Alan Murchison's blog by Alan_Murchison

In my previous blog I promised to talk about my little bike project, so here goes. Last year after a summer of injury, I spent a lot of time cycling as cross training. I have always really enjoyed biking, whether it's road or mountain bike. I think all runners end up on a bike at some stage of their running career, usually down to impact injuries! But this year I am going to do a few duathlons to test myself and to set a new challenge. My running is pretty strong if not that quick and I have to recognise that I am only going to get slower with age. So mixing in another discipline could really work for me. I have already been including a fairly savage weekly brick session (run/bike/run) in my training schedule for 2 months now and I have a few races planned later in the year. It would seem I can cope well with running after biking which is half the battle in multi-sport events.

With that in mind I needed a serious bike upgrade to be competitive, at least that was my reasoning anyway. My steed of choice is a Specialized Venge S Works, the same bike a certain Mark Cavendish rode in this year's Tour de France and World Championships to great effect. I had a bike specification in my head and the brief to the bike shop was 'make it fast'. Full Shimano Dura Ace groupset and carbon aero wheels go without saying. I then selected superlight and very sexy Bontrager carbon bars & stem. It was certainly going to look fast that's for sure. To make sure I was making the most of this amazing bit of kit, I had a expert bike fit done by the guys at Pedal On in Tadley. Young Karl who himself is a very accomplished bike racer, spent a huge amount of time analysing everything from the length of my arms (short for height!) inside leg and also torso length. He also looked at my current training bike and assessed stem length and height, bar width, seat position, diameter and height and many more points all over the bike. All this was done to ensure maximum performance and comfort; all quite a scientific process and I was given a print out detailing my perfect bike fit for time trailing/racing.

After what seemed an eternity, actually less than a week, the bike was ready. Lots of money spent, hours of measuring and tweaking and what was the result??? Well I decided that I needed a little test ride. I replicated my weekly bike brick loop and conditions were identical to the previous week on my trusty Roubaix training bike. This little spin on the Venge showed me that you CAN buy speed on a bike! I was doing a 20 mile loop, so any guesses how much quicker I was than on my very excellent training bike ? A whole 9 minutes! 9 minutes over 20 miles on a bike is an absolute eternity during a race. So job done then on building a fast road race bike. If I can find an extra 2mph then we are looking fairly competitive at age group duathlon. All I now need is to get some serious mileage and get myself into good bike shape. At the moment I've all the gear, but no idea !!!