Trans Am Bike Race / TransAm / TABR

She was talking about a dodgy cleat position. I was tempted to say it’s a rookie thing to mess up but then I remembered that most of us have made a race much harder by doing something similar at some point.

Both my TABRs were fucked by stupid mistakes like that. I mean, not ended but very close.

A rookie error would be using new shoes at the start. A slightly more complicated error but still fucking amateur hour is setting your seat height to a line that's totally wrong.

Yeah 20+ medical answers lol. If his creamy ass finished ahead of mine I'd probably want to ask him about that post.

"Utilizing any form of social media for help (ie. conjure ‘trail magic’) is also forbidden."

Didn't Donnach or was it Adrian DQ himself one year because he asked for help with something on FB?

A variation of that is adjusting your saddle height mid ride and not tightening the clamp properly then having your saddle gradually slip down over the rest of the ride so that you find, as soon as you stop riding, your knees have become fucked.
Me on pbp 2015. Had to wheel my bike across Paris to the eurostar the next day as I couldn't ride up anything steeper than 0%

I think that's how mine happened. It's the only explanation I can come up with. I had a final fitting, rode 2x400k audaxes back to back and THEN marked the saddle height before packing the bike. Can only assume during the 2x400k weekend the post had slipped and then I marked the height and set it to that in the US. #fuckwit

80 year old Thomas Camero is out, one of the female pair looks out too. The (so far) small scratch list is filled with people mentioned in this thread 😢

Curse of the Commentators

That happened to me several times. It always happens gradually enough that you don't notice it until you're 20mm lower and your knees a blown.

The Ergon split seat post I use is great for reducing the noise but it seems natural to assume it's more prone to slipping than a solid post. I've tried a bunch of different collars and I think I've got it locked now, finally.

Thomas out with suspect UTI. That's rough. Dirtbagging your way across the US is going to challenge any immune system. Big ol' hat tip for him for plugging away at 80. I hope I'm as game at that age!

Haven't read anything more on Mateo, presumably his early crash fatigue finally caught up with him. I'm sure he'll be back for another shot.

Yeah it's quiet on what happened to him.

Abdullah is doing an extremely in-depth video breakdown of the race so far I just saw on the FB group. Not sure how to link it, he might be doing it on Instagram live or something? Fascinating to hear his thoughts and reminds me of when Skinny used to do breakdowns of the race!

Always put a ring a gorilla tape at the seatpost seattube junction. Then you know.

Kraig Pauli was nearly 200 miles ahead of Evan Deutsch before ED started to move again, but KP has been increasing his lead steadily. Not too thrilling as a race so far, let's hope ED somehow catches up, but right now it doesn't look as if that will happen. He's made up about 18 miles while KP's been resting, let's see how close he gets.

I put a triangle of nail polish with the point right on the line. That way if it slips and scrapes tape/polish I can still use the angles to know where the line should've been.

Kraig looks to be taking 4 hours sleep but Evan's banking much more. Tortoise and hare (relatively speaking) but I think Evan's stops are too generous to recoup. Kraig does know what he's doing so I doubt he's going to overcook it.

Still a long way to go. But with fewer riders you do tend to get bigger gaps between each more quickly. Not much you can do about that given travel limits and stuff.

I usually tape it, sometimes dot it with whiteout pen, but neither matters if you set it and it moves before you mark it.

Also those BBB Seatpost Fixers are quite good for this.

An interesting race is Kraig vs the record set by Abdullah. Though yes, no high drama so far.

Normally the tracker has the record on it doesn't it? I can't see it on this though

Yeah they did for Lael's. I kind of want to email them and ask.

Yes, I was wondering about that, but couldn't find a comparator. When you said that Abdullah's commenting, I was wondering if he talks about Kraig vs. the record, too. Shame he's not in the mix, but who knows if he could ever reach again the form he had in 2019.

Perhaps Kraig will rest a little longer this time, given that he's at the bottom of the highest pass?

A week into the race, with a decent margin; I'd be investing in a solid recovery night of 7-8 hours to close the Rockies chapter and prep for the plains.

It's not a hard climb or anything, it's just higher. The harder stuff has been. Obviously depends what state he's in but I'd want to get through Silverthorne and Breckenridge and over Hoosier so I could descend and get into the warmer states sooner rather than later.