David Singlespeed Unrau

I have so many pictures lying around waiting to do something with them, so I though I should get on with it. I’m going to try to stick up a picture a week from the archives.

This picture was taken in 2004 in downtown Vancouver at Granville Island. Construction everywhere.

I just finished putting together this sexy looking bike:

The bike is an aluminum triathalon machine that will be seeing lots of training miles and Ironman use. The paint is a lovely deep metallic grey with white decals. The build is full Shimano Ultegra with Dura-Ace 10 speed bar end shifters and Shimano R600 brake levers. The seat of choice is a Profile TriStryke saddle. Profile CarbonStryke aerobars are mounted on a Vision base bar. The 10 speed (6600 series) Ultegra works great with snappy, positive shifts. Like all True North bikes, the geometry is full custom with a triathalon specific fit tailered to the Ironman distance.

Well, we’ve just finished cleaning up after getting back from the 2007 Uxbridge Icebreaker put on by BikeNXS. These short races are a lot of work – a good ten hours of packing, driving, registering, changing, cleaning, etc., for only an hour of racing! The weather was poor and there wasn’t all that much ice, but this was a fun event none the less. The weather was cloudy, rain heavy at times and around 6 degrees or so. Luckily, the course had a sunny week beforehand to dry out, so the mud was not the worst I’ve seen in the area. Here is what this year’s course looked like:

The vertical profile looked like:

with about 450m of climbing per lap. This year they put in a single-speed catagory, so of course I had to race that. Unfortunately, they only did a single-speed 25km catagory, so I didn’t get to do the normal 50km. Given the weather, I’m not complaining too much though! I rode my 29er single-speed with Schwalbe Little Albert tires at ~28psi and 34:18 gearing. This set-up seemed to be about right. The tires bit pretty well without feeling like they were rolling slow, and they were very fast in the sloppy single-track. A slightly narrower tire might have been faster on both the gravel and in the soupy mud.

The singlespeed catagory was pretty popular. I counted at least ten singlespeeders at the start line despite the poor weather. My strategy was to go out fast and try to get into the front group of geared riders, then ease off and see what developed. This seems to have worked, as I was the lead singlespeed off of the start, and I was still the lead singlespeed at the finish! I’m very happy to start the season off with a win. The race felt good – I was riding hard, but not at 100% and my pace was high, so now I just need to keep this going through the rest of the season! Here is my heart rate data from the race:

My average heart rate was 177bpm for the race, which is lower than my averages at o-cups last year, so I think I can dig deeper if I need to. You can see the drops in my HR when I spin out going downhill!

True North had a great showing at the race. Lots of fun, lots of medals. Make sure to check out the team results and reports on the team website!