Mike's Bike Blog

Join me in welcoming the newest bike to the stable, a Fuji Aloha Time Trial (TT) bike. It kind of happened out of the blue and quite unexpected. I have been oggling TT bikes for almost a year, watching CraigsList for a deal trying to come up with ways to get another free bike. An opportunity presented itself when Spin City went out of business. I hate to see any local business close it's doors especially a bike shop but I was able to get the bike way under my imaginary budget.

The bike itself is very entry level, evident with it's 9 speed drivetrain powered with a compact crank. I'm not sure what Fuji is thinking when they put a compact on a TT bike, most TT cranks have 54 or 55T big ring (standard big rings on a crank are 53T). The crank will be the first thing to be upgraded. If you follow me on twitter you might have seen my tweet looking for a used 53T or bigger Shimano compatible crank.

I took her down to Peter at Southwest Cycle Sport for a fitting where Peter confirmed what I'd already known, I'm not that flexible. From the picture below you can see that I'm not bending at the hips and I'm arching my back to compensate. I've been working on that with some stretching but also working on my position on the trainer, I'll post up that process another time.

I am a little worried if a low end TT bike will be any faster than my Orca, thus why I don't want to spend much money on it. I did give it a little test, on a course I averaged 20.5 mph in a 20 minute TT on the Orca I averaged 20.8 on the TT bike. The time on the TT bike was a little faster and the power to accomplish this was 9 watts less on the TT bike. On the fast section of this course I spun out the compact crank in the 11 so when I get a new crank that should help. I'll also do more testing with a route I have more data to compare. I do plan to race it at the Cronometro. I suppose I can do 2 races, 1 with the TT bike and race the Orbea in the road bike classification race. In case anybody is wondering about the 20.6 mph as that is not very impressive, I have a disclaimer, the course is very short, .86 miles so there's a lot of braking to do a 180 to turn around at both ends. Not a great course to use to gauge the performance of the bike.

I'll be posting up my thoughts and experiences on riding a Time Trial bike as I'll be riding it almost everyday till the March 13th Cronometro race. For now welcome to the garage!