[hozn]

@Steve 41802 wrote:

Happy to say I took Hozn’s advice and got the t-Servs. Got to ride them today for the first time and was extremely happy. We talk a lot about how frame material can change the feel of the ride, but not tires. Going from vittoria zaffino 23s to the panaracer 25s made the ride feel very very smooth. Thanks for the advice here, as well as the tires thread!

Awesome, I am glad first impressions are good! I really am happy with these for all-season commuting. Well, and just riding in the winter period.

[hozn]

@vvill 41705 wrote:

Nope just the standard 3/32 Surly cog, size 15T.

The chain had trouble engaging each tooth, even with just gently turning the pedals (by hand) on a bike stand.

Yeah I thought it was odd too but when I did some Googling I found a few forum posts about it. Some people apparently took a file/grinder to the corners of the teeth to make it work.

Interesting — and good to know for the future. I have definitely used 2 different KMC X8.93 chains with my Surly chainring & cog setup on my horizontal-drop SS MTB, but I have probably just been lucky. Maybe also the larger cogs are less likely to have this issue (18t/20t) due to angle of the cog teeth (??) … that is just spitballing, haven’t applied any science there

[hozn]

@vvill 41660 wrote:

Hmmmmmm well. Mostly a success. The tall Surly cog though doesn’t seem compatible with the KMC X8.93 chain. I ended up just shortening my old stretched Shimano chain which fits in the tall cog teeth fine.

But now I have a new shortened KMC chain that I don’t have a use for, and an old chain on a new cog.

That is odd. I have used a few of those chains with surly cogs (they are nice and cheap!). What size cog is it? (And is it otherwise special?)

[hozn]

@vvill 40726 wrote:

So from what I’ve researched online, there are a few recommended options for putting singlespeed cogs on a standard Shimano/SRAM hub. The Surly cog and Surly spacer kit are what I’m leaning towards, together with a new KMC X8.93 chain (I’d guess the existing chain/cassette are around 3000 kms old with little maintenance). I found some others that make even wider base cogs too but they’re a bit more boutique. The Surly stuff seems to be one of the most durable. I’m planning to keep my chainrings/RD-as-a-tensioner/FD-as-a-chainkeeper as they are, for now. Anyone have any other suggestions, or caveats?

I recommend the Surly setup — good quality stuff; the cogs work with 8-speed chains and have wide bases. Some of the cheap conversion kits require SS chains (heavy!) and have narrow bases that will chew your freehub body up (well, especially if alloy). I am 95% sure that I have that set of Surly hub spacers zip tied together in my parts bin that you can have (from my first ss-converted mtb). And I may have a lightly used 16t or 17t cog. Send me a PM or email if interested.

[hozn]

@Steve 40919 wrote:

Thanks! Any idea if anyone locally sells them? Looking to avoid shipping time.

Sure. I think The Bike Lane carries these (they definitely used to), but not sure which exact models/sizes they stock. It probably will be similar cost to the specialized tires from lbs.

[hozn]

@Steve 40882 wrote:

On the bright side, this might be my excuse to buy some Armadillos.

I also recommend (as I’m sure many do) the Panaracer T-Serv tires. I have the reflective sidewall 28s for commuting; the 25s are nice too. I’ve heard good things about the Armadillos too, but the T-Servs are cheaper (online) and lighter.

[hozn]

I would like to volunteer to help with any scripting/programming efforts on the “pointless awards”. While this is counting chickens a bit before they’ve hatched (I don’t know the full depths & limitations yet of strava api), it looks like it would be relatively easy to pull down rides (including GPX of all the rides) and mash those up with other APIs to answer questions like — most rides in the rain (or on rainy days, not sure if I can actually determine whether the rider happened to be getting wet), most rides in the dark, etc. Anyway, I’m gonna try to spend some time this weekend getting some scaffolding scripts in place to pull down all the rides for teams and store to local database for reporting purposes. I’ll follow Ron’s example and post my code on github (it’ll be python, not haskell, sorry) if anyone wants to contribute or play with their own reporting ideas.

[hozn]

There is only one all-rounder wheelset option even worth considering: https://madfiber.com/

Anything else is stupid. Building wheels with metal is so nineteenth/twentieth/early-twenty-first century.

[hozn]

@ejwillis62 40165 wrote:

Getting fenders on Saturday, anything else?

Fenders with mudguards. E.g. Planet Bike Cascadia. I “retrofitted” the Cascadia mudguards to my SKS P35 fenders; that works well. W/o the mudguards my feet were getting drenched from water streaming off the end of the front fender.

The most comfortable clothing setup I have found for real rain is:
– Gore rain pants (Goretex). I wear either knickers or lightweight tights underneath. Nothing worse than skin directly against this plastic-feeling fabric. Beware these tend to fit a little short (I am 34 inseam and the size L is just a tad short — works fine in conjunction with shoe covers, but pulls up too short for my winter cycling boots).
– REI Novarra eVent cycling waterproof jacket
– Gore waterproof shoe covers
– Wool socks. Inevitablly water can still make its way in (e.g. from bottom of shoes), so wool is nice.
– Helmet cover or waterproof cycling cap
– Fleece gaiter, if temps warrant it.
– Waterproof gloves. Or at least water resistant. I have a set of LG Windtex gloves that claim to be waterproof (they’re not, but they resist light rain fine) and a set of Gore gloves.

The Gore pants are still hot, but they breathe much better than others I have tried (e.g. LG, Performance). In general Gore stuff is expensive, but it works and is well constructed. The REI eVent jacket is phenomenal and a great value. Beware rain stuff that doesn’t breathe; you will end up soaked from sweat which isn’t any better than being soaked from rain.

[hozn]

@GuyContinental 40319 wrote:

Meethinks that Hans is going for the longest “oops I missed my office, commute” with 35 extra miles this morning.

http://app.strava.com/activities/37141481

Go Ochos!

I think you claimed that podium spot long ago with your “accidental” rides to Purcelville I have to pack my miles in during the week since my weekends are always very low mileage. Team 5 & 9 are pretty serious competition, but we’ll make them work for it With you back in the saddle this week, our weekly mileage trend looks very promising. (Sounds like you should have skipped today, though! Hope you feel better.)

[hozn]

@acl 36245 wrote:

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=57565

I’m late to the party, but figured I would throw in my $0.02 experience. I have these Northwave Celcius boots too (got lucky & found them on geartrade for $80) and think they are a significant improvement over Pearl Izumi thermal shoe covers — or Gore shoe covers. Everyone is different (I tend to be more wussy, I think), but I find these comfortable down into the 20s with wool socks for rides for 1-1.5-hour rides. For those 2+ hour rides at those temps, I find it tough to keep my feet (and hands) warm enough. I haven’t fully tested the waterproof-ness of these shoes, but I’ve ridden them in rain & my feet stayed dry.

For me Northwave fit similar to Specialized shoes: they are wider than most. For reference, in non-cycling shoes I wear a size Clarks 12W (or Asics 13 [not-wide]); this translates to a moderately roomy Northwave size 48 (and Specialized 48 too, though I wish there was a 47.5).

[hozn]

Personally, I would like to register a vote against a team challenge that falls immediately on the heels of Freezing Saddles. I’m already tired and week #1 isn’t even finished If things remain close, I am sure there will be some extreme mileage intensity in the final weeks of this race. And then I have a 6-hour MTB race on the 23rd. Yes, little violin. Obviously I’ll participate with the team if that’s what everyone else wants to do, but it seems to me that Freezing Saddles *is* the competition and we don’t need more ways to win; one will be more than enough for Team Ocho. Assuming Kevin decides to return from his warm beach, anyway. I would be all for some sort of competition (using same teams, if appropriate) later — say, for the hottest month of the summer?

On a completely unrelated note, is there any interest in putting together [non-team-specific] cycling kits (or just jerseys) for the freezing saddles competition? I worked with Primal Wear most recently for our corporate team kit and we were able to do full custom bibs & jerseys for $150 (obviously things like quantity are important factors). [These would probably be summer jerseys, admittedly.] Anyway, just throwing it out there; I have very little artistic ability/inclination, but if this is interesting to a significant number of people *and* someone is willing to do the art work, I volunteer to work with the sales reps & see what we could do. If the desire would be for just jerseys, may be better to use someone like Jek Sports (have worked with them in the past too), etc.

[hozn]

@Certifried 39313 wrote:

The code is available.

Being a Linux engineer, and having built my career around open source, I want to (again) thank Ron for his work! Especially making it all open.

https://github.com/ronwalf/ba-winter-challenge/blob/master/src/Scoring.hs

Unfortunately, I’m not a programmer, so can’t figure out the answer to your question, nor can I add code to subtract any miles ridden by Strava athlete 136274.

OMG – it’s in Haskell. That’s awesome.

I know about as much about Haskell as I do about heaven, but the last couple lines of this block appear to explain the “flooring” and cast to int:

[COLOR=#990000][B]renderScores[/B][/COLOR] scores [B]=[/B] ol [B]$[/B] [B]do[/B]
mapM_ row [B]$[/B] reverse [B]$[/B] sort scores
[B]where[/B]
row us [B]=[/B] li [B]$[/B] [B]do[/B]
a [B]![/B] href (toValue [B]$[/B] [COLOR=#DD1144]”http://app.strava.com/athletes/”%5B/COLOR%5D [B]++[/B] (show [B]$[/B] uid us)) [B]$[/B] toHtml [B]$[/B] name us
[B]_[/B] [B]<-[/B] [COLOR=#DD1144]": "[/COLOR] td [B]$[/B] toHtml [B]$[/B] userScore us [B]_[/B] [B]<-[/B] [COLOR=#DD1144]" points ("[/COLOR] toHtml (days us) [B]_[/B] [B]<-[/B] [COLOR=#DD1144]" days, "[/COLOR] toHtml (floor [B]$[/B] miles us [B]::[/B] [COLOR=#445588][B]Int[/B][/COLOR]) [COLOR=#DD1144]" miles)"[/COLOR] [/CODE] That said, that looks like it's just for display, so it's possible the full values are being stored (?) I'm sure rcannon can illuminate. I too build my work life around open-source software; I love that this is open-source.[CODE] renderScores scores = ol $ do
mapM_ row $ reverse $ sort scores
where
row us = li $ do
a ! href (toValue $ “http://app.strava.com/athletes/&#8221; ++ (show $ uid us)) $ toHtml $ name us
_ <- “: “
td $ toHtml $ userScore us
_ <- ” points (“
toHtml (days us)
_ <- ” days, “
toHtml (floor $ miles us :: Int)
” miles)”
[/CODE]

That said, that looks like it’s just for display, so it’s possible the full values are being stored (?) I’m sure rcannon can illuminate.

I too build my work life around open-source software; I love that this is open-source.

[hozn]

@essigmw 39300 wrote:

It does. I think you could pick a date say, the 7th ( a full week after start) to have people report in, then start substitutions. Also can these people be reached by Private Message? Can a big bold message be put up on the leaderboard saying “If you don’t see your name here you are risking being dropped from the competetition. Please contact XXX to fix this.?

I would hate for people to be on the outside looking in, and not every seat taken.

I think it would make sense to replacing people on the teams immediately if they have not checked in by now (i.e. the start of the competition) and didn’t bother to provide valid Strava user names. I don’t think this original request was either unclear or difficult

Or, probably best, just ask the other members of these teams if they want to wait; they are, after all, the ones that will have to dig out of the deficit.

[hozn]

I forgot to mention a great WIN:

Specialized Hydroflo bottles

I think these are much better than the Camelbak podium bottles. The flow is intense, plastic soft/ easily squeezable, and the top/valve disassembles for easy cleaning (my biggest issue with the Camelbak).

[Author]

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