Monday, August 29, 2011

Bad News Good News

I will start with the bad news first. I went out for a ride a few months ago. I didn't plan on anything to long. Maybe 40 miles or so. The weather wasn't the best but that wasn't stopping me. A little rain never hurt anyone as long as you stay on both wheels and keep yourself off the deck. At about 30 miles I said to my self, self you are flying today! At mile 31 I said, self you have just BONKED. I thought it must be the nasty weather getting to me or the cocktails I drank last night, but I was wrong. It was my back wheel...again! I broke a spoke along the way and that caused wheel to bend a little and rub my breaks. That explained why I was feeling slow all of the sudden.

I wasn't excited about the spoke because it was my forth broken spoke and SRAM had already replaced two spokes and sent me a new wheel in the last year. I took the wheel into Park Ave Bike and called SRAM to let them know how I was feeling about my S40 wheel set. That is the bad news.
The good is that SRAM is a great company! With in 5 minutes of being on the phone the customer service tech decided to upgrade my wheel set and send me a new set of S60's! That is what I call great customer service. They could have done what most companies would have done and sent out a new spoke and put a band aid on my bullet wound, but they didn't do that and for that reason I put them at the top of my good list for going above and beyond for a little guy like me. I have been out on the new wheels for about a month and a half now and they are AWESOME.  Thank you SRAM!

I have put a number of good rides in on the wheels and I haven't heard any of the POPS and CRACKS I would hear while riding the old S40's, so I am hoping my days of breaking spokes are behind me.

This has been a terrible year for training.  I have been working 60-70 hour weeks and not getting out to do much of anything related to training.  I had an injury that kept me from running more than a few miles at a time since January.  I think the injury has finally healed up and I am back on the road running again.  I have also made some significant changes to my work so I expect to be training a lot more.

The Finger Lakes Tri is coming up in about 3 weeks.  I am hoping to train enough now that I am feeling better and have the time to train like I need to. 

Be safe and have fun out there!