Jon's Jibber-jabber

Last year, my wife wanted to buy something where she did not have to reach down for her water bottle.  She is not the greatest bike handler and was uncomfortable reaching down for the bottle off of the down tube.  At that time, she did not have aerobars and vertical bottle mounts for the handlebars were not practical for triathlon.  You can use them on your beach cruiser but it is inconvenient on a road bike.  So we picked up a Speedfil.  The Speedfil standard model fits on your downtube where the water bottle goes but has a tube straw that goes up to your handlebars or your aerobats.   The Speedfil is meant to be used in aero like a between the arms (BTA) bottle but resides on your frame.  This way, it can hold a much larger capacity than anything that could be mounted to the bars.  The current model holds about 40 ounces of liquid.  It has a sliding groove for the screws allowing for adjustment of placement on the tube to account for va...

Last year, we signed up for the First Watch Sarasota Half Marathon because of a very good promotional price they were running.   Sarasota is about an hour and ten minutes south of our house so it is a local race to us.   We had heard good things about it and several people we know were going to do it.  We discovered soon that this year the race fell around spring break and hotel prices were out of this world.  Being so close, we decided to stay at home and drive down.    Race Week  Since this was a training run, I did not taper.   In fact, this was an increased volume week for me.  I had increased my swimming this week but unfortunately had a long bike set up for Saturday afternoon.  Having no choice, I did the bike hoping my legs would be recovered enough to at least finish this race.  Race Day Ok so races that fall on the "spring forward" day are evil.  I recommend not doing this.  Ever.  Because we lost an hour, mo...