Cycling
I think I just leave this here. We have this same problem in Finland. Victims of traffic accidents are always the active party in media. Like pedestrians and cyclists go under the cars to get injured or die. Car driver becomes active party only if he or she flees the accident site. In those cases fleeing the site is the only active thing driver has done. I think I have to start to use term traffic violence more often.
500 kilometers from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve. I learned about the thing weekend before Christmas. Sounded fun and weather forecasts looked like weather would be suitable. I started aiming to get 400 kilometers. I didn’t have 500 km eight days even during summer. So I didn’t want to aim to 500 kilometers. During summer I rode on cyclo-cross bike. This was going to be with fatbike because it was during winter.
It felt so good after first couple days I wanted to try to get 500 km if weather was suitable. For first three days weather was like dry autumn. Next three days we got snow and winter weather. Still quite easy rides but not as easy as first three says. For last two days it was wet, windy and muddy weather. I am glad I had so much kilometers by that time I could have shorter days.
With my poor shape it took 36 hour with breaks. Probably won’t be doing this again next year. I had other plans for this holiday season but it felt like this was good year to do Festive 500 if I ever gonna do it. With Covid-19 there wasn’t much else to do. Besides trying to make some music and videos but that had to wait this time.
It is reference to classic Dead Kennedys album. I am not looking for death if I don’t get reasonable gear ratios.
Current pandemic made me ride daily and I was starting to think maybe I should support Finnish bike stores by getting new bike. Not only because of this pandemic. I have considered upgrading my cyclocross bike for a while now. Might have done it this summer in any case. I want disc brakes and wider tires. More gears wouldn’t hurt either. This is where we get to this post’s topic.
I checked cyclocross and gravel bikes. Current flavor of the month seems to be them having mountain biking gear ratios. Having 11-36t gearing on back seem to be the standard. It would be good on cross-country riding but on everything else bike wouldn’t be too good for that sort of riding. If you have something like fatbike you don’t want to use gravel or cyclocross bike on cross-country style of riding.
If you mostly ride on something that can be called road or easy trails you want gearing where jump between gears is one teeth rather than two teeth which is mountain bike gearing. I rather have 11-28t gearing. Mountain biking gearing is big reason why I don’t like riding fatbike on road. Bigger tires and worse aerodynamics play part too. But it is hard to find good gear sometimes when jump between gears is so big. On cross-country you want that but on roads gradients and surfaces don’t change so much that you need to make huge gear ratio changes all the time. It is more of getting optimal gear for current situation.
Other part of gear ratios is front chainrings. By default front chainrings are something meant for racing. I watched video which preferred gravel bikes over cyclocross bikes because gravel bikes had gears to go over 60 km/h when cyclocross bikes have gears for top speeds of 45-50 km/h. Like anyone who isn’t racing would need gears for that sort of speeds. Two by bikes seem to have bigger chainring of 46t. One by bikes have chainring 42t. I calculated gear ratios. Bigger chainring of 42t would give good gear ratios. When it is only chainring you have to have mountain biking gearing on back to make bike to handle all sorts of terrains and gradients. But if you had smaller chainring of 30t you get everything you need with 11-28t gearing and you get one teeth jumps between most gears.
I couldn’t find gravel or cyclocross bikes with 42/30t on front and 11-28t on back. 46/36t or 46/30t on front and 11-36t on back are more common. I understand 46t on front is good for races but not everyone of us races. 42t on front would give rest of us more reasonable gear ratios. My current cyclocross bike has 46/36t. I haven’t used biggest gears it has and smallest gears are not small enough on some cases. 42/30t would be more useful. I don’t know if it possible to get that without custom components. Haven’t seen that anywhere.
It is a miracle. Finland had day when total deaths lowered by one. Not daily deaths. Total deaths. I don't know how you can miscalculate when daily maximum is five and total is under thirty. Today we have more deaths but our situation is still quite good. There haven't been exponential growth in confirmed cases, hospitalizations or deaths.
Talking about statistics. It has been interesting to see Financial Times's corona page statistics. Graphs have changed when United States' situation has started to look worse than elsewhere. It could have been also because they wanted to show curves turning down elsewhere. Now the new graphs start to look bad for United States. Will the graphs change again? From outside it looks like United States wants to make this worst possible without looking like they are doing it. Some states let churches stay open when other places are closed. I guess they haven't heard about South Korea's Patient 31 who at one point was responsible of half of the South Korea's cases.
British government planned to let Covid-19 loose on their population to get herd immunity as soon as possible. Now their prime minister is in intensive care because of Covid-19. I guess he will have second thoughts about the original strategy
Last weekend was Tour of Flanders weekend. It was cancelled or postponed. They still hope to have it later this year. What we got was virtual Tour of Flanders with quite star packed field. At least if you call 13 riders a field. You can watch the race below.
I went back to training twice a week. I feel it was correct choice. Most training instructions tell you should train at least three times a week. I had that opinion earlier but now I feel two times a week is enough. It probably depends on how hard you go when you train. I feel I can train harder when I train only twice a week. More you train easier you have train to recover from your training. I recovered from training three times a week but I was tired most of the time.
When training twice a week I can go harder. I can use bigger gear and go faster. I don’t attempt good average speeds. It is pointless to try to get your best average speeds. On mountain biking it depends on where you ride and on urban roads it depends on traffic lights and other traffic. It also makes you ride too hard on easy parts. I don’t care about average speeds but my heart rate monitor shows when I have new record average speed. Getting back to training twice a week has given me new average speed records.
I probably get back to train three times a week next summer when weather gets better. But it is good to know I don’t have to train that often to get results. This probably depends on how hard you can train. If you can’t train hard enough twice a week is not enough.
This is video I have planned for some time. I have had the idea for over a year. I don't know if anyone else care about what is sport. Maybe some people want their hobby to be called sport for credibility reasons. This is my attempt to define what is sport.
For that I shot some sporting footage. Footage was shot with fatbike and DJI Osmo. I hope Youtube doesn't compress it to pixelated mess. If it does I like to know how to render video with DaVinci Resolve which Youtube doesn't compress into mess. Version I uploaded wasn't mess.