Road bike - Giant Defy 3

My new road bike that I can only ride every few weeks

Giant Defy 3

Sora/2200 Groupset

Aluminum Frame - XSmall

I visit the Palo Alto area every 3-4 weeks to visit my fiance, and it's always a pleasure to spend time with her as well as the lovely locale of Northern California. In the past, I've always done a lot of running every time I've visited, but now that I'm a triathlete, it's important that I maintain my cycling ability as well.

To facilitate this, I purchased my first true road bike this weekend, the Giant Defy 3. (Actually, my fiance purchased it for me!) It's considered a low-end or introductory sport-fitness bike, and is not spec'd out for high level competition racing. Its price also reflects this, as I purchased the bike for $695 at the local bike store. Compare this with the $3k that my carbon Cervelo P2C time-trial racing bike cost.

One would think that a bike which costs 1/5th my racing bike would yield dramatically inferior results, but that simply is not the case. My initial impressions of the Giant Defy3 is that it's a fully raceable, competition-grade bike, whose only conceivable weakness is the lower-grade shifter component set that it comes with. And even that is a doubtful weakness; the Shimano 2200 shifter set in its current incarnation performs excellently, and exceeds pro-level shifters from a decade ago. The frame on the Defy3 is remarakable given its price. Light, responsive, and attractive. A far cry from the bikes of this class just a few years ago.

The reality is that bike performance is 98+% rider and less than 2% hardware once you start comparing road bikes in the current generation. (Mountain bikes are significantly slower than road bikes.) I didn't know this when I purchased my triathlon bike, and though I have no regrets riding that hot racing bike, I doubt I would have spend so much on that bike in retrospect, knowing that performance is nearly all rider.

The main difference between this pure road bike and my triathlon (time trial, or "TT" bike) is that the shifting mechanisms are dramatically different. My TT bike shifters are out up front on the tips of the aerobars, meaning that you can't reach the brakes at all while you're shifting, and that you're in the "aero" position. In contrast, on my road bike, the shifters are integrated with the brakes, so you can shift and brake from the same hand position. And obviously, there are no aerobars on the Giant road bike. I still need practice in getting the shifters to where I want on the road bike, but it's not a problem.

Training in general has been pretty solid in the past 2 weeks. I have been cutting back on volume slightly but replacing it with a lot more intensity. Running in particular, seems to have benefited from this. I have only been running 20-25 miles per week, but half of those miles are hard VO2 or lactate threshold runs. I finally reclaimed my spot as the lead runner in the Wednesday group run, which I had relinquished for the past month, but this week I went out hard and held the aggressive 6:40ish pace for the full 10k distance, leaving the next closest runner a good minute behind me. Feels good to get the legs moving fast again.

Swimming is gradually improving. I've dropped my 100m repeat pace from 1:54-1:56 to 1:48-1:50, and increased the number of repeats I do up to 20 x 100m with very little slowdown. I still have yet to translate this speed and endurance to open water performance, but I'm optimistic that I'll do much better in the upcoming Malibu triathlon.

Cycling is still my favorite of the 3 disciplines now, and I've been very fortunate to have a good number of 3.5-5 hour rides under my belt for most weekends now. I've added high-intensity bike sprints to my weekday routine on the stationary bike, and those are definitely very hard and not much fun. I'm hoping that the combo of short-distance bike power and long-distance weekend rides will give me improved performance at the 26 mile distance on race day.