bike lesson learnt

I have over the past 5 months encouraged, persuaded and voacalised my belief that if you are gonna spend some serious amount of time on your bike you should look after your trusted machine, and quite right.  If only for the fact that most of you reading this have spend almost as much on your bike as you did on your car or atleast your second car.

I regularly clean my bike and give it the attention neede.  However, I don't alway have the funds to keep buying new bits.  So last December after noticing the bottom bracket was passed its sell by date I decided that I would clean it up, pack it full of greese and and emake sure I go through the worst of winter before doing the necessarya nd replacing what is after all a £30 part

Now the last 3-4 months have bene hard work, I have been putting it down to a bit of poor diet, tiredness brought on by lack of sleep (3 kids under 6 can have that affect) and a bit of fatigue due to the hundreds of miles my legs have been doing.

I tried suppliments, changed my diet, got my wife to give me a weekly sports massage to see if I could overcome the sore legs, and back. I spent money of new pedals, cleats and shoes (I still had the starp pedals).  Still I continued to sruggle and get more and more tired.

I finally decided that the weather was getting better and said "now is the time to fix that that bottom bracket".  Well, if I was to say I knocked 10 minutes of my average winet ride and was only 5 minutes short of my homeward journey PB you probably wouldn't believe me.  hhowever is the truth.

The difference in the feel of the bike, the power I could generate and the increase in speed in comparison from before was huge.

I look back thinking what an idiot!  I guess though i have learnt a few lessons and surpisring gained a few benefits

1 - I will never leave for tomorrow waht should be done today.
2 - Never kid myslef that it won't make much difference
3 - Treat the machine with more respect.  In the end of the day that beautiful beast has got me over 13000 miles.  It deserves some love and attention

I did find one benefit from all this however. The fact the bike added  huge amount of resistance to my body whilst cycling must have added addional levels of power and endurance.  I am looking forwrad to testing that theroy of the net few months and when theweather permits breaking a few personal bests!

Get your bike ot, clean it, greese it and love it like it deserves!