I bought my Cervelo S1 back in February but because of the crappy weather I barely got to ride it until just a few weeks ago. The temperature has been rising steadily, and I’m pretty happy if it’s anything above 11-12 degrees. Some people might not think that this is anything to get excited about, but after spending close to $3000 on a new bike I’m pretty happy when I can ride it and not worry about losing various parts of my body – especially my face – to frost bite.
I’m starting slowly, but doing about 150km a week right now. I can’t get over how great this bike feels and the speeds that I can reach on it. I used to think I was going pretty fast when I hit 45km/h on my mountain bike, but I now blow that away regularly. A little while ago I went for a ride with my friend Robin and I was doing 53km/h on the flat stretch of the Lakeshore bike path just west of Ontario Place. Now this is my first road bike, so I’m not sure what kind of numbers are normal here but I was very impressed. On top of all that, the bike is incredibly light and surprisingly comfortable.
There is one annoying (and potentially dangerous) thing about it though: I don’t know if this is unique to my frame size (I have the 51cm), but if my pedals are horizontally level, I can only turn my wheel slightly before it hits the tip of my shoe. This doesn’t really affect me while I’m riding, but if I ever need to make a sharp turn to avoid an obstacle or something like that I need to be very conscious of where my feet are otherwise I could easily fly over the handlebars. I need to ask someone about this because I find it strange that the geometry would allow that, although I guess this bike isn’t really made for sharp turns ;).
Anyway, now that the temperature is rising, we just need to get past all the rain. It’s supposed to rain every day this week, but at least it’s not snowing.
