Seeing RED

Sorry for the lack of posts. In addition to the normal routine of work, travel, dogs, riding, mowing the lawn on my "rest day" and other glamorous details an amateur cyclist juggles, Dave F. and I have been busy building a local training series. I'll have more of an update on the training series shortly, but we have high hopes of growing/strengthening the local racing scene. That, and once Fall rolls around . . . CX training series. Nice segue. We've gone the legit route and done it with a genuine permit and affiliation with the Onondaga Cycling Club. No sense in losing the house over a lawsuit I guess. Everyone has been very supportive, so hopefully we'll have a solid turnout.

So back to seeing Red. I recently made the proverbial leap. Our team was lucky enough to score a Grass Roots deal from SRAM, thank you Syracuse Bicycle, so that made the move fairly tough to turn down. It all showed up in red boxes with cool red bags. Installation was more or less a snap. The videos on SRAM's website made it even easier. I helped Drumroll remove is ancient Dura-ace crankset. The bearings in his crankset were literally square. Moving to Red probably bought him 10 watts. I'm sure he'll service his BB again in 10 years or so. Maybe his mojo is in my trash with his wasted BB.

Everything I've read and heard had me thinking that it would take a couple of weeks to get used to the shifting. I think I had it more or less nailed in a few minutes. It's really intuitive. For the record, I'm no genius, I still mess up shifts occasionally using Shimano. That said, the SRAM is easy to learn and far easier to use. I won't go into tons of detail because there are about 100 articles covering the benefits, but after a bunch of miles and a few races, I'm a BIG fan. I also bought a mix of SRAM for my Ridley, so that'll be going on tomorrow if I can take a half day. I'm supposed to do a Black Fly shakedown ride on the CX bike on Sunday, so I'm hoping it'll be good to go. SRAM is going to be the shinizzle on the Ridley. I'm a set of tubulars away from having no excuse for sucking.

Make the leap . . .