waterway.



Liftlock on the Trent Severn - also the end of my trip. This is looking west... low water.



Looking east(ish) from the Liftlock - high water.



Part of the dusty trail - with a poor man's switchbacks.



Most of the way back down Carlyon Line heading towards Orillia - horses in the shade. Really only stopped to take the photo cause I was fighting a headwind and needed a breather. : 0



This is called the Uhthoff Trail - it always feels like it is within the city limits (this stretch is only 3km from my house) but it is just barely outside of Orillia. Still... when I've reached this point I'm pedalling easy knowing I'm almost home.



Jamis is in the backyard and I'm just about to walk into the shower with all my clothes on.