The Moose Mitts Cometh.

The Moose Mitts showed up on Wednesday. Lucky for me the mail was running early, and my lunch hour ended up running late, which meant I was able to get the road mitts on the Bianchi and take them out for a test ride.

Getting them on the bike was easy. They included a sheet with pictures/instructions, so it wasn't like I had to do any guessing. As you can see from the pictures, these things are pretty big. Despite the semi-conical shape, I don't think they're increasing my aerodynamics or anything like that. Really though, all I ask of them is that they keep my hands warm.

It was a pretty great day for a test ride. Temps were somewhere near 28°, and the winds were between 10-15mph. On a day like that, my fingers would be pretty numb after a short time, regardless of whether I was wearing my OR Grippers with liners or the Endura lobster mittens I picked up on Chainlove over the summer. Especially on the downhill stretches.

With this in mind, I grabbed the Grippers and threw the liners in the pocket of the jacket, just in case the mitts weren't as awesome as they were supposed to be, or even if it was just too cold and windy to expect them to do all of the work.

The mitts themselves are pretty unobstrusive. They don't get in the way of normal hand postioning, whether on the hoods or in the drops. There's plenty of room to move around in there, which also explains why they look so massive. I feel like my bike looks like some sort of old Battlestar Galactica spacecraft (the old series, not the new one).

The first real test was a nice downhill stretch about a mile from my house. I usually get up to around 42mph on the way down, and with temps in the upper 20s, that would mean some pretty frigid hands. Not today. I didn't feel a thing on the way down the hill.

Or any other hills. Or on any flats. My hands stayed toasty warm. In fact, by the time I got home, they were sweating. I could have just worn the liners (which stayed in my pocket) and left the gloves at home. That's probably what I'll end up doing from now on.

To sum up, these were worth every penny. Super-warm; warmer than I could ever have imagined. Easy to move around in; switching hand positions didn't require any extra effort, and the mitts weren't a distraction. Did I mention that these things are super-warm?

Still have to try out the MTB version. I was supposed to get out this afternoon, but neither Brian or I could get it together to make it to Frick. Soon enough.

Dancing with myself.

Sitting in a coffee shop, supposedly working on some freelance. All by myself with the laptop and headphones. It feels like I haven't done this in roughly ten years or so. Heather really wanted to come with me, and I'd have been happy to have her here, but she can't stay up as late as me, and I really needed to get out of the house.

Working from home is great, but after awhile I just need to get away. Especially if I still have to sit and do some work in the evening. If I'm going to keep staring at a computer screen, it's nice to at least switch up the surroundings a little bit.

Riding at lunch isn't the same thing as getting away from the house, either. That's getting away, but it's a different thing. That's getting away and clearing the head of work, but it's not like I'm thinking about how I'm away from the house while I'm riding. I'm thinking about riding. I wish I was riding right now, actually.

December hasn't been much of a month so far, in regards to riding the bike. I think I've been out maybe five times. In fifteen days! What's up with that? Sure, one of those days was the Punk Bike Enduro, but I'm really, seriously itching to get out on the roads and go for a really nice long ride.

It'd be nice if I could do that on Saturday, but Verizon's coming to install FIOS, and they're supposed to show up anywhere between 8:00 and 12:00, and they say installation can take up to four hours.

With our luck, they'll show up at 12:30, while I've been sitting around waiting all morning for them. And then the day will be shot. At least in terms of riding.

If the weather's nice on Sunday, Brian and I are supposed to head over to Frick in the afternoon. Really looking forward to that. The Combi is so sparkly clean right now, but I'd love to get back out on some trails that I know. And hope that Brian doesn't insist on going up Iron Grate. That is craziness. Seriously.

With any luck my moose mitts will show up in the next few days and I can try them out on Sunday. I'm really looking forward to having a good solution for cold hands, but I do worry a little bit about feeling claustrophobic, or that my hands are locked to the handlebars. Full review will be posted once they've been tested.

Okay. Back to work. I think this place is only open for another forty minutes or so.

The Dirty Duo and the PBE

It was a pretty good weekend on the cycling front.

Saturday morning, I met Jon Conley down at the bike rental place on the jail trail. The idea was for us to head out and hit all of the Dirty Dozen hills, since neither of us were able to make it last weekend.

The weather yesterday was definitely not as favorable as it was the day of the actual event. We headed through town with cloudy skies, temps in the low 30s, and light snowfall. A far cry from mid-40s and sunny.

For whatever reason, there was tons of traffic heading through town. A taxi pulled out right in front of me on Smallman in the Strip District. My knee-jerk reaction to flip off the driver was foiled by the fact that I was wearing my lobster gloves.

When you only have three fingers on the entire glove, the whole middle finger thing loses some of its effect. Probably for the best. Flipping people off isn't very nice, even if they did see you coming and decided to pull out in front of you anyway.

The ride up Center was no problem, and Ravine wasn't too bad, either, but by the time we got to the top, the snow was coming down a little bit harder and the roads were getting pretty wet. I felt my rear wheel start to slip in a few places as I neared the top of Ravine.

Jon's feet were freezing, too. With those things in consideration, and taking into account that Berryhill would be cold, wet, and mossy, we decided to call it a day. We head back down Ravine and back into town. So much for completing the Dirty Dozen.

I probably wouldn't have made it through all thirteen hills anyway. Aside from the cold and wet, my left knee was giving me considerable grief by the time I made it home. Most likely because I has basically taken a week and a half off from riding while waiting for my finger to heal. I really should have at least been riding on the trainer in the basement.

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Today, Robbie Sedgewick and I headed out for the Twentieth Annual Dirt Rag Punk Bike Enduro, held in Emmerling Park, over in Indianola. It's an eleven stage race/event, with most stages punctuated by beer breaks. Alas, I forgot to bring an extra vessel and was unable to partake.

The riding portions of the day were pretty good. Muddy. Extremely muddy. With huge puddles all over the place. Still, it was fun riding, and I'm sure the bikes enjoy getting caked with mud, even as the derailleurs became so clogged that they were simply no longer able to function (Robbie's single-speed didn't have that issue).

I'd never been to Emmerling before, but apparently lots of motocross racing happens on those trails, so there were some pretty deeply rutted sections that were fairly ridiculous to try to ride through.

There were a number of sections where I had to walk the bike through an area like that, try to get back on and clipped in (with pedals and cleats also enrobed in mud), pedal a few strokes and then run into another rutted section. Either that, or there'd be a big log in the way, and I'd have no momentum to even consider trying to ride over it.

A good time, though. I'm glad I went, and I'm glad that Robbie was able to go, since there weren't too many other people who were there that either of us knew. I'd have to say that I'd have rather done more riding that standing around at beer breaks, but that's a big part of the whole thing, so I'm not asking for any changes or anything like that. If I go next year, I'll have to remember a vessel.

Dirty Doesn't

*Sigh*

So today was the Dirty Dozen and... I didn't ride. I wanted to, and the weather was perfect, and I trained for the last few months and got to know all of the hills (some better than others, but I still covered them all). So I was all ready. But then I went and messed up the middle finger on my right hand.

This past Sunday night, I decided to swap cranksets on the Bianchi. I picked up an Ultegra compact on eBay for a pretty great price. Brian was going to help me with it, but I wanted to get it on there before the ride and the instructions looked pretty straightforward (mind you, I've not done much mechanic-ing on my bikes up to this point), so I picked up a bottom bracket tool at Pro Bikes and got to work.

The swap itself was ridiculously easy. As I mentioned, the directions were pretty clear, so everything went off without a hitch. And then I realized that I had left the pedals on the old crankset. Which meant I'd have to wrench them out of there without being able to use the bike for leverage.

That didn't work out so well. I was working the drive side pedal loose, and all of a sudden (and way more quickly than I was prepared to handle) it did, in fact, come loose. The whole crank set sort of spun around with the crank arm and one of the teeth on the big ring jammed itself into my middle finger, right at the first knuckle.

One good thing is that it didn't hurt at all. Either that or, I was so focused on getting out of the garage and back into the basement to start trying to get the grease out of the wound that the pain was the furthest thing from my mind. Who knows. I don't remember any pain, and that's all that matters, right?

After scrubbing it for awhile and not being sure if I was doing a great job, I called up to Heather to come down and lend a hand. She could tell I had some trouble from the trail of blood that led from the garage door to the stationary tub. I asked her to go get a pair of scissors so that we could cut off the little flap of skin on top of my finger and see how clean everything looked.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a little flap of skin. It was the rest of my finger. The tooth had dug in at a deep enough angle it was pretty much just a puncture wound. I can't imagine it was all that far from the bone.

We got it cleaned out as best we could and headed over to my parents' house to get my mom's opinion (she's a nurse). She said it looked like we had done a pretty good job of getting everything out of there, but I made a doctor's appointment the next morning (my mom sent me to school with a broken collarbone when I was in high school, so if she says everything's okay, I'm still a little wary) just in case.

The doctor was also pretty satisfied that everything looked okay, but she gave me a prescription for some antibiotics anyway, AND I got a tetanus shot. All that was left to do was wait and see how long it took to heal.

And wait.

(The Finger on Tuesday)

For awhile, I really thought it might be good enough to go today, but then I realized I'd need to have gloves on all day and bear down pretty hard on the bars while climbing the hills. I figured I'd just end up tearing the whole thing open and bleeding all day.

I was pretty okay with my decision all day today, but then we ran over to the EEFC to pick up a few things. While we were driving through Squirrel Hill, we came up on big groups of cyclists heading down Beechwood.

Heather rolled down her window and asked if they had just finished the DD (it was about 4:45). They confirmed, and that's when I started feeling really bad about not being able to ride. I wish I had been out there with them. Oh well. Next year.

I just hope that the finger's in good enough shape for the Punk Bike Enduro next Sunday.

Ten of Thirteen isn't too bad.

Chris Mayhew organized a little Dirty Dozen scouting ride for Sunday morning. This was a good thing because a) Saturday was kind of gross out and I didn't feel like heading down for the WPW training ride, b) having skipped said WPW ride, I really wanted to get out and get some hills under my belt, and 3) Chris's plans were to do the whole thing, and I wanted to see if I could even make it through from start to finish.

Here are a few details:

• Eight of us started from the Oval at 10:00 AM
• The weather was great. Clear and sunny all day, with temps somewhere in the mid-to-upper 40s.
  
• Three of us (Chris, Robbie, and I) finished at the top of Flowers/Kilbourne/Tesla sometime around 1:30 or so.
  
• The five that peeled off at varying points in time did so of their own volition, not because of mechanicals or anything like that.
  
• In the time between, we climbed ten of the thirteen hills on the DD route.
  
• We skipped Canton, Boustead, and Barry/Holt/Eleanor.
  

All in all, I'd say I felt pretty good. I was still on my bike when I got to the top of each hill. I wasn't flying, but I wasn't puking, either. I was slightly disappointed that we skipped out on Canton, just because I still haven't tried it yet, but I'll just have to make sure I get myself over there this coming weekend.

At some point I need to swap a 12-27 cassette from the Portland to the Bianchi. I've been doing fine with the 12-25, but those two teeth might make a little bit of a difference.

Murrysville Cyclocross 2009

Finally got my first cyclocross race under my belt. The weather was pretty much perfect. Almost a full day's worth of rain on Friday, with showers tapering off about fifteen minutes before the start of the race left the course sufficiently saturated and ready to be turned from grass to mud. Temps were hovering somewhere near 60.

Heather and her dad came along to watch, and we got there somewhere around 9:20. That gave me plenty of time to get a lap around the course to get a feel for how things would be. It wasn't too hard to imagine that things would be muddy.

Morningside Velo at the starting line. L-R Robbie Sedgewick, Alex Braunstein, Brian Janaszek, Me

I was fortunate to get a spot in the first row before the race started, and once they set us off, I was in fourth or fifth place and a gap was already forming between us and the rest of the pack. There were maybe two other people close behind me: some guy I didn't know, and Brian.

When we got to the first run-up, Brian passed me. Somewhere not too far after that, the other guy passed me, too. Before the end of the first lap, though, I had managed to pull back in front of Mr. Unknown. Brian was still in front of me, hanging pretty close to some other guy.

By the end of the second lap, the guy behind me was pretty far back, and the rest of the group was nowhere in sight. I wasn't too far from Brian and the guy he was battling, but I knew that I didn't have the legs to catch up with them.

Me, shortly before eating it on the last lap.

On the fourth and final lap, I guess I had built up enough distance between me and my closest trailer that when I wiped out on one of the switchbacks and dropped my chain, I was able to stop and get everything back to where it needed to be without any threat of being passed.

I ended up finishing 6th in a field of 26. That was way better than I would ever have expected. I might not make it out for another race this season (I screwed up and made other plans before realizing there was another race tomorrow), which really stinks, but it was lots of fun and great incentive to try and get to more races next season.

The Portland: post-race, pre-bath.

Up next: Dirty Dozen.

*Sigh*. Postponed.

Hmm. The start of my cyclocross racing career is still on hold. Pro Bikes didn't have a middle ring, but I didn't find out until I called on Friday to see if there was any news. It's on its way, but won't be in until next week.

If I had been smart, I'd have called Wednesday morning to see if they had one in stock and then started calling around to other bikes shops. Alas, I was not smart, so now I have to wait.

I'll probably get out on the MTB for a while tomorrow morning. The tentative plan is to meet Jon at Riverview Park and see what that's like. He's spoken highly of it, so I'm looking forward to riding in a new place.