Better than I expected!
Work and life schedules and cycling - and most especially Clunker Challenge cycling - don't always play well together. So I rose earlier than I find ideal and got out on the bike this morning around 6:00 a.m. It's truly freaky to ride a bike in South Carolina on June 1 and be grateful for tights, wool arm warmers and full-fingered gloves! Because I've been slack and watching my mid-section spread much of this year, I settled for 11.8 km before breakfast, riding hamster-on-a-wheel laps around the neighborhood. All of the due diligence tweaking yesterday paid off, as the only time I stopped was to pull in long enough to switch to the aforementioned gloves. The bike ran smoothly and well, with Strava recording what may be my fastest time yet down the sharp little incline near the church end of the street. My only mechanical quibbles are (1) I may want to raise my saddle perhaps as much as 1 cm, maybe, and (2) I will lubricate the actual bar end shifters themselves, possibly loosening up the pivot screws to make sure they're not binding. Only 88.2 km to go!