It's done

My new bike is now finished, and it is siiickk. Obviously the wheels are total overkill, but they are just too much fun to not ride. In the interest of sensibility I've also got a set of generic silver track wheels which I can switch out for every day regular around town use. Another nice thing about that is the Zipp wheels have a 16 cog and the cheepos have an 18 cog. Making it a double speed single speed with an inordinately difficult shifting process. But for right now I'm ridding it with the Zipp wheels and they fast. I'd also like to reiterate that everything you've ever heard about the ride of carbon fiber tubular wheels is true. It's just indescribably awesome, smooth, velvety, and magic carpet like. When you pair them up with the nice ride quality of a well built butted steel frame you get one smooth ridding bike. And I mean smooth! I don't feel anything uncomfortable ridding over rough pavement, especially when comparing ridding the same stretch of road on my road bike with ksyriums.

So last saturday I took this beauty out for it's first real road ride. It was a fairly big group ride about 30 people, at an easy pace. About 20 miles and all flat until the last few miles. It's very interesting ridding in a pelton style pace line on a fixie on an open road. I have to say I kinda liked it. There were a couple time when the pace picked up a little bit and I was spinning a ridiculously high cadence. But over all I did pretty well. I should also note that this was my first group ride back since the accident, so I was stocked to be out on a bike no matter what. One thing that was interesting was, when we would start ridding up small inclines I would inevitably drop the group. While everyone ells was down shifting, I just stood on the pedals and and cruzed up to the front. This of course was only true to slight inclines. When we got to the last leg of the ride and had to traverse a series of big rolling hills, well that kinda just sucked but I made it over them. but I definitely wouldn't recommend that to anyone.