I’m busy preparing for the TCRno11 in July this year. This requires a lot of training but also I need to upgrade some things on my bikes for such an epic ride.
What is TCRno11? It’s the Trans-continental race, 11th edition, this year it runs from North-West Spain to Romania, via 5 checkpoints and associated parcours (preset course) routes. In total it will be around 5000km we think. And we have to do that in 17 days to be considered in the general classification.
(I’ll write another blog about that one as we’re doing it for our honeymoon!👰)
I’ve put a load on new stuff on my trusty steel-framed Dawes Super Galaxy (Dora) to adapt it for this mammoth ride. Although she’s not finished yet!
<insert photo here> – can’t believe I don’t have one already!
Dora is a beautiful bike, if I do say so myself. She is metallic blue with black accents and I’ve dressed her up with some super comfy and grippy Supercaz oil-slick bar tap*. It’s currently on a spring deal at Amazon for £30.
Then I’ve added the Redshift Kitchen Sink Handlebars*, for multiple hand positions and teamed then up with the Redshift suspension stem* after hearing great things from several other TCR riders. Then for even more comfort I added the grips*, which can be fitted to any bars, not just redshift.
All these items are in the spring deal, which is amazing – wish I’d known! Luckily for you though, I’ve now tested them out on several rides, including a 500km multi-day ride to Devon in February. Yes it was that week with the good weather!
Altogether, that’s a pretty expensive upgrade to my cycling cockpit, coming in at around £400, but that is a lot cheaper than a new bike and per kilometer it’s less than 10p and did I mention it’s my honeymoon!
The upgrades did not stop there though but let me explain/justify why I needed to make some further changes. I’m not the best climber and we will also need to do a lot of climbing, there will be at least 5 mountain passes, if not more. We will be cycling through the Picos de Europa; then the Pyrenees, taking in the highest mountain pass, the Tourmalet; the Alps, via a gravel pass (wonderful!); then we cross the Appenines, maybe twice – still route planning; then the Sharr mountains, part of Dinaric Alps and then hopefully skirting around the mountains in Bulgaria before a flattish finish, I think in Romania.
So I needed to have a better climbing gear and do a lot of work on upping my climbing fitness. I had a play with my cassette and derailluer and found that it could be quite tricky to get the set up I needed.
Dora runs an adapted SRAM Red 22 groupset, adapted because it’s 1x. This meant I was limited to basically the large road cassette rather than any MTB gearing, but I knew I needed that larger gearing. I played around with a SRAM NX derailliuer, but it’s not compatible with the SRAM red shifters. I was frustrated as it really improved the hills I could tackle but was effectively un-indexed and therefore not fit to be used in that way.
Then I discovered ‘Mullet Drivetrains’ and suddenly my prayers were answered. You can read more about the Mullet drivetrain here, but effectively it is a way of connecting a road shifter to an MTB derailleur and cassette. In order to do this you need an after-market kit to convert the ratchet in your shifter to exact actuation, and bonus it also converts it to 12-speed.
An awesome company called Ratio Technology make several kits that allow you to replace the ratchet in your shifter. And then by making a further adjustment, by way of adding a fin, to the derailleur you can install a fancy new 12 speed derailleur and cassette with a huge 50-11 range.
I paired the kit with a huge Sram Eagle Casette* and fancy 12-speed flat-topped chain*, and spare connectors*. Followed the video from Ratio Technologies, ate the Kendal mint cake and had a fancy new drivetrain. It is bl**dy awesome! I still can’t quite manage some of the tougher climbs, I had to walk most of Winnats pass in the peak district last weekend, but I did get up some other pretty steep stuff and with some more training and more weight loss my power to weight ratio will improve further.
Overall that was another £500 upgrade, so I’ll be wearing a second-hand wedding dress for sure in June. I’ll get a lot more use out of this though!
I’m now just testing out some inner-bar-ends, I wanted to get these ones by SQlabs*, but I was worried I wouldn’t be able to mount them on the Jones loop of the Kitchen Sink handlebars. So I thought I’d test out the concept with some cheaper ones* that I found, just to see if I like the position, the jury is still out at the moment.
Then I know I need to buy some decent luggage. I currently have a heavy rack and when we went to Devon, I used the trusty Ortlieb pannier bag, but that’s not very aerodynamic and a bit too heavy for the race. So I’m looking at options now. I’ll put that in a future post and get Rob to tell you about his fancy *new* bike and bags. And I’ll get matching bottle cages too.
Happy Cycling!
Claire x
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