Poetic Justice

A fantastic post on the Cycle Chat forum today. Read it if you fancy a laugh.

Congratulations to Mark Cavendish

Starting the year as he means to go on, with a win in the Tour Of California. I'm also pleased to see some particularly catchy categories in there - "California Travel & Tourism Commission King of the Mountain (KOM) Jersey". Give me "The Yellow Jersey" any day :-)

London (well, Staines) to Oxford

My mate Barry and I cycled the Thames Valley route from Staines to Oxford this weekend (with an overnight in Pangbourne). As you might expect, the weather added some interesting aspect to the ride, but it was still do-able (with some pushing, some slow cycling and some giving up the official route and just taking the road). It's a mixed route taking in Thames-side cycling, some lovely rural bits on Berkshire and a bit of the usual "creative accounting" off-road routes that Sustrans specialise in (through housing estates, car-parks, etc)

4 Bad Things About This Weekend.

1. Mysterious Exploding Inner Tubes. Before we'd even left London, Barry had destroyed two inner tubes (waking up his neighbours in the process). Had they got caught on the rim ? Was there something sharp inside the tyre? Was the gauge on his track pump a couple of bar low? We suspect the latter, but can't say for sure. Oh well, it only seemed to set us back an hour-and-a-half.





2. Snow and Ice. A lot of the route was surprisingly clear or gritted, but anything that took us through Windsor Great Park, round the back of Didcot Parkway or down pathways into Oxford was a treacherous landscape of thawed and refrozen snow. Good job I put my new slick tyres on last week!!

At best this took our average speed down to 3 or 4 mph while we struggled to keep upright and at certain points we just had to get off and push.

3. Trying To Get Our Bikes On A Train From Reading to Pangbourne With 50 Million Reading Town FC Fans. Barry got on, I could not. At least it meant I got to bomb along the A34 on the bike trying to catch-up the train.

4. No Local Beer in Pangbourne. Half the fun of a bike ride away from home is being able to drink Ye Olde Goat's Nadger's Ale from the local brewery. Only London Pride and Courage in the otherwise good George Hotel, although I did end up remembering how much I like London Pride.



4 Good Things About This Weekend

1. Cycling Through The Snow Covered Landscape of Berkshire. Most of Sunday morning involved cycling down nicely cleared country-lanes, surrounded by pristine snow-covered fields and woods. In particular,
at one point we came out of a wood onto a hillside that seemed to look down onto much of Oxfordshire, with Didcot Parkway being the only thing to break up the white blanket covering the landscape. London seemed very far away and it felt far more like the Peaks or Lakes than the South-East.

2. Slicks Coping On Ice and Snow. No punctures either

3. Wildlife Following Us. As well as rabbits running across the frosty fields to our side, a bird of prey (possibly a Buzzard) followed us on-and-off for a couple of miles around Wallingford. Obviously we must have been looking weak and vulnerable at this point (at least until our pub-lunch)

4. Getting 15 "Mornings". When overtaken by the local cycle club out for their Sunday morning run.

Overall it was a good ride, with the Sunday morning the undoubted highlight. Inevitably for a Sustrans route going through urban areas, some of it tended towards alleys and pathways that can reduce your average speed somewhat and aren't necessarily that picturesque. If I was doing it again, I'd probably try and swap some of these out, for more rural lanes.

If you go expecting something like the C2C or the Devon-Coast-to-Coast, you'll probably be disappointed by the extent to which our crowded corner of the island is now dominated by man's footprint, but for an easily-organised weekend out of London, it was a lot of fun.

Interesting Interview With MD of Brompton Cycles

Yesterday, while recovering from the cold I caught while cycling in the snow to Oxford at the weekend, I heard the following interview with Brompton Cycle's Will Butler-Adams. It's pretty fascinating, I didn't realise they were still actually built in London (Brentford, a mile from where I went to school)

BBC iPlayer (only valid for a week)

It starts about 1:35 in, so you'll need to fast-forward to that, to avoid the 80s jazz.

Tip When Booking Bikes On Trains

If you try to book a bike reservation through an external ticket seller like The Train Line, and they tell you one isn't available, it may be worth checking with the train company themselves. This has happened to me at least twice, most recently this week. In both cases, bike reservations weren't available NOT because the train was already full of bikes (as The Train Line said), but because it was a revised timetable and therefore you couldn't reserve anything, seats or bikes, on the train. In this case, the nice lady at First Great Western has advised me we should be ok, if just turn up and stick our bikes on the train.

Mind you, if we have more snow, who knows if the train will actually turn up.

Made me laugh

From my friend David's flickr. Although to appreciate it you probably need to have seen one of these

New Tyres and Rapha Sample Sale - Part II

So, I've had a week on the new tyres and it's been a week of dry clear days and wet miserable days and this has proven a pretty good trial. They do seem faster, but like always with city riding, unless you go a *lot* faster (or don't stop at lights), it won't make much overall difference.

On Tuesday, which featured "that fine rain that soaks you through" and a resulting layer of slime over the road, I definitely had a few wobbles going round corners a bit fast. Nothing too alarming, but definitely some faster heart-beats and a need to work out what I can and can't do now. The tyres are Armadillos, which are reknowned for their puncture-resistance, so a softer-tyre might be a bit grippier. I'm hoping they'll prove their worth on longer rides when that reduction in friction will add up.

Also - just back from the Rapha sample sale. Nothing too much too tempt me (wrong sizes, wrong items) but a fairly big queue to pay, so obviously someone was tempted. T-shirts were 20 quid, everything else upwards from there.

New Tyres and Rapha Sample Sale

My Specialized hybrid currently has some fairly chunky, 700 x 38c, tyres which seem a bit surplus to requirements, given that most days I ride on the not very gnarly Brixton Road (mind you, some of those potholes...).

So I've splashed out and bought some new, narrower, slicks. APPARENTLY, according to the nice man in the bike shop, I don't need 38c width tyres and can actually take them down as narrow as 28c, so that's what I've gone for.

I'll let you know on Monday whether I can actually get them on my rims and whether I go any faster.

And in other news, Rapha have another sample sale coming up next weekend, next door to Condor Cycles. Hopefully I'll make it to this one and can find out whether reduced Rapha is within the price-range of us mortals.

Opening Times are:

Friday 30 January: 12am-8pm
Saturday 31 January: 10am-5pm

Truing A Wobbly Wheel

Truing a wobbly wheel is one of those bike maintenance tasks that I always thought was some kind of dark-art, that could only be done by the tattooed, big bearded mechanic you always saw lurking in the back of your favourite bike shop. But having watched a video on Bicycling.com, I was able to carry it out with reasonably good results.

The video assumes you have a truing stand, but I was able to manage with the bike upside down, so that the wheel could spin, and using the brake pads to gauge how much the wheel was wobbling from side to side. One other thing, I had the tyre off (I was replacing a spoke) which seemed to make it easier to see what was going on.

Warm Head

Seeing as I'm a slaphead, I can't believe I haven't previously owned one of these. I got one as a Christmas present and tried it out for the first time on the ride to work this morning. Needless to say my head was suitably toasty, despite London being "colder than the Antartic" (© the not remotely sensationalist Evening Standard).

Mine is the Pearl Izumi Microsensor Skull Cap for around £14, but I'm sure others work just as well.

Now I just need some winter gloves and I'll be sorted.

Keep 'Em Peeled...

...motorbikes can use TFL bus-lanes from today.

50 Quirky Bike Rides

Some cycling is all about performance, hauling yourself up Leith Hill so that you're ready for your summer trip to Mont Ventoux or Whistler, or to take another minute off your PB. It's the battle between your will-power and abilities, seeing which will give in first.

Another side is more about the journey, the people and places you come across. The remote hill-top cafe in Cumbria, the beatiful viaduct in mid-Devon, the guy with the recumbent you meet at Newcastle Station. I have to admit this is where my heart lies and is very much the emphasis of Rob Ainsley's excellent book "50 Quirky Rides".

It lists 50 rides in the UK that take you to somewhere notable or unusual. If you've ever wanted to go on a ride that features a trip on a ferry, a visit to a cycle maze or over a scary unfenced viaduct, this is the book to satisfy your need. It even tells you how to ride up that optical-illusion road they used to feature on Blue Peter, where you appear to free-wheel up an incline.

The rides themselves are between 5-50km ("many can be done in a lunchtime"), but the introduction suggests you can expand them into a day-long trips (or longer)

The routes themselves are listed on the website, but I'd encourage you to buy the book, so that we can hopefully get
50 Quirky Bike Rides Volume 2.

New London Bike Shop...

...well, a bike-shop specialising in Fixed/Single-Speed, so not sure how well it caters for those of us not wearing skinny jeans.

Tour De Ville

I'll make a trip up there soon and give it a review.

Another Nice Mapping Tool

I've just come across Bikehike, a website which combines Google Maps, Ordnance Survey Maps and elevation date to make a rather powerful off-road (and hiking) route planner. The OS map pane is great, as it has far more detail than the Google maps, so you can plan trips through forests, over muddy tracks, across fields, etc, that Google alone would struggle with. The elevation graphs are nice too, allowing you to switch between pure elevation and incline (where you can see how much of the ride you'll be going "Arrgh" and how much you'll be going "wheeeeee").

Maybe less use for plain old road-riding and I don't actually have an MTB myself, but I'll certainly be using it for planning my next walk.

Be Careful Out There!

Not one, but two friends of mine fell off bikes while hitting black ice last night; you can see the results of one rider <-> tarmac interface above!

It looks like the weather's getting "warmer" (i.e. not below zero) in London for the immediate future, but it's worth bearing in mind, next time you head out there in near-zero temperatures.

You Won't Get Far With That Front Wheel...

...not to mention the flat at the back

(from Norwoord Road in Herne Hill)

Lovely picture

Pictures like this make me want to leave the South East (where it snows rarely) and move further North.

Does Anyone Know...

...when you should replace your bike helmet ? In particular, I'm wondering about after dropping it. A lot of sites on the internet (the source of all reliable information) suggest you should replace it in that situation, but none of them specify what constitutes dropping it. I'm fairly sure that of the people I cycle with, all four of us have dropped a helmet from table/handlebar height at least once. Does this really ruin the integrity of the helmet ?

Best advice I found was on the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute site. One of their criteria for replacement is "Is The Helmet From the 1970s ?" :-)

More Bike Tattoos

I've mentioned bike tats in the past but they seem to be growing in popularity. Check out some of these "bad boys" from Wired

Crap Cycle Junctions of London #1

Queen Victoria Street and Queen Street, Mansion House


Want to encourage red-light jumping in cyclists ? Then why not create a set of cycle traffic lights where the cyclists only get one green-light for every two green-lights that the rest of the traffic and the pedestrians get. Guaranteed to either make people think that the lights are broken or just infuriate them that they're regarded as less important than everyone else.

Not mention the queue of cyclists that back up, blocking the pavement...