BICYCLE TRAINER SOFTWARE

I left early this morning and drove all the way through Italy to Frejus, not very far from Nice. A big mountain biking festival is happening from Wednesday to Sunday, with a bunch of races and events. This evening, Sebastien and I participated in a special race called "Roc Ruelles". It is a relay where you have to do as many laps as possible on a 1 km loop. The "track" is in the tiny streets of Frejus, going through sharp turns and up and down stairs. The place is full of spectators and the atmosphere incredible.

So we arrived there and decided to take a look at this loop. After a few trials, I realized that my back tire was losing pressure... and managed to found a hole in it. As I have tubeless tires and didn't have spare tubes, I couldn't use my bike for the race. Too bad. So we decided to use Seb's bike only. The race was in 3 parts: qualifications for bib numbers from 1-35 at 19h00, then at 19h30 for 36-70, and the 15 first teams of each group would compete in the final at 20h15. At the start of the first race, we realized that Seb also had a flat tire. Fortunately, we were number 68, so in the second group. We quickly took the tube out and fixed it, put it back... but the tire was still losing pressure. We put it out again, and found another hole, fixed it and put the tire back again. At this point it was time to go, but the tire was still losing a little bit of air. So we started like this, and at each relay, we would pump a bit! It was super intense! 2-3 laps before the end, the valve got bent, so it became impossible to pump, and I noticed that we were 14th in spite of all those problems. We finished with the air we had left and managed to secure this position! So we were qualified! w00t!

We weren't sure if we could do the final though. During the 10min break, we actually managed to find someone who gave us a new tube, and we changed it in no time. And there we left for the real race, with almost no rest! The race went much better, and we finished 12th! We were extremely happy and proud of our fight against bad luck :-)

I have almost finished the updates to my bike since buying it in November. I find bike modification to work in surges, where parts are changed until a plateau of completion is achieved. The single biggest change to the Wildcard is in tires and tubes, with an estimated 4 pounds lost in replacing the 2-ply tires and downhill tubes with Maxxis Minion EXOs and standard tubes. The bike now weighs close to 35 pounds, quite respectable for what is still a relatively burly build.

Beyond that, I bought a pair of Wellgo B065 pedals in red, and came across a WTB Devo saddle on the cheap to top my 400mm RaceFace Deus post. In this photo I also have Andrew's RaceFace Atlas FR bar, which is pretty much a perfect match for the pedals and red rebound knob on the fork. The evolution of my bikes is inevitable, but for now, the Wildcard seems to have achieved stasis.