You can call me Grace

Since it appears we are officially into winter, I substituted my Saturday outdoor ride with a 90 min trainer ride in the garage. We don't have a basement in our house and we have a very large garage that we keep heated to 50 degrees in the winter. Add in a small TV and a stereo, it makes a great place for me to ride in the winter.

I brought in this month's issue of Triathlete magazine and read part of that for the first hour. Side note: If you're a triathlete and you don't get it, I would highly recommend picking up this issue. The Kona recap and articles on Chrisse Wellington and Craig Alexander are awesome! It is the perfect thing to read while on the trainer. If this issues doesn't motivate you to work a little harder, I don't know what will.

So I finished the Kona section after about an hour. I wanted to get another 30 min in, so I started a progressive interval set. I've been doing 1 min big chain ring, 1 min off, increasing the time in the big ring by 1 min up to 5. At the 5 min interval, I sit for 2 min, stand 1, sit 2, and then work back down to 1 min on, 1 off. It's a hard set that always has me dripping in sweat.

I made it to the last 2 min interval, when all of a sudden, I was falling over! Holy S%*! WTH?? I fell to the right and while I was able to get my foot unclipped, not in time to catch myself before falling. I landed on our roto tiller (the down side to being in the garage) and cut my hand, which I didn't notice at the time. I couldn't figure out how in the hell I managed to fall off a trainer. A trainer! It's not like I was on rollers!

I put my bike back up and looked for damaged. Everything seemed OK. Luckily, I landed on the roto tiller and not my bike. At least I was able to break her fall. I checked the trainer, everything looked OK, other than I was on a very uneven part of the concrete floor. Apparently, I didn't have one of the spindles locked off, a bad habit from using my trainer as a bike stand in the summer. I think the combination of loose spindle, uneven floor, climbing out of the saddle worked the spindle loose until my bike fell out. I tightened everything back down and then put the chain back on. That's when I noticed my hand was covered in blood. Chain grease is an excellent coagulant. I couldn't tell where the blood was coming from so I figured it wasn't a big deal.

I decided that was a good sign that I should be done for the day. Since I was already dirty, I made some adjustments to my bike. I dropped the front stem down about 1/2 " and re-adjusted my aero pads. I also moved my seat up and forward slightly. For some reason, my seat tube always seems to slide down, no matter how tight I get it. I think I need to start checking it before every ride. Otherwise, it eventually falls all the way down and it takes a few miles to figure out why I'm so uncomfortable! D'oh!

I'm amazed at what a difference 1/4" to 1/2" can make. I'd like to drop the bars down more, but that is going to take a little more work based on the fittings. I should probably adjust to the new position before getting any more aggressive, too. I'm still looking at getting Ultegra components for the rear but I'm on the fence. If I decide to upgrade then why spend the cash on components now? We'll see. Part of me just likes to tinker and get my hands dirty.

Today I'm running, so at least if I crash there won't be any lawn tools for me to land on. Lesson learned: keep sharp-edged objects out of the crash zone while spinning. Maybe trying out my neighbor's rollers is a bad idea...