Monday’s can be a bear. A computer program I use daily started not working correctly. I dread calling customer support so I tried chat first but the person was not able to fix my problem so we switched to a phone call. Trying numerous things and failing the step that worked was re-installing the program. All of this took a couple of hours delaying the start of today’s bike ride plus waiting for the temperature to go up a couple more degrees. I got ready to ride and thinking of a route to ride I changed from my first choice and settled on the Kingwood – FM 1485 – Kingwood one because of the late start.

Finally getting my Lynskey Helix bike on the road at 12:57 PM I noticed the power meter was not sending data to the Bolt computer. I circled back home and checked the battery. It was dead so I replaced. Glad I ordered new batteries when the Quarq power meters were added to my bikes. Now I was ready to ride.

It was a little chilly at the start because the sun had not broke through the clouds. I dressed for the chill with a long sleeve jersey and a wind jacket. It took about 15 minutes of riding to get my body heat flowing and the chill didn’t bother me. Weather conditions: Start 69 degrees, humidity 59%, dew point 54, overcast, wind E 8 mph; Finish 73 degrees, humidity 57%, dew point 57, mostly cloudy, wind E 8 mph.

Over the weekend I switched the BiSaddle that used to be on my Cervelo Caledonia to the Lynskey Helix to see if it was more comfortable. I also wore a new pair of Primal shorts today and the BiSaddle was much more comfortable than the other one.

In the SRAM phone app I learned of a setting called “Compensating” and enabled it. My understanding was that the gears would adjust the rear gears by 1 or 2 gears when I shifted from the small chainring to the large chainring. I tried that near the end of the ride and it sent the chain off the large chainring onto the crankarm, FAILURE. I need to learn more about how this works. I was able to get the chain back on the large chainring and then shift back to the 35×13 gears to finish the ride at 3:41 PM.

I altered the route on the way back to Kingwood to avoid the schools on Briar Berry Lane by returning to the US59 southbound frontage road from Valley Ranch Parkway, riding south to Auburn Trails and back to Briar Berry Lane to continue into Oakhurst. This didn’t impact the ride distance from the average for this route but Strava didn’t find any matches. Today’s 33.15 miles moved me to within 31 miles of reaching my April goal of 700 miles.