Cannondale Slice and My TT Race

Pre-Race Week and the Slice

I have some mileage in the saddle and I am entering the final week before my second time trial race at the Healthy Newton Omnium. 

I didn't follow my own advise (living in ignorance) and I checked out the results from last year's race. I was in last place. SO, my goals for this year are pretty simple and I list these in order.

1. Improve my time (average speed) from last year.

2. Climb out of the cellar and not finish in last place

3. If I am having a good day average 21mph or better 

If I have a decent race, I plan on entering a couple of more TT events. I have every inclination of entering some road races in the future but I am still not fast enough to be competitive with even the cat 5 guys. If you haven't seen or deduced from my pictures, I am not your average cyclist. I am 6'4" tall and currently tip the scale at a sleek 255 pounds. I think that I raced at last years event at 270 pounds. I have the watts to be competitive but not the physique....YET. I am on a mission to get down to 210 pounds, but it is going to take some time to get there all the while building my cycling base. 

I am having a blast training and preparing for this race which means absolutely nothing to anyone but me. I am definitely trying to buy some speed in addition to losing weight and training. According to Strava I ride an average of 83 miles per week. If you are at all interested you can do an athlete search on Strava for Lee Hanson. I am the one in Temple, GA. Also, yesterday, I drove 1 1/2 hours to the race site and pre rode the course. I completely rode the course once then went back and did some specific work on hills and tried to determine proper wattage at specific places. Will this help? Probably not. I am sure once the race starts I will let adrenaline do the work and completely blow up half way through the race.

As far as the bike goes, I am still loving the Cannondale Slice. I have made a couple of changes to help me out. The first of which was to change my aero bars. The ones that came with the bike were basically straight and I found that felt funny and put a little strain on my wrists. I guess I pull when I ride. I switched to some bars that bend up and put my hands at a more natural angle. This made a HUGE difference to my comfort level in aero. Also, I had to move my cycle computer (Garmin edge 800) out in front of the handlebars. When the computer was mounted back on the stem there was no way for me to see the display when I was down on the bars. I purchased the K-Edge and it is awesome. In fact, it was so rock solid that I purchased another one for my road bike. A little pricey but you will not ever think about your computer mount after you install this. Garmin should include a mount like this for their higher end computers. Who wants to trust their expensive gps gadget to a couple of rubber straps that will eventually break. 

After a little riding time the rear derailleur needed a small tweak which was probably due to cable stretch, but this was a minor thing. It seems that every time I ride this bike I get faster on it. I will say that it does not seem like a climbing bike. The bike is heavier than my Synapse, and I am still not great at changing the gears when not down on the bars. As a result, I find myself mashing up the hills in the wrong gear and wasting my legs in the process. I am still getting used to the neck fatigue and the Adamo seat but I am slowly improving and getting more comfortable.

Cannondale Slice Ultegra

I am going to try to give a review of the Cannondale Slice, and let you guys know the good and bad of the bike. Please bear in mind that I have ridden quite a lot on my Cannondale Synapse, but I have NEVER ridden aero before.

Last year I rode in the Healthy Newton Omnium. Well, actually I rode in the time trial on day one and the road race on day two. I did not do the crit. In retrospect I should not have ridden in the road race because I was not ready. The distance was fine but those guys were a lot faster than me. I entered the cat 5 race but I need some more training to even compete at this level. However, I did not do so bad in the time trial. I have not actually seen the results because I THINK that I did fairly well (not last place) but I could be completely wrong. I choose to live in ignorance. 

The thing that I noticed was that, in addition, to being less fit than my fellow competitors, I had the wrong equipment for the time trial (TT). I was excited to go there and race and I knew that I had good equipment. Was I ever wrong. I had the wrong bike, helmet, wheels, stationary trainer etc... 

This year I want to alleviate some of those problems. I have been reading several reviews online and doing a fair amount of research to determine the best bike for my TT endeavors. As it turns out, all of my research was in vain because it seems that Cannondale was the only company that made a bike to fit me properly. Most of the companies show models in their catalog that would work, but no one had stock and even the factories had a 6 month lead time. Good thing that I was favoring the Cannondale before hand. I went in to my local bike shop and they ordered my bike. It only took one week for it to come in. I went today and had my fitting session. 

First impression during the fit was that the aero position was as uncomfortable as I had feared. I finished up at the shop and headed to the Silver Comet trail for a "quick" 30 miles. The ride was great. The aero position was a little shaky at first but I got used to it within a couple of miles. It is going to take some time to get my neck used to looking up from that position. That is the only negative thing that I have to say after my first ride and that is not the fault of the bike at all. The bike performed flawlessly. I purchased the slice with the Ultegra group set and it is awesome. My Synapse has 105 components with an Ultegra rear derailleur and it shifts ok but nothing like the crispness of the indexing shifters on this bike. I am not sure if it is the Ultegra group or the fact that these shifters are not incorporated into the brake levers like my road bike.

 As you can see, I added on the Adamo seat and that is going to take some getting used to as well.

 The Ultegra brakes work great. I included these photos so that you can see what the wind sees. This is the front profile of the bike and it is very slender unlike the rider.

 The bike handles a lot differently than my road bike. The steering is more quirky. It is not anything that  is insurmountable just different responsiveness.
I plan on adding some different components and accessories and I will update you here with some pictures. The main thing to do for now is to get some saddle time.

Stay Tuned!!

The Juror

Approximately 3 years ago I served on a jury in a child pornography case. It was my first jury summons and I didn't have a lot going on, so I slapped on some fancy clothes and proceeded to perform my civic duty.
After the voyardier phase I was selected as the foreman. This proved to be somewhat of a challenge. I had a lot of diversity in the jury room. There were some very logical people that would listen to reason and the facts and weigh them accordingly. Then there were others that were more concerned with the amount of inconvenience that this process was to their lives and just wanted a fast verdict so they could get home and watch Oprah, regardless of the outcome. Within 15 minutes of deliberation one of the jurors wanted me to tell the judge that we could not reach a verdict so that she could go home. Of course I didn't do that, but I did examine all of the facts and try my best to "do the right thing". It took us 2 days but we finally reached a verdict and we found the defendant guilty on most of the counts charged against him. Let me explain in a little greater detail.
The GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) released several videos on the internet with "tracer" programs imbedded in them. These videos were related to child pornography and revealed to the GBI who downloaded them and who watched them. The defendant in our case had downloaded (in our estimation) 8  of these videos. Please bear in mind that I do believe he was guilty of possessing these videos, but he did not film them, distribute them, sell them, share them or do anything at all except watch them. Now that in and of itself is BAD. I agree!! But????? We found him guilty on 7 of the 8 counts and he got 140 years!!! Thats right 140 years! Please don't get me wrong, I think the guy was guilty as sin, but I do not think that he deserved 140 years! He has a wife and 2 kids and he deserves a chance at rehabilitation, Right?? If he was filming or selling or meeting with some minors this would be a different story, but to just have a perverted mind and then die in prison? Surely, we have failed this guy and his family.
I feel horrible about this event in my life. I know that I did the "right" thing. I did my civic duty! I know that justice was served. However, I do not feel that the sentence fit the crime! I feel that I have eaten into the fabric of our society. I did what was expected of me, but I am not sure that was/is enough. I believe that there is a time when men of good conscience can not blindly follow the convention of present day thought, nor can he follow the normalcy of the un-silent majority. Right and wrong should not have a grey area. There should only be black and white and this one I would consider grey.

The lightbulb's getting dim

Please tell me that this sign is wrong.

Toni and I were driving back home from Midtown Atlanta and we saw a billboard on I-20 that said that 32% of students in Georgia don't graduate high school. What? Are there that many dropouts?

I have subsequently looked at some of the statistics and here is what I found. Apparently, there is some new formula for calculating the graduation rate and it puts Georgia and some others at the low end of the totem pole. Look at the map above. The states in yellow have a lower than 70% graduation rate. Basically, this is calculated as the number of kids who get diplomas in 4 years vs the number who enrolled.
This led me on a statistical scavenger hunt.

This is a map of our current unemployment. Do you see a correlation? The darker areas are the highest unemployment areas. Could this possibly be suggesting that our employment is based (at least in part) on our level of education? If this is true, There might even be a relationship between our education and our income. Please insert all of the sarcastic tone that you can muster here.

How about that. The lighter colored states have the lower per capita income.

I could go on with this analysis, but I think I will let this sink in. Do you ever wonder why the checkout girl seems stupid? That is because she is. Does it shock you that some of my neighbors think Montreal is in North Carolina? They do. Do you wonder why we have so many people living off of our hard earned taxes. That is because just over 33% (in Georgia) do not even have a high school diploma. As a result, no one will hire them. I sure didn't. Would you?