Day 178 - Presta Valves

Thursday, AVP night. The day started with another series of early morning business calls and the arrival of the carpet fitters whose cacophony of noises and smells, hammering and gluing, challenged my senses through to lunchtime. My afternoon, while quieter and less fragrant, was no less busy and I feared greatly that I would not make the evening ride. 6:15 pm, a quarter of an hour before bike check in time, I powered down the laptop, slipped into my Lycra and made my way to the bike shed. I've now worked out that I can do the short ride to our club meeting point in around 2 minutes, so was happy I would not miss the off.

Before heading off, I also wanted to ensure I had sufficient air in my tyres. Yesterday, I received delivery of a new set of tyre pumps. Something I had not realised when making my Roubaix purchase, was that it has a totally different tyre valves to those of my Crosstrial. The Roubaix uses the Presta valve, which being much thinner than the Crosstrail's Schrader valves, which are more like those found on a car tyre, did not fit my current set of bike pumps. The differences don't stop there. Inflating the tyre with the Presta valve is far from straight forward for the novice. Luckily a visit to YouTube and terrybyclicles.com got me sorted, you have to fully unscrew the valve stop first! So in the 15 minutes from powering off, not only did I have to slip into my kit, fill my water bottle and power on the Garmin, I also had the challenge of inflating the tyres .. which I'm pleased to report, worked a treat.

Arriving at the meeting point, the Roubaix attracted a great deal of attention. The pressure was now on to perform and this the Roubaix did. I had a much better ride out than the previous Sunday, may be because I was able to ride with the peloton and take part in a few of the sprints, while if you recall, while out with the SVCC, I lost the peloton very early on. I also think I'm getting more familiar with the gearing. We cycled out to Wilmington and Honiton and 21 mile circuit, although in my hast to leave the house, I did forget to power on the Garmin, so had covered a mile or so before I realised. Most unusually on an AVP ride, we lost 3 of our number and although two went back to seek them out, fearing a puncture or a crash, they were nowhere to be found. With the delay we cut short the intended circuit and using the power of the peloton, 3-4 of us made rapid progress down the last 9 miles of lanes and main roads, at times we were powering along at just short of 30 mph on the straights, something I would never have been able to do on the Crosstrail. I also achieved a new fastest speed of 41.2 mph and brought my 10 mile time down from 37 to 35 minutes.  I'm loving my Roubaix!

Stats: 21.38 mi, 1h:31m, Avg 14.0 mph, Max 41.2 mph, 1195 kcal