Sunday 16 June 2019

On the wearing of cleats

I switched to clipless pedals on Leonardo in 2011. During recent jaunts, I had noticed that the front of the SPD cleats were getting almost sharp. After yesterday's Challenge, I inspected them again. I then looked them up on the MEC's website. It didn't take much effort to decide that they were very worn and it was high time I replaced them.

Removing them involved first cleaning out the crud that had accumulated in the hex slots. For a moment I was afraid I wouldn't be able to fit an Allen key in them. However, my fears were unfounded.
 After removing the first one and replacing it right away, I took the time to photograph a new and an old cleat next to each other. Bear in mind that these exactly the same model of Shimano cleats, viz Shimano SM-SH56 SPD multi-release cleats. In the top image, I am holding them upside down. The two holed "washer" type thingy on the right in the bottom image is removable. Also, note how much crud there is in it!
  
Note to self: replace the cleats more frequently.

On feeling like a fast tortoise

For reasons that I shan't elaborate on, I did the Montérégie Challenge alone this year. It started in Saint-Rémi, just South of Montreal. It was surprisingly smooth sailing from my flat to Saint-Rémi in a rented car. I guess that one person moves more smoothly that three.

The forecast had been for showers as well as wind with gusts up to 70 km/h out of the South-West. I wasn't too worried about either as I had packed rain gear to deal with the first, and the course went roughly South-West from Saint-Rémi and back, hence tail wind on the way back. The latter proved inaccurate in the particular. In fact, there was relatively little wind and only two shortish periods of light showers.

The area around St-Rémi is mostly farmland with a particular emphasis on vegetable growing. A consequence of this is a non-trivial number of Hispanic migrant workers. At one point, I saw a party of about half a dozen or so on bikes presumably heading into town to shop, use the local library,  and/or have a drink or two on their weekend off. At the end of the day, as I was leaving St-Rémi, I saw a store with a sign in Spanish offering Latin American food products as well as money transfer services to Latin America. I didn't notice a sign in French!

The terrain being flat, it was easy to make good time, relatively speaking. My stats for the day were: 5 hours, 47 minutes and 24 seconds of biking in which I covered 128.35 km, for an average of 22.1 km/h, with a maximum of 42.6 km/h. Not too bad.

However, the thing is, on Leonardo I am relatively slow for the distances I aim for in these challenges. While there are slower people in the challenges, they typically opt for shorter distances which means that for much of the time, I am one of the slower people on the road. This doesn't do my ego much good, especially as I am currently experiencing middle-age insecurities as to my fitness.

Still, as I mentioned earlier, my average speed is pretty respectful. So while I may not be the hare, I am at least a fast tortoise. ;-)