big john

I may or may not have run over a small snake today. I was on a short dirt trail and I didn't see it until I was very close. I yanked the bar enough to get he front tire clear but I'm not sure about the rear. I thought about going back to check but didn't.

bampilot06

Not sure, but the tires are prolly toast.


someone should start a thread and ask………

ls01

uhhhh...Hangovers?

DougRNS

the point is moot. I begin my aspirin regimen tomorrow.

ls01

Don't feel bad. I lost my biggest, fastest segment to a guy from Austria, pretty sure it was Austria. He did it in the winter.....on a gravel bike...by 35 seconds or so. Then he went home.

genejockey 

Really? Huh. My wife's family are the Hammonds, apparently big wheels in Corry. They owned the hardware/building supply/lumber business. That and slum lords....

EDIT: I should perhaps point out that my wife wasn't one of the 'big wheel' Hammonds, her mother having married someone from outside the area and moved away, and then came back divorced, which was still A Scandal in a small town back then. So instead of staying in Corry her Mom moved to a tiny town 8 miles away in the toe of New York. So, Mrs. GJ didn't even really grow up in Corry.

bampilot06

I think guy just moved to the area. Looking through his activities feed. He’s fast but not fast fast.

Trsnrtr

Back in 2014, my wife and I were lean and mean and were scooping up KOMs on our tandem but there was one guy in our area who was really tough and hard to beat. Late in the season, we went to Myrtle Beach for a wedding and had our tandem with us. We had a tailwind on a stretch of road and unbeknownst to us, it was Strava segment. After the upload, my wife pointed out that we both made the top 10 for the segment. Guess who was first? The same guy who had many of the KOMs from our area in Illinois.

Velo Vol 

Sounds kind of psycho.

Velo Vol industries is animal friendly. Except for yellow jackets. Those are shown no mercy.
We could start with the chalkboard on the wall which is . . . strange.
You were the one who brought it up.

LesterOfPuppets

Well, now they have a good story to tell.

ls01

lol. I follow a guy that I acused of steeling a segment from me in his car. He's a Canadian, but comes over here to ride quite a bit. He also winters in Forida. It's not unusual for him to ride 5 centuries in a week. Does double centuries quite frequently. Anyway I had a great big fat tailwind, probably 25 mph, I hit this segment on Jefferson Ave in Grosse Point just flying. It averaged 32 mph easy. A couple days later he rode it at 35 mph. I was sure he did it in a car. I was wrong. Big time wrong. The guys a friken Hammer! He accepted my apologies with grace. And I have followed him ever since, and he followed me in return.

WhyFi

He sometimes records his rides with an iPhone and sometimes with a Bryton. He has some strangeness going on with the iPhone rides - I think it's an eBike. This isn't from your KOM, but it's from another one that he recently nabbed (he has a handful in the last couple of weeks. Anyway, note the speed plot - crazy steady but with the very uniform deviations. Another one of his recent KOMs looks like this, too -



I think that there's enough to strongly suspect that he's a cheater, but the above is the closest to a smoking kitten that I've yet seen.

bampilot06

Well that’s cool. What a tool. Im tempted to follow him but don’t really care. Would never have known if strava didn’t email me. Maybe he will open a bike shop in my area and claim to be a retired pro! I bet him and Lemond go way back.

WhyFi

He's got 8 pages of KOMs. That's quite a lot for someone with 1200 miles this year and 2400 all of last year and nothing really before that. A number of his KOM speed plots look just like the previous - crazy steady with precise deviations up and down. A couple others look really weird and exactly the opposite - inhumanly jittery.

bampilot06

So was getting The Ritchey ready for the trip to Charlotte and I have came to the realization all of bikes are on the verge of being out of commission.

The Ritchey is at .5 on the chain wear scale. Will be replacing that in clt.

Rear tire on the cervelo is almost worn out and the chain is almost at .5

I’m at 3700 on the Madone, chain wear tool shows it’s good but I am positive this is wrong. So will def need to replace that sooner than later.

DougRNS

The mighty Pirates are going for the sweep against the Dodgers in LA. They're up 1-0 in the first.

bampilot06

What’s the point of this? Just wondering. Can he add this to his tinder account?

WhyFi

Some people are weird - there was a guy in my area that, every few months, would go on binges of nabbing KOMs in his car. Anyway, your guy, from his "workouts" and the notes on them, he seems to be lookin' for pats on the back and recognition as a serious athlete.

bampilot06

23 followers, he following 16 people. Just strange.

Watch him show up at my next bike race, and actually be legit.

bampilot06

He is riding around with tri bars.

bampilot06

Almost did the same thing. This one might have been dead but I was not sure. It was large, and I went off the road to avoid it.

Mojo31

Helps with the urges.

DougRNS

All this snake talk reminds me that the Mighty Pirates are hosting the snakes for a three game series later this week.

WhyFi

Well, he has a bike with aero bars - I saw that, too. But far too many of those speed plots. I flagged a handful that were blatant.

Looking at his rides as a whole, he's very obviously setting out and targeting certain segments, too. Stolen Strava Valor

Bah Humbug

And I will come back to the Town Lake (running) KOMs, which are all set on bikes. When I got close to a top 10 on some of them, I went digging and discovered most were clearly fake. I flagged them, they were removed... and the same people tagged bikes as runs to get their KOMs. Just one, to get on the leaderboard. It's a sham.