10% off Rapha

Promotional code I picked up at the Smithfields Nocturne:
SMTH2009
gets you 10% off on their site.

Although that still leaves them a little dearer than Halfords.

Valid at http://www.rapha.cc/ until the 20th

Penny Farthings and Bike Week

Last Sunday I caught the tail end of the Veteran Cycle Club's annual event at the Herne Hill Velodrome. It has to be said, there's something pretty awesome about seeing a Penny Farthing "racing" around the a bike track against other cycles from antiquity (I'd tell you what they were, but I haven't a clue - a velocipede? Solid tyred bike? No idea!). Unfortunately we only got there for the very end, so I think we'll have to return next year, but it does look they put on other events

Loads of bike events coming up this week (being Bike Week and all), but a few which have caught my eye are:

• Bike and Kite Festival - Blackheath, tomorrow and Sunday
• Southwark Cyclists Film Festival - Shortwave Cinema, Bermondsey, Monday evening - showing shorts plus Breaking Away. Email barrymasonuk@googlemail.com for details
• Greenfest - Furnival Gardens, Hammersmith, Sunday - not just bikes but general hippy-dippery
• Free breakfasts for cyclists - (Camden, Tower Hamlets, Hackney. Plus many others)

Bike Tubes

One good thing that might come out of this - the LCC organised some "Bike Tubes" today, where they led a number of groups of cyclists into central-London from pre-arranged locations (Ravenscourt Park, Finsbury Park...).

I couldn't see from the site whether they are repeating this tomorrow, but they do say they'll be running more Bike Tubes in future, even if there's no disruption. Sounds like a good introduction to commuting into London to me.

Mayhem On The Roads Today

As you may know, there's a tube-strike today. Rather than use it as an opportunity to "work from home", Londoners seems to have decided to battle in anyway possible, with the streets already rammed at 7:15. Here's your I-Spy cut-out-and-keep guide to the strike

• Red-faced tube workers manning picket line outside a station (10 pts)
• Commuter shouting at red-faced tube workers (20 pts)
• Twelve people trying to hail the same taxi at once (20 pts)
• Pedestrian walking out in front of you because their head is buried in their A-Z as they attempt to work out how to get to their office (50 pts)
• Cyclist, riding a bike that hasn't been used since the late 80s and certainly not in rush-hour London, wobbling across three lanes of traffic in an alarming fashion (100 pts)
• Company director, in flash car, equally un-used to rush-hour traffic, cutting up the novice cyclists in order to try and grab the last parking spot (100 pts)

It'll be an interesting couple of days.

Back On The Road

Finally, my Evans voucher arrived and I popped over to the store to pick up the new steel stead. With hindsight, I should have perhaps got the voucher for a bigger amount, as it's not often you get the opportunity to buy what you want in a bike shop, effectively at half-price with six months to pay it off. In the end I contented myself with a new lock and some SPD pedals.

I've also added a Brook's B-17 saddle, as per Purple Traveller's advice. Bit early to tell yet, although I'm sure we'll be very happy together. If nothing else, I think it makes the bike look a lot nicer (you may remember I wasn't sold it's appearance) and it complements the ace, Carradice Barley saddlebag I've bought.

After 4 months or so, off the road, I have to admit I'd forgotten the sheer joy of cycling, even if it was on a clogged up, drizzly Euston Road. I'll take it out for a proper spin over the next few weeks and let you know how it is.

Still Waiting For Evans Ride2Work Voucher

Apparently they've received the payment from my company, but not the form. Obviously, it's too much to expect Evans to email/phone my company and ask where the form is. Oh well, duplicate form on it's way now. It's like living through an enforced No Bike Week

On a more positive note, yesterday proffered an unexpectedly, nerve-wracking end to the Giro, with race leader Dennis Menchov falling off his bike in the final kilometre of the Time Trial around Rome. Some pretty sharpish bike changing by his team car, and the decent buffer he'd built up saved the Giro from a pretty unfortunate end in it's centenary year.

Pith Helmet

A bit pricey at £95, but this Danish helmet is one of the most dapper I've seen. Available from Bobbin Cycles

New Bike Show Episodes

Doh, I've somehow managed to miss a whole 8 new episodes of The Bike Show from Resonance FM, but not to worry as they're all available online at The Bike Show. There's no finer way to start a Friday than tweaking some Perl scripts while listening to Jack's adventures on a bike around Flanders.

Watching The Giro

If like me, you want to watch this year's Giro, but you don't get the Eurosport channel, you can watch it online using their online Eurosport Player for £3.99 a month (so I'll be cancelling come the beginning of June :-))

Not much to watch today though, the riders have decided it's too dangerous and are just poottling round at a slow speed (until the very end)

Getting A New Bike

Inspired by having the Ride2Work scheme at my present job, I've decided to invest in a new bike. Having ridden both my hybrid and flashy-road bike over the last few years, it's focussed my mind on what exactly I want a bike to do, namely:

• be usable for the daily commute
• be able to do light touring (maybe a week in Scotland, rather than a month round Africa)
• *maybe* be comfortable/practical doing something like a 100-200k

To me, these requirements make perfect sense, but it does seem as if they fall between a number of stools. Road bikes are built for speed and generally spurn the need for mudguard-clearance or anywhere to attach panniers. Tourers do well on those points, but are generally built for serious touring, with an associated weight and lack of whizzing-in-and-out-of-the-traffic-ability. Hybrids too, are slower, and generally don't have drop-handlebars, leaving your wrists craving new riding positions once you do much more than 50k.

The remaining options (at least in Evans - who we can only use for Ride2Work) are:

1. cyclocross bikes
2. audax bikes.
   

Cyclocross bikes look like mummy racer had a one-night stand with daddy mountain bike, with a road frame but knobbly tyres (which I'd swap for road tyres) and enough room to stick guards and panniers. Of these I ordered the Specialized Tri-cross, Genesis Croix De Fer and Kona Jake to try. The Specialized looked great and had carbon forks, but just felt sluggish to me. No doubt some of it was due to it's chunky tyres and it's more relaxed geometry, but it just didn't seem right.

The Genesis felt much better, with disc breaks and a steel frame, but Evans have run out of them now, which conveniently solves that dilemma. I'm still waiting of the Jake as Evans only seem to have one in my size, which is trapped in some limbo between London and their Gatwick warehouse never to materialise into a test-rideable form.

An Audax bike, is a bike designed for riding Audax events :-) These are essentially long-distance, non-races of any where between 100 and 600k, the more hardcore of which feature people cycling for days on end with a few hours kip grabbed here and there. The best bikes for this kind of lunacy are fast touring bikes i.e. perfect for what I want. Unfortunately, the one such bike Evans stock has a slight Granny vibe about it, but otherwise had the best feel of all the bikes I've tested so far and again was steel so should be comfortable on those longer rides.

So which will I go for? Evans have just phoned to say that the Kona *should* be in London tomorrow, so hopefully I'll be able to final make my choice (if only so I don't have to put up with anymore of their indifferent customer-service)
[TO BE CONTINUED]

Cyclists To Be Allowed To Turn Left On Red

The Guardian is reporting that Boris Johnston has asked the Department of Transport to allow cyclists to turn left at red traffic-lights, on the grounds that this will allow cyclists to get ahead of vehicle (i.e. lorries) at the junction. Not sure how practical it is, or how much safer it will make the roads, but will be interesting to see what happens. From the quotes in the article it seems CTC have already taken against it.

He'll Never Get A Bike Helmet Of That Hair

http://www.bbc.co.uk.tscc.org.uk/pressoffice/stories/2009/1_april/30/topgear.shtml

PS - apologies for the lack of updates of late, I've been in Hawaii. And New York. Talking of which, it's interesting to see what the bike couriers look like here (supposedly the home of fixed-gear-courier culture). A few of them are the gnarly, trendy looking types as seen in London, but most of them look like they're on crack. Seriously.

Long Distance Cycle Talk

Long-distance cycle tourer (tourist ?) Peter Gostelow is giving a talk on his epic journey home from Japan to England this Saturday at the Globetrotters Club

His blog's worth checking out too - there's plenty of stuff on there to get you wanting to pack it all in and cycle off to Japan. Unfortunately I'll miss his talk as I'll be cycling to the slightly nearer...Cambridge.

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.