On the fixed ride file, I seem to have lost a couple of minutes from the end of the power section (I hit Stop just past Smeatharpe when the Garmin showed 30:00 and the fixed file before Smeatharpe at 28:04) but otherwise the data looks very good. I didn’t beat the power on my prior candidate CP30 ride but I learnt something. My ride was out into the wind then back along much of the same route with the wind in my favour – my power charted against speed is here:

In a nutshell, when the riding was harder (into the wind) and the speed lower, the power was higher, yet when the riding got easier and I could cycle at 20-28 mph my power dropped. It could, of course, be power fatigue but from studying the data and recalling the ride I don’t believe that was nearly as material as the wind effect. Where there were slight rises on the easy half, my power rose, and when there were slight descents on the hard half my power reading fell, confirming that an easier ride makes for a lower CP30.

Next time I try to set a CP30 value I’ll do it somewhere that’s either gently uphill all the way or at least doesn’t have such a pronounced “there and back” character as this route.

My other problem is the practical one that I wrote about before: the heart rate information on my Garmin is often grossly wrong. Yesterday actually it wasn’t too bad, but look at the output I got last weekend when I was doing anaerobic intervals on the turbo trainer:

The flatish part at the first 10 minutes of each of the charts represents me waiting for the 800 to report my heart rate at a correct/survivable level. In fact, I’d been kicking around doing not much at all for some time before this, waiting for my HR to stop oscillating in the 220-250 bpm range. It didn’t, so I got on the turbo trainer, hoping that after a few minutes of gentle pedalling I’d get a sweat up and then it would work.

The part where the HR chart goes into a linear downslope is me taking the damn thing off and trying Paula’s. That showed numbers that I could use for my work-out; then, after three intervals, my own one was showing usable numbers too so I switched back to that.

You can see the form of the exercise – I pedal at a cadence of about 115 rpm, corresponding to something over 500W, until my HR gets to 160 bpm. Then I take it easy until I reach a recovery rate of 134 bpm. Then I start again. Within a 20 minute window I managed this twelve times. The goal is to be able squeeze in more as I get more conditioned.

I confirmed that I don’t have an exotic heart abnormality by wearing the Garmin while I was on a gym bike that measures my heart rate through metal plates in the handlebars. While the Garmin was off in the 200′s the gym bike was showing normal readings of, say, half of that. Looking online, I see that this is quite common and I’ve tried all of the proposed remedies. Naturally, my first recourse was to change the battery in the strap. I also tried licking the electrode pads on the strap. And I tried using my old Garmin 500, which had the same problem, confirming my view that the issue is with the strap itself. After all of that, I tried the more quixotic ideas from the web: moving the strap to the side so that it sits differently on my ribs, then trying having the electrodes at the back; putting the transmitter on upside down; dampening the strap; applying electrode gel. None of these changes brought the slightest improvement. The only path that seems to have led to some kind of increase in stability has been washing the strap after every ride.

Since the Edge 800 is effectively unusable for protocols that require a semi-accurate HR reading, I decided to press my power meter into greater service. I use it on the turbo trainer but tend not to use it so much out of doors, if only because (a) it means swapping over the turbo-specific tyre for a road tyre and (b) the Mavic OpenPro into which the CycleOps PowerTap unit is built is my least exciting road wheel. Neither of these issues is a big deal.

To prepare myself for a few weeks of power-based training, I set out this morning on my Felt (with PowerTap wheel) to assess my CP30: the critical power level that I can hold for 30 minutes. In all of 2011 I only had one session on the road of about this duration when I had the PowerTap on the bike. Then, I had managed an average of 264W; this morning I was hopeful that I could improve on this. At about 9 am Paula and I drove out to the car park at Staple Hill and set off on the level roads around Smeatharpe. We rode together for about half an hour, and then I saved that part of the ride as a separate warm-up activity on my Garmin. Then I upped the power and increased speed while Paula carried on with her tri training. Ironically, my heart rate readings were fine: in the warm-up I was averaging around 130 bpm with no rogue high values, and during the power phase my heart rate showed a stable and credible 170.

Exactly 30 minutes later I hit the Stop and then the Reset button on the 800 to save the ride. When I tried to load it to see my stats the unit froze. It often does this when scrolling through the maps page; it’s a known defect and hitting the power button to bring up the brightness settings usually restores control to the screen. This time it didn’t. When I tried turning it off and on again it wouldn’t re-start at all, hanging on the “load maps” message.

Back home, I can retrieve the FIT file off the device but it won’t load into Garmin Connect or Garmin Training Center or Golden Cheetah. Nor can I find a Mac-compatible utility to load the FIT file into non-binary format or to repair it. There’s a PC-based programme that looks just the ticket and the guy who wrote it very kindly says he’ll have a look at my file for me tomorrow. I’m more hopefully of hearing from him than I am of getting anything from Garmin Support, but you never know.

Meanwhile, my G800 is unusable. When Emily had the same problem (it’s not just me) she had to delete all of her courses, and then it worked again. I tried that and it hasn’t worked for me, though I suspect that if I delete all of my activities, or even just the corrupted last one, the device might lurch back into life. Until it does, I’ll try using my old Garmin 500. In London, that means cycling for miles while its ineffective GPS locater fails to find any satellites – a feature that’s much improved on the G800. Despite the thing driving me up the wall, it’s so useful when it works that I’ll have it going again by next weekend, even if I have to resort to restoring factory settings.

Some of these, like VO2 Max – the maximum amount of oxygen I can process – provide interesting comparisons to age/gender norms and hence an index of fitness. More directly useful, though, are the specific exercise recommendations – the effectiveness of these will determine how valuable the metabolic assessment ultimately turns out to be to me. The first is simply a specification of the best zone for fat burning and endurance training. The second is a set of anaerobic interval sessions to improve fitness, essentially by nudging up the heart rate level at which I can still get a useful fraction of energy from fat rather than carbs and also improving my efficiency at processing lactate build up. The technique for this is to pinpoint and then exercise around my Lactate Threshold Heart Rate (LTHR).

One of the anaerobic intervals session that serves as a progress benchmark is to do a three minute warm-up then see how many times I can get my heart rate up to 90% of its max and then back down to 15 beats under my LTHR in 20 minutes. I gave this a go on the turbo trainer yesterday. At the outset I was undermined by stupid HR readings from my Garmin 800. Idly pedalling away with no effort, the Garmin would show a reading in the 220′s. Then, when trying as hard as I could to push up my heart rate, I’d struggle to get it over 140. The readings, as so often at the start of a session, were grossly wrong. This is a consistent problem that I’ve had with the 800 and, before I had the 800, with the Garmin 500. Emily has also had erroneous HR readings from both her old Garmin Edge 500 and her Garmin Edge 800, though in her case the readings were more prone to be too low rather than too high. Paula has had similar problems with her new Garmin Forerunner 610. I’ve replaced the battery in the strap and tried wetting the electrodes but I still get these dodgy numbers. I guess that Garmins need you to have been exercising for a while before the HR readings are trustworthy. Maybe they require a degree of vasodilation or maybe exercise changes the electrochemical properties of the skin. Even when warmed up, the 800 is prone to throw some stupid numbers – often, for example, when going very quickly downhill with no effort I’ll get a stupidly high HR reading.

Anyhow, by my third of fourth go I managed to get some sensible numbers on my anaerobic intervals session yesterday. Here’s how it went (the first two minutes are warm-up):

You can see that I managed to get in 11 cycles in my 20 minutes. The charts here are from Garmin Training Center. Golden Cheetah has the most/best analytics and Garmin Connect has the cleanest graphics but neither of these have enough precision to confirm, as I can see in Training Center, that my HR did indeed fall to 134 bpm – my recovery point – each time.

You can also see that in getting up to 160 bpm – 90% of my max HR – my HR in every case skidded some way past it before starting to fall. If I wanted to game the exercise to cram in more cycles I’d maybe ease off the power some beats earlier. You can further see that my recoveries became more ragged over the course of the 20 minutes. This is very much how it felt: much of the session was spent pedalling at an easy spin, waiting for my heart rate to return to 134. It’s very different from the power intervals that I’ve done before. We’ll see whether, over time, I can fit more than 11 cycles in the 20 minutes and whether this increases my LTHR.

Today, I tried the endurance exercise. My aim here was to do a moderate ride – I found a 29 mile circuit that is largely dead flat – and get round it keeping my HR in the range 110-149 bpm. Again, I had my Garmin 800 HR problem. While I was standing over the bike outside the house, when my actual HR was probably about 80 bpm, the Garmin was reading 170. In frustration, I pushed the strap into me a bit to settle it down against my skin – the Garmin rocketed up to 225. After a while I set off anyway and cycled steadily. Charting the Calories per minute against Average HR, both as recorded on my Garmin, for each mile after the ride gives this:

The first nine miles, during which time I don’t believe that the Garmin was showing the correct HR, are coloured in red. You can see that the rest of the dots are neatly arranged along a line. Removing the red points clarifies this:

I suspect that the only reason that the points don’t actually lie on the line is because I’m averaging over whole miles. If I could parse the Garmin activity file directly and plot each point it records, I believe that it would reveal that Garmin models calories per minute as a linear function of HR, using age, gender, weight and exercise frequency to set the slope.

If I compare this with how my metabolic assessment tells me that I burn calories as my HR changes, using the same mile points, I get this:

It’s apparent that the metabolic assessment found me burning more calories than the Garmin model posits, though with a very similar profile. This is borne out by the same analysis run on a longer ride where I was cycling at a higher intensity:

The cleanest way to reveal the essential difference is to take a plot such as this and fit Cals/min as a function of Average HR as in one of the charts above, but now for both the Garmin model and the metabolic findings:

Because the metabolic assessment was based on actual readings from actual me, it has more shape at the tails, though is still somewhat linear. The Garmin model is evidently dead linear (at least in this range). I’m due to have a debriefing with Richard sometime soon and I’ll ask him if he has any thoughts on why the Garmin might think I’m burning less energy than his assessment suggests I am.

Finally with the charts, it’s also interesting to see how the metabolic assessment believes that my calorie burn breaks down into fat cals and carb cals as my heart rate increases:

At <= 140 bpm or thereabouts I’m burning more cals from fat than carbs but then it switches over. On the ride charted here, if I have the maths right, the Garmin thinks I burned 2,231 cals (no maths required for that) while the logic of the metabolic reports suggests that I burned 981 cals from fat and a further 2,485 cals from carbs. Hmm.

So how useful is this? It’s too soon to say and I’ll write a follow-up in a few months. There are practical issues that will affect the extent to which I can act on the recommendations of the assessment (setting aside all of the diet and lifestyle stuff, which I’m not even going to start on). Doing the endurance session 1-2 times per week and the intervals 2-3 times per week (avoiding anaerobic work on consecutive days) plus doing strength work etc etc, as recommended, wouldn’t allow much time for the cycling that I do now and actually enjoy. I’m a recreational cyclist and not an athlete so I’ll do what I like. But I think there probably is a way to weave in some of the new routines into my pattern of activity and I’ll see how it goes.

One thing’s for sure – if I’m going to do more work on the turbo trainer I need a new exercise playlist. I’ve been shuffling through these tracks for a little bit too long:

I did more miles in 2011 than 2010, clearing over 6,000 by the end of the year. The pattern of seasonality was similar:

Both years saw a peak, unsurprisingly, around the 330 mile Tour of Wessex after a trough in Feb/Mar. This year the trough was caused by the break to my wrist in February. Both years saw the start of a decline in the miles as winter set in, though this year I bucked it in December.

My first ride in 2012, yesterday on New Year’s Day, was a fabulous 64 mile circuit that started with a lumpy coastal section taking in Lyme Regis, Seaton and Sidmouth before turning inland along the banks of the Otter to return home. Here’s a snap I took in Sidmouth just after I fixed a puncture in a bus shelter, escaping from the rain:

Directly ahead, you can see Peak Hill enveloped in cloud. The only way to really remember how steep these hills are is to do them again.

I was hoping I could kick off this year with the Glastonbury 100 Miler but it’s been moved to later in the year, which, for me, is a big shame: it was a great January leg loosener. I’ll probably do the same route on my own later this month.

Loops like this around Somerset are the bedrock of my cycling. Mostly I do them on my own but it’s also nice to ride with other people, and organised events bring an atmosphere of occasion to the day. The 2012 events I’ve signed up to so far are:

1. The Lionheart Sportive in March. This is actually a roll-over entry for Paula, Zoe and me from last year, when we’d entered and then I broke my wrist. Our friend Steve has signed up for this too.
2. The Somerset Gran Fondo in early May. This is a 180k ride starting in Cheddar Gorge and heading onto Exmoor. I love this kind of riding.
3. The Tour of Wessex in June. My event of the year.
4. The Beast of Exmoor in October. I almost feel that I have to.

None of these ticks the innovation box. For that, I think I have to do some riding abroad. I intend – I’d even say I plan – to ride up Tourmalet in early September, hopefully with friends but, if necessary, alone. Other than that, I’m on the look-out for opportunities that I can’t yet foresee.

For any who is interested (though I’m not sure why you would be), here’s how my geared road bikes compare in weight as measured by me in real life.

First the Astraeus. It’s a 60 cm frameset bought directly from Van Nicholas with the following components:

• Ultegra groupset
• 3T 44 cm Ergonova bars
• Felt stem
• Specialized Avatar saddle
• ProVibe carbon seatpost
• 2 x VN Ti bottle cages
• Shimano PD M770 pedals
• Plastic crud catcher
• Garmin cadence sensor and Edge 800 mount

The weight without wheels is 6.12 kg. With  Mavic Elites shod with a 23 mm Conti Grand Prix 4 Season tyre on the front and a 25mm Conti Gator Hardshell (and Ultegra 11-28t cassette) at the back the total bike weight as I ride it, ex tools and bottles, is 8.73 kg.

Next, my Felt Z15. It’s a 58 cm frameset with these components:

• DuraAce groupset
• 3T 42 cm Ergonova bars and stem
• Felt saddle and seatpost
• 2 x Easton bottle cages
• Same pedals as the Ultegra
• Garmin cadence sensor/mount.

Without wheels the weight is 5.28 kg. With Fulcrum Racing Zeroes shod in 23 mm Schwalbe Ultremo ZX’s front and rear (and a DA cassette) the total bike weight, as I ride it ex tools and bottles, is 7.66 kg.

Finally, the Cervelo R3. This is also a 58 cm frameset set up similarly to the Felt with:

• DA groupset
• 3T bars/stem
• Condor seatpost (awaiting replacement by Condor with the 3T specified)
• Specialized Ronin saddle
• Shimano PD A600 pedals
• 2 x Elite bottle cages
• Somerset/Dorset/Devon mud.

Sans wheels, this tips the scales at 4.77 kg. With my new Zipp 404 Firecrest clinchers wrapped in Vittori Open Pave tyres (and the same DA cassette as the Felt) the total bike weight, ex bottles and tools, is 7.34 kg.

This is the set-up I’ve been enjoying since I bought it. For any rides that are all about hill climbs, I’d switch the Fulcrums onto the R3, which brings its weight down to 7.15 kg. The Fulcrums don’t spoil the Cervelo’s looks either:

While the bikes certainly feel as though their riding speeds are in weight order (lighter = faster), I can’t believe that weight alone makes so much difference. There’s only three or four pounds, or a bag and a half of sugar, between the heaviest and lightest configuration. My own weight fluctuates more than this all the time. And if I wanted to save the weight difference between the R3 (with Zipps) and the Felt (with Fulcrums) through an equipment change I could do it at little cost by getting a lighter helmet and leaving my gilet at home.

To see where I was riding faster/slower than I had on the Astraeus, I used my Garmin 800′s Training Partner feature, defining Saturday’s ride as a Course and tracking my progress today against how I fared then. On the relevant page you get a little graphic of two bikes indicating whether you’re ahead or behind and two numbers: Time Ahead/Behind and Distance Ahead/Behind. Initially I focused on the relative distance. I found, consistently, that on the downhills my relative distance was increasing quickly whereas on the uphills I was tending to give it back. This surprised me as the R3 is lighter than the Astraeus and should be differentially better on the uphills, which is how it actually felt. My route took me down into Axminster and then up a short, sharp hill into the town centre. I was sure that I gunned up it quicker than I had on the Astraeus but the Garmin showed me losing a significant amount of ground in a very short run. On the longer hill out of Axminster, I found that I was steadily losing an increasing amount of the distance I had gained on the descent into Axminster. About halfway up the long drag, this turned around and I started gaining ground again.

Once I had made it up to the Crewkerne road I stopped for a banana and realised what will have occurred to more alert readers more quickly than it did to me: the pattern I was observing was exactly what I should expect on a faster bike. You can skip to the next para if you see why already, but, if not, imagine a faster and a slower rider setting out on the same route, which, let’s say, is initially level. The faster rider will steadily pull away. Then, imagine that a steep hill appears. As the first rider ascends he’ll slow down markedly and the distance between him and the slower rider will compress. When the slower rider reaches the hill the distance will start to open up again as the faster rider will, we presume, also be climbing more quickly. Then, when the first rider reaches the top and goes over the other side and starts going downhill the distance will begin to open up dramatically until the slower ride starts going downhill too.

Having figured this out, I switched my attention to the Time Ahead shown on the Training Partner screen. As I rode, post banana, I could see this ticking up monotonically until I got home. Naturally, the fact that I could compare my progress against Saturday’s ride would itself tend to make me go faster but the extent of it surprised me. On Saturday I covered the 32 miles in 2 hours, 14 mins, 7 secs; today I did it in 1:57:33, about 16.5 minutes faster. My impression is that the bike made all the difference. Here’s a chart, from Garmin Training Center, showing the profile of the rides and the comparative speeds:

It’s irritating that as the miles progress Saturday’s ride opens up a slight erroneous amount of distance relative to today’s, leading the speeds get slightly out of sync. Even so, it’s clear that on the Cervelo (shown in red) I was notably quicker all the way along than on the Astraeus (shown in blue), both on uphills and down. My fastest speed today was 37 mph, compared to only 32.4 mph on Saturday. The difference is even clearer when comparing pace at each mile:

Here it’s clear that my pace on every mile was quicker, and usually very significantly quicker, than it was last time. (The only ostensible exception – at 20 miles – is seen to be an artefact of the misalignment of distance if you look at the actual speeds over that mile from the chart above.) And the Astraeus is by no means a slow bike.

I’m not going to extrapolate what this implies to my event pace until I’ve done a lot more rides on the R3 over routes that I’ve done many times on both the Astraeus and the Felt. But this does suggest that my feeling that it’s a very quick bike, which I reported before, should translate, to some extent, into faster times on those events where I’m doing my best to get round the course quickly.

I asked the guy who was serving me whether they’d sold any of the uber-expensive Cervelo r5ca framesets. Apparently, they’ve sold four – I don’t know whether this is more or less than I would have expected. Confirming the suspicion that you could only buy one of these if you have more money than you know what to do with, it transpires that the shop is having trouble getting hold of one of the purchasers who hasn’t yet swung by to pick it up.

If your brain is addled by comparing it to the r5ca or even the R5, the price of the R3 seems almost reasonable. Of course it’s not, but it looks fantastic. This isn’t only my opinion – several people I passed in the streets around London told me the same thing. Partly, it’s the New Bike effect – anything in carbon in black and red looks striking when new, and there are plenty of such bikes to choose from. But the R3 really does look the biz.

Geometrically, it’s quite similar to both my Astraeus and my Felt but in every respect more committed. They all have sloping top tubes that have a vertically ovalized join at the head tube and narrow down towards the seat tube; the R3 narrows most. The head tube on the R3 also fattens towards the bottom. The Felt and the Astraues both have down tubes that also ovalize vertically at the head tube and then ovalize horizontally to make a fat join across the bottom bracket; the R3 has a “squoval” down tube (work it out or look it up) with a massive junction at the bottom bracket, which itself is asymmetric to transmit the same power along the non-drive side as the drive side. All three have chunky chain stays for direct power transmission from pedal to rear wheel and thin seat stays to disperse road noise en route to the saddle. But the picture shows just how pencil thin the seat stays on the R3 are.

Weightwise, the R3 is about 400g lighter than the Felt despite the fact that the Fulcrums on the Felt are a bit lighter than the Zipps. The Astraeus weighs about 800g more than the Felt, depending upon how I configure it. However you weigh them all, the difference between the R3 and the Astraeus is less then the difference between my weight in summer when I was putting in more miles and my winter weight now.

The most important and expensive component on my build is also the one that most enhances its kerb appeal: the Zipp (“Speed Weaponry”) 404 Firecrest carbon clincher wheels. Pete recommended Vittoria Pave tyres. They have a green band round the breaker strip and I wouldn’t have chosen them myself but they actually look very classy.

I can’t say that the Dura Ace group set “saved me money” but it was way cheaper than the DA Di2 and, I think, no more expensive than the Ultegra Di2. Even though electronic shifters are fast becoming de rigeur I’m more than happy to stay mechanical for now, as I wrote before. I was very pleased to see that Condor built the bike with Jagwire cables. The bars are my favourite 3T Team Ergonova’s, with matching stem.

I’ve fitted both my Tempo and the Astraeus with Specialized BG Avatar saddles. They’re very comfortable but too heavy for the R3′s lightweight spec, and I’m not sure whether the Avatar is even a current model. Pete pointed me instead towards Specialized’s Romin Pro as an alternative. It has a reassuringly wide channel all the way along it and despite being very firm it has the flared-at-the-back shape that I find much more comfortable than flatties like the Fizik Arione.

I like being able to slide up the back, especially when I’m in the drops and I’m hoping that the shape alone compensates for the lack of padding.

At some point I’ll get myself some proper road shoes and pedals to go with them. But for now, I like to be able to swap around the shoes that I have and walk for as far as I need to without risking a clown fall. Accordingly, I recently bought some Shimano Ultegra PD-A600 touring pedals. They’re quite light SPD’s with a platform unlike the SPD’s that I’ve been riding for the past several years. I tried them out on the Astraeus for a couple of weeks before bringing them along to Condor to put on the Cervelo and I’m very pleased with them. I was also happy that when I got them (from the aptly-named pedalon.co.uk, which had 33% off) they were a neutral grey/silver rather than the light blue shown in most photos.

So, how does it ride?

My very first impression was just how snappy it is. In the same way that the Felt just feels faster than the Astraeus, so the R3 feels faster again. Every watt that you put into the cranks feels as if it drives you forward. On the few sustained runs I could get in London, my first being around Regent’s Park, the R3 (thanks, probably, to the Zipps) also feels as though it holds the speed better. Unfortunately, the conditions haven’t permitted me to do meaningful straightforward time tests against previous runs on other bikes. Apart from the traffic, which was heavier than normal, when cycling over to Paddington, the traffic lights on Edgeware Road were literally swaying in the wind.

Back in Somerset, I had a similar experience: wet, greasy roads and strong winds conspired against record times. First, I did a 12.5 mile moderately hilly circuit that I’ve done a number of times this year. The last time I did it, a couple of months or so ago on the Felt, I stormed round in 41 minutes. On the Cervelo it took 5 minutes longer. It was analogous to driving a new Maserati around a track that you’ve done many times on a souped up Clio: you know the new car is faster but you probably won’t slam it round at the same speed on your first go. Apart from new owner circumspection, the wind was an even bigger factor.

Next, I did a route that I like down the fast hill to Staple Fitzpaine followed by the return up the hill through Corfe. My time was better than my recent ones on the Astraeus and the Felt but not quite as fast as I was getting round it in the summer when the weather was sometimes better and I was fitter and lighter.

Although I have excuses, I was a bit pissed not to have set any new best times on a bike that feels very conspicuously faster. Partly in frustration, I went out for a 7 mile sprint round the (also hilly) 7 mile block that I’ve done twice on the Astraeus in the past fortnight. Here, I managed to take a substantial amount of time (well over 10%, which is a lot) off my recent form.

Today, I went for a longer ride to see how comfortable the R3 is over some dozens of miles. With better weather than we’ve had so far this month, I cycled down to Lyme Regis, stopping off in Axminster to pick up a pie from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s cafe/deli to enjoy overlooking the sea.

I like the feel of the bike on the road. On some surfaces, such as the Marshvale road from Axminster to Crewkerne, more buzz comes through than on the (titanium) Astraeus but it’s as comfortable as the Felt. I need to do properly long rides to see whether this gets draining but I doubt it: rather than feeling harsh, it’s positive and sporty. On downhills, the R3 is excellent, but the Felt is pretty sharp too and, on the right road, I even can do 50 mph on the Astraeus without it getting sketchy; I suspect that the R3 will turn out to be the best of the lot though. However, the situation where the R3 already sets itself apart is on short climbs that you can muscle up: it’s as if the bike is willing you to put in some grunt and roll over the top as quickly as you can.

The Zipps feel great. When I’m pedalling they make the whoosing sound that I’ve admired on other riders’ deep rim hoops around Regent’s Park. On more or less level ground and downhill, they do seem to hold speed and I doubt that any penalty on the uphills is very noticeable. I had read in reviews that in crosswinds you can sometimes feel a gentle push on the front wheel and it’s true. I’ve had plenty of chance to discover any unwelcome strong wind response and it’s not been even slightly worrying. I’d do the Exmoor Beast on the 404′s in foul weather without a second thought.

These are just my initial impressions after 113 miles. If it doesn’t come across, I love the R3 and couldn’t be happier with it. I’ll post a more considered and meaningful review when I’ve done 1,000 miles – I’ll make sure a ride up Dunkery Beacon features. The 1,000 may not come round too quickly as I’ll be doing most of my bad weather miles on the Astraeus and the Tempo.

This shows the extra expended by a typical non-drafting rider at varying speeds on different frames. Joerg’s conclusion was that the difference between the R and the S – e.g. 11W at 35 km/h – is inconsequential. I’d seen the same chart and thought of it in the context of doing closer to 40 km/h on Park Loops – then, the fact that I’d be saving ~20W on the S5 struck me as material. But Joerg’s right: most of my riding is done on long, hilly rides where at the corresponding lower speeds the power saving is minimal.

At a different part of their website, Cervelo have a presentation entitled, “The eternal question” that balances the saving in weight of a traditional frame against the aerodynamic benefits of the S5. Of course, they favour the latter, claiming that on slopes of 5% or less for a regular rider and 8% or less for a rider like Thor Horshovd the aero savings trump the weight penalty. But I look at the chart above and see 4W at 30 km/h and think I’ll take the comfort, thank you very much.

Emily expressed the same view: for the riding that I actually do the R3 looks like a better bike.

The contrary position was argued by John, the newest of our Park Loops crew. The body gets used to stuff, he says: just get the fastest bike. If I get the R3, he tells me, I’ll always be thinking that there’s a bike I could be riding that’s less compromised and speedier. Paula’s view in favour of the S5 was more direct: she loves its mean looks.

On Wednesday I went to the Condor shop and this really helped me finalise my decision. They had just taken delivery of an S5 frame and I could see it in the carbon. Like Paula, I had thought that it looked very sleek in the photos online but I’m glad (for my sake) to report that that doesn’t translate to the real bike. The red and blue on black colouring is natty but the bike itself looks like a hastily finished engineering project. You can see, having read the Cervelo materials, why the shapes are the way that they are but the aesthetics, for me, don’t work. It looks clunky, especially (but not only) around the bottom bracket. And, as I wrote before, the robust tubing from the ground up through the chunky seat mast to the saddle looks like a clear transmission path for the worst kind of discomfort. All in all, I have no remaining doubts that the R3 is the bike I want.

Thor takes receipt of his new S5, having returned his R3 to Cervelo

The fitting on the jig at Condor went well. I like the geometry that we arrived at, based around a 58 cm R3 frame with a 110 cm stem and an inline seatpost. In consultation with Pete from Condor, I chose all of the components to hang off the frame and ordered the bike.

Rationally, if that’s a word that I can use to justify so much extravagance, I’m more excited about the Zipp 404 Firecrest wheels I’ve ordered than the frame itself. I do think that the Cervelo will be a marked improvement over my Felt but that is, to an extent, an act of faith since they’re both stiff carbon road bikes with a sportive geometry. By contrast, the Zipps are completely different from any wheels I’ve had to date and it’s hard to see how they could not have a different character from my Mavics or my Fulcrums. I really can’t wait to get out on them.

The other big decision was what groupset to choose. Pete, like the reviewers in every magazine or website I’ve seen recently, was very enthusiastic about the new Ultegra Di2 package. I have no doubt, having read so many unequivocal views on the matter, that the electronic gears give a crisper shift, especially as they trim the front gear as you move up and down the cassette to keep the chain line straight. But I don’t care. On my mechanical groupsets I can dump gears as quickly as I need to. Also, I can change the front and back gears while cycling up even the steepest hills without any drama by respecting them with a degree of finesse rather than mashing them. Moreover, look at the weights on the table here. The Ultegra Di2 is 333g heavier than the mechanical DA, which costs about the same. Considering that I “saved” £1,000 by taking on the extra 200g of weight that the R3 frameset carries over the R5, this seems like a great, free way to do more than compensate.

On a very practical note, it turns out that Shimano have sold all of their Ultegra Di2′s to the big bike manufacturers, all of whom have gone electronic this year, so it could take many months to get it on a custom build. And if I was still thinking of cable-tieing an ugly battery onto my nice new frame, here’s “one small issue” noted by the very enthusiastic reviewer who supplied the weight table above:

“Shimano was very careful to note that the cables and plugs (everything, actually) were pre-production and not fully watertight on our test bikes. We were warned that they shouldn’t get too wet, but on one of our rides, the ground was damp with puddles in spots from an overnight rain and overcast morning. My bike stopped shifting about 90 minutes into the ride. After about 30-40 more minutes, shifting function returned sporadically and after the full 2.5 – 3 hour ride, it was mostly shifting again. Some of the Shimano guys thought perhaps a little water had entered one or more of the plugs, others thought it might be something else. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the diagnostic tools on hand to test it and find the real issue. Should this concern you? Probably not.”

I’d like to re-express the last couple of sentences in my own words. Should this concern you? What are you thinking, are you on drugs?? Of course it should concern you!! The gears stopped working because it had rained!!!

One day we’ll all be on electronic shifters but for now I’m pleased to have gears that work in England and that I can easily service myself.

Another important decision is what saddle to fit: no matter how good the frame is, a saddle you don’t  like can ruin the ride. My favourite saddle, which I have on both the Tempo and the Astraeus, is the old-model Specialized Avatar. With a possible new bike in mind, I recently re-tried the Fizik Arione that people rave about. I got used to it somewhat after a few miles but initially it felt as if I was getting a broom handle rammed into my perineum, even atop a Ti seatpost. Given my strong Spesh-pref, Pete recommended the  Romin, although I don’t think he likes it himself. I had a look at one in the shop and it feels harshly unpadded and over-light. However, I like and trust the shape, and the reviews I’ve read subsequently have all been glowing – see this one, for example. Now I’m very keen to try it, and, as a plus, I like how it looks (in black).

The cost of the whole package is, if you want to look at it that way, a bit silly, even with Condor’s 10% complete build discount. With the exception of the second hand BMW 840 that I had for a while (my favourite ever car), this will be the most I’ve ever spent on something for myself. Having dwelt on it at length, I’m comfortable with the cost. I could argue that it’s okay for the budget (in £ or Euros or $)  for your best bike to be the same as your annual cycling mileage but I know that that’s fatuous. I’m just really really looking forward to riding it. I had an email this week about the 2012 Cornwall Tor sportive. Although I rode it in 2010, I hadn’t done it this year and wasn’t planning to do it next year either. But as I read the email it struck me that by the time it comes around I’d have my new bike so maybe I’d find a way to fit it in…

Question:
I’ve read the answers on the Knowledge Base given in reply to questions about the comparative stiffness and comfort of the R3 v. the S2. I’m making the same comparison now in choosing between an R3 and an S5. The tipping point presentation you have on the stiffness/weight balance is great. Do you have similar *quantitative* analytics on the difference in *comfort* between your frames? Given that I’ll be riding the same bars, stem, wheels and tyres whichever bike I get, it would be great to have a measure of (a) what proportion of road noise gets transmitted to the contact points; (b) to what extent this is affected by the frameset for a given set of components; (c) how this varies between the S5 and the R3. For pure speed, it’s clear that the S5 is better. However, I want to balance this against how I’ll feel after 100 miles of riding. Many thanks!

It was perhaps optimistic to hope for a reply detailing a new lab measure of transmitted road noise, or comfort, but at least they replied promptly, as follows:

Answer:
Hello Ian,

I can say that the newest R3′s and the S5 both share our BBright based frame architecture that improves BB stiffness.  Ultimately the squoval design features of the R3 will continue to give it the edge in terms of overall stiffness.  Ultimate stiffness may matter you, but both frames will supply performance that exceeds most riders needs.
Comfort is something that most of us are looking for in bike.  With that it mind it may surprise you to learn that there really is no way to quantitatively assess frame comfort relative to one another.  Various people are working on such a test, but so far results have not consistently matched actual riders opinions.  That tends to make the assessment methods invalid.  As such comfort continues to be an entirely subjective rider experience.
Many riders do prefer the R3 in term of perceived compliance.  It’s not wrong to let user reports to influence your final choice.  To develop you own opinions, work with a shop to take test rides if at all possible.
Enjoy the ride.

Sincerely

Tim
Cervélo Customer Support

Of course, I’ve been aware of the brand for a long time. I read a lot of reviews and have never seen a bad write-up of a Cervelo. On web forums I’ve yet to find a Cervelo owner who doesn’t love their machine. Quite recently on the Black Rat I cycled past a guy who told me that he was super-pleased with his RS, much preferring it to the Orbea he rode previously. But all this is just so many words. The deciding moment for me was taking Joerg’s RS around the streets of Zurich after we’d finished the Engadin Radmarathon. Despite being too big for me, the RS was conspicuously livelier than my Astraeus on which I’d just done a very satisfactory 100 km up and down the Bernina Pass. My Felt also has something of the same edge to it, but less so. Since then, a part of me has wanted a Cervelo, although with no sense of how I might justify buying it to myself.

One prompt to look at the Cervelos again came in last week’s Cycling Weekly, which had a piece on the new R5 VWD build. There’s apparently a Ltd version of it shipping now with a natty blue flash colour scheme for the same price as the regular R5. The other lure is that I want some new wheels. Actually, I don’t want new wheels (my Mavic Elites and my Fulcrums are fine): I want some Zipps. More specifically, I want a pair of Zipp Firecrest 404 carbon clinchers. I could explain why, but if you’re reading this you probably want some too (unless you’re lucky enough to have some already). Doing Park Loops, we go early enough and it’s quiet enough that it’s very rare for me to be passed by another cyclist. The majority of those who do are riding deep rim wheels: I can hear their distinctive whoosh as they approach me from behind. That’s the noise I want to make.

Why Zipps in particular? Well, they’re called “Zipps” and they say “Speed Weaponry” on them. That might be enough but they also have credible arguments from science. You can google dozens of different review sites and read about the aerodynamic and comfort benefits of the Firecrest rim shape and the special resin they use for the rim surface to stop it overheating and getting grabby. I believe it all.

People will tell me that I should get tubs instead of clinchers. Save your breath: it’s not happening. For example, read p186 of the current (December) issue of Cycling Plus. The C+ Production Editor flew to Tuscany to ride L’Eroica last month. 75km in, her tubular punctured – she had to walk 5km to the next feed stop and then abandoned. I tried riding my Fulcrums tubeless as a half-way house to tubs but gave up and switched back to clinchers. The tubeless ride is nice but doesn’t compensate for the convenience of clinchers and the comfort of knowing that a puncture will only have me off the road for ten minutes.

Last week my desire for the Zipps overcame my reluctance to spend the considerable amount of money required to buy them. In a kind of domino effect of crumbling prudence, I gave in to my desire to own a Cervelo about two days later. After all, if I’m going to have kick-ass wheels, they might as well be on a kick-ass frame. On Wednesday, I went to the Condor shop to talk about frame options; this week I’m going in for a fitting.

To date, only two of my bike buying experiences have been as good as they should have been. The first was in 2006, when I bought my Specialized Tricross from Evans. After reading around for a while and talking to people, I guessed right with the frame size (a 58 cm), found a shop where they had it in stock and bought it after only a test ride around a very short block. It was fantastic – even the fact that I had to go the wrong way down a one-way street on the test ride improved the experience. Riding away on it was exhilarating: it was so much better than the hand-me-down mountain bikes that I’d ridden, infrequently, beforehand. The Tricross was the machine that showed me how great cycling could be, and the gateway bike that ultimately led me to now be at the point of spending as much on a Cervelo as you might spend on a (very) small car.

My other Great Bike-buying Experience was getting my Condor Tempo about three years ago. Again, I read widely beforehand and instead of trying lots of bikes simply chose the one I felt most drawn to. At the Condor shop in Grey’s Inn Road I spent about an hour on the jig getting fitted and selecting the best components I could get for the arbitrary budget I’d set (£800 if you’re curious); and a few weeks later I had my bike. As with the Tricross, I loved riding it from the moment I got on it. I still do.

Other bike purchases have been less satisfactory. When I bought my Van Nicholas Amazon it took way longer to ship than their estimate, and, even after a huge delay, they first delivered a 54 cm rather than a 58 cm frame. And I’ve written about my travails ordering my Van Nicholas Astraeus at length elsewhere on this blog.

Buying my Felt was differently disappointing. I had been keen to get a bike from a real cycle shop. There used to be a guy who had a small shop and did occasional repairs for me whose main brands were Viner and Felt. He was nice and helpful and I asked him essentially to give me any bike he would recommend for me to try/buy. It became like the Monty Python cheese shop sketch: for every different bike that he himself proposed he found a different reason why he couldn’t source it. I began to doubt whether his income was truly coming from bike sales. A few months later he moved (fled?) to France. I think he was the person who first interested me in the Felt brand, although they were then being ridden by Team Garmin (note they’re now Team Garmin-Cervelo!). When he disappeared I approached a few other bike shops to try to get a test ride on a Felt. Evans were the only shop that could offer me one, and, although I liked the bike, they could only supply the SRAM-equipped models and I wanted Shimano. In the end I guiltily bought my Felt Z15 on Wiggle, with the benefit of a 25% discount.

Hence I’m buying my new Cervelo from the Condor shop.

Turning, finally, to the title of this blog post, I’m a bit uncertain about which Cervelo to get. Joerg’s RS is no longer in the catalogue and the nearest equivalent would be one of the R’s. These range in price from expensive (the R3), through very expensive (the R5) up to WTF?? (the R5ca). A defining characteristic of buying a mid-life crisis bike is that cost is (excluding absurdities like the R5ca) almost immaterial: I could buy an R5 if I wanted to and I have, with my ever-amplifying sense of possible morbidity and certain mortality, a dangerously diminished inhibition against doing so. But Cervelo really aren’t playing along. Here’s how they describe the R3 and its advantages over last year’s model:

Listed there are some good reasons to buy this particular bike, notwithstanding that you undoubtedly already own a carbon race bike, which might possibly even be the 2010 R3.

Now, here’s what they say, on the main part of their site promoting their 2012 bikes, about the R5:

The important thing you need to know is that the R5 frameset is one thousand pounds more expensive than the R3 frameset. And their entire rationale for you (me!) spending an extra £1,000, the best their Marketing pro’s could come up with, is the single word, “Lighter”.

Wake up Cervelo! Help me to help you!!

Pete at Condor says that it’s 200g lighter, for the £1,000, and also less comfortable. 200g is less than the weight difference between the saddle that I use on my Tempo and my Astraeus (an old Specialized Avatar) and the Fizik saddle that I first had on the Astraeus and that’s now sitting around in my bike room while I think of something worthwhile to do with it.

Given that Cervelo themselves have made the R5 unchooseable, the real alternative to an R3 is the S5.

The differences between the two are not subtle. Here’s the R3:

It looks like a regular road bike with compact/sportive geometry. The high head tube, sloping top tube and spaghetti-width seat stays promise a comfortable and compliant ride, notwithstanding all the stiffness in the front-to-back and side-to-side dimensioning.

By contrast, here’s the boy-racer S5:

Doesn’t it look as though it wants to bite someone!

If you spend any time at all online it’s clear that this is the bike Cervelo want me to buy. I have no doubt that it’s faster than the R3, even for me. The downtube, the rear wheel and the back brake are almost invisible to oncoming air. The main tube profiles are virtually 2D, yet cunningly shaped to slip through crosswinds. Physics tells you that it must work. Approximately 100 out of every 100 sincerely enthusiastic words from company Cervelo are about this bike. Which is the same price as the R3 (if we ignore the white R3 that has worse forks).

The benefit of aerodynamics are obviously less compelling on the rides that I do, where 10 to 20% gradients are commonplace, than on flatter terrain. Even so, I’m guessing that the 200g extra weight that the R3 packs relative to the R5 puts it into the same ballpark as the S5 so there is little weight penalty to the S5 compared to the R3 on the hills. Also, despite being an ultra-aero frame, the S5 doesn’t stretch you out over the top tube. In fact, although you can clip on tri-bars and tip yourself forward, the default geometry is identical to the R3′s.

I don’t have a case-closing reason for preferring the R3. One factor is simply taste. I don’t agree at all with those people who find the S5 ugly but it does make a statement that I don’t want to make. While it’s fine for ex-World Champion Thor Horsovd to ride the S5 in the Tour, his intention and capability of winning are incomparably higher than mine. The S5 doesn’t look like a bike for riders who want to enjoy the scenery and are happy to come home a third of the way down the field.

Apart from the aesthetics of it, I’m even more concerned about comfort. Although the S5 doesn’t guarantee you the geometrical-skeletal discomfort of a TT bike, the back end worries me. Where the R3 has those springy, pencil-thin seat stays, the S5 looks as though it’s going to jackhammer every detail of the road surface right through the saddle. The review feedback is mixed but look at it: how can it not?

While I may yet change my mind, my current disposition is to choose the R3, loved by every owner and reviewer over years, over the possibly greater but more uncertain benefits of the S5.

The choice of which Zipps to get is easy: I want the 404 Firecrest carbon clinchers. I do, though, think that they would look better on the S5. Although Cervelo show the R3 in deep-rim Lightweights, the Zipp 303 looks a more natural match. If you were 100% serious about the benefits of the 404′s you’d cosset them like the S5 does. The apt wheel for the R3 or R5 feels as though it ought to be the lighter one. But I don’t care. Unless I change my mind in the next week or so I’m getting an R3 with 404′s. If anyone reading this thinks this is the wrong choice please let me know why before it’s too late!