I no longer have a bike to ride for Ironman Florida

In an interesting twist of fate, my local bike shop told me today that there is a crack in the frame of my trusty Cervelo P2C…no longer safe to ride

…that would probably mean that it’s not been safe to ride for at least a little while 🙂

The cracking is appearing on the red and white top tube part of the frame in the picture, in front of, and to the side of where the black seat post goes into the frame…

It’s not like I don’t keep my bike serviced…I have it overhauled regularly….the last time was only 4 months ago before the Vancouver Half Iron in July of this year…taken apart…put back together…no report of cracking at that point…same bike shop

…yet here it is…in the stuff happens category…of course the great news is that it was discovered at a bike shop while in the stand, and not on one of those 40-50MPH downhills over the past 2 hilly 6-7.5 hour weekend rides…’discovering’ a cracked frame at that point as it disintegrated into tiny pieces of carbon would have _really_ hurt

…and in further good news I did take it to the bike shop to be overhauled again, before Ironman Florida…just to make sure that everything was ok…should have been routine…wasn’t…would have been a long day at Ironman with either a broken bike or body

…I wonder if you need to have your bike with you at the end of the bike portion?…I should check that out…maybe just a piece of it would be ok if it broke down in the last few miles 🙂

…so there it is…I no longer have a bike, with less than 2 weeks to go

Now the good news is that Cervelo does warranty the frame to the original owner for life…so I _should_ be getting a new frame

…the only testy part is that the timing is a bit tight, since I was planning to leave for Florida this Saturday to be nice and relaxed for the race…now it’s a matter of getting the warranty processed, a new frame delivered, the bike built, my carefully crafted fit ‘re-fit’…and then riding it to get it ‘broken-in’, typically cables and shifting adjusted after 100-200 miles of riding…I may need a backup plan…

If Lance Armstrong is right when he wrote “It’s Not About the Bike”, I did see that Wal-Mart has a nice looking Cranbrook Cruiser for only $89.97

…unbelievable price, considering that the new tires that I needed on my now defunct Cervelo are $65.00 each

…if the Cranbrook lasted 112 miles, and I gave it away, it would be less expensive than the overhaul was going to cost on the Cervelo…

…I guess we’re about to see how good Cervelo and the local bike shop customer service really is…stay tuned 🙂