Remember that Flite Ti that I fixed with an inner tube?  No?  Here it is. Well, the inner tube lasted through a few races, many rides and about six months, but the original leather was badly damaged and was slowly parting ways with the rest of the saddle.

I got fed up with the shrinking leather, tore off what was left, and sent the saddle off to Jason at Recovered Saddle. I wanted to match the Ergon Biokork grips on the Kona, so I asked Jason to covered the saddle in ‘Cinnamon’ marine vinyl. I considered leather, but the Kona will probably see a lot of mud, so I thought the vinyl would hold up better.

The saddle came back looking great.  The vinyl is very similar in texture to the orignal Selle Italia leather, and is indistinguishable from leather when riding. It’s been on the bike since early October, and it’s holding up very well. Thanks, Jason.

Friday night I rode the purple Trek over to the Edwardstown Velodrome to watch some track racing, the PACC cyclocross awards, and ‘race’ in the Roller Frenzy. The race was setup with handicaps and in a bracket format. I ended up making it through to the third bracket, and it was surprisingly painful to sprint for 20-25 seconds / 500m a few times. I’m still sore two days later.

If you’re not familiar with roller racing then you’ll be even more confused after you watch a couple videos:

Update: here are the official results.

The final PACC cyclocross race of the winter was today.  It was a sunny and warm day with no mud to be seen.  The course (map) was similar to the previous courses, but with a huge spiral, and a couple good mulch run-ups, which were both quite rideable. Here’s what my phone and Google Tracks thought of the course:

View PACC CX 2011 Race 6 in a larger map

As usual, I rode the Gunnar.  There were no major changes from the last race, save airing the tyres down from 45/50PSI to 30/35 (F/R).  The All Terrainasarus tyres did very well at the lower pressure, and I think something like 28/32PSI might work a little better.

So, the Gunnar did well, and I had a great race.  Before the race I decided that I was going to put in more effort than the last and either blow up before the finish, or place higher.  In the end, I placed fourth, which is a decent improvement over the seventh place finish in the previous race.

Dan borrowed Rachel’s Specialized Sirrus so he could try out a cyclocross race.  The Sirrus had about 2 kg of extra weight removed, the brakes swapped from ‘American’ to ‘rest-of-the-world’, and the old 32/30 Speedmax Pros swapped on for the race.  Dan did well, winning the B grade.  Here’s the Sirrus before and after:

The full race results, race animation and a write-up are over on PACC.

Also, I’d like to thank everyone at PACC and those who helped organize, setup and tear-down the races.  The cyclocross series was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to the next race.

Here’s a great video of the first lap of the CX B race from kdcd.  I’m the one in the “authentic” 2009 U.S. Postal Service Pro Team yellow jersey :

How many funny, strange, weird or scary expressions can you find?