Hot New Hoops

Well, I made my very first purchase on e-bay (and survived). I resorted to the "pre-owned" market after a few calls to bike shops revealed that a set of nice wheels with a PowerTap was going to cost me ~$3k. Wow, that's alittle to steep for my squeeky tight budget. So, I consulted a few of my guru bike buddies and discovered, "there's no reason you shouldn't buy a used PowerTap". So I started the search.

I found the set shown below on my 1st day of searching ebay and craigslist. Sent the guy a few emails and decided he was a honest fellow. I lost the last minute bidding war, so I was really bummed out. However, got an email from ebay stating the auction was "canceled" and saw that the wheels were posted again later that day. I emailed the seller and turns out it was a "spam" bidder and ebay caught it and canceled it. A few days later I won the 2nd auction.

Then I had to sign up for a Paypal account to pay for them. What a pain. Turns out you need to get "verified" for larger money transfers. Had to connect a bank account in addition to having a credit card. After about a week I finally figured out that I was 1 digit off on the routing number.

Anyway they showed up quick after I finally paid the fellow. It was just like Christmas. Nothing like coming home to a big box sitting on the porch of cool toys. I took the evening to swap out the casette (it had Ultegra 10 speed - I got the older 9 speed). Jumped on the trainer at 1030pm at night to collect a few minutes of data on the PowerTap.

Downloading the data turned out to be a challenge - darn Windows. About 1am I finally figured out to change the "baud rate" (a setting for a USB communication device buried in the Windows device manager). Finally, cool graphs of more data than I knew what to do with.

Luckily, one of my teammates let me borrow this book, the current "bible" of training with power. Never read a 200 page book so quickly. Good stuff.

Finally, I got the bike on the road last Wednesday afternoon. The indoor trainer doesn't give you much feedback on the wheels. WOW, talk about some SWEET and STIFF hoops!!!! Probably, more of a placebo effect, but after spending more on wheels than on my bike - I need to believe it.

No excuses now - training with POWER.