Category: Words

Riding at the moment is a cold and wet affair. Despite all the strong winds that have blown down trees, torrential rains that have washed away bridges and numpty pedestrians, I’m still here. Doing a bit of web development work too.

I caved in this morning. faced with the prospect of a very hefty courier bag full of gear that needed to be hauled into work I surrendered to the fact that I would have to check my tyres if i didn’t want to pinch flat them on the way to work. They’d only dropped to 80 psi, but putting them back up to 120 made the whole bike feel different.

At lunch I decided it was time to update my ride journal over at MapMyRide. I’m not very organised at doing this, so it’s been the end of August since I filed any daily records. The only things in there are the occasional big ride at the weekend. After spending 15 or so minutes adding in entries, I thought it would be good to do some year on year comparison. How many miles have I done this year so far? How does this compare to the previous year?

Can I do this comparison? No. Why Not? Because the MoFos at MapmyRide have changed it now so unless you pay them $12 a month you cannot get more than 12 months of stats. $6 a month only gets you 12 months. What other added value to you get for $144 per year? No adverts. Not a great incentive.

So the question is. What to do next…

About the most exciting thing on the commute over the last week or so has been the fact that I haven’t bothered to check my tyre pressures. The excitement of playing the low tyre pressure vs puncture risk lottery is quite demoralising. At the most the fact there are a mixture of wet leaves, quite a lot of diesel spills and wet roads is adding some interesting handling into the mix. Perhaps then there is something to be said for not running 120psi this time of year. What is needed is some proper riding, so roll on the weekend.

It’s been cold and wet enough this week to justify getting the winter boots out. My Shimano workhorses have to be some of the best biking kit I’ve ever bought in terms of value for money and function. If only they had toe studs they’d be the best thing going for cold weather riding. Not much else to report really other than the brakes on the Roadrat are driving me mad. Pretty much anything more than gentle power will pull the non-driveside forward in the track drop outs. I really need to either: ditch the Hope disc brakes for some v-brakes; get another set of chain tensioners; or get some bolt up QRs and stop complaining about this.

Sorry mate, I didn’t see you… the Stop SMIDSY campaign aims to report and thus reduce bad driving that hurts cyclists. Debra Rolfe from the CTC writes more about the campaign in the Guardian.

There’s nothing quite like being in the mountains even if it’s only for a few days. Some of the scenery that you get just doesn’t compare to that in the UK.

Train to London yesterday took just under two hours which is great. Train home took 3 including a 20 minute stop in Rugby getting me into Manchester at 1am. I think Beardy Branson should be made to endure that kind of ‘quality customer service’ from Virgin Trains at the end of a long day.

Riding to work this morning. Three number 50 buses within a 100 metres of each other. No wonder there is always an epic wait for one. With no competition on some routes there is no incentive for Stagecoach to sort this type of mess out.

None of this encourages me to even remotely consider working in a job where commuting is reliant on public transport. I’ll stick to my bike. Today’s probably the last day of riding to and from work without lights. The clocks fall back on Sunday, so it’ll be the season of commuting by lights until the 28th March from now on. Best dig out the HID…

It’s been a long time since I went on a decent ride, but yesterday I changed that with a great ride from the Peak Dirstict back to home. Great riding company with some of the riders from the various Ride the Alps trips I’ve been on and beautiful autumnal weather.

My legs are telling me they feel like they’ve done more than the 42 miles that the ride involved.

It was going to happen. The signs were all there. Today on the way into work a student just walked straight into the bike lane and despite frantic ‘Ping Ping Pinging’, locking up both wheels and getting a bit sideways, I ploughed into the unfortunate pedestrian and used them to finally stop. Quite what they felt about being almost mowed down by a Roadrat I don’t know and to be honest I don’t really care. I’d look over my shoulder to see what was coming up behind me…

Having almost been ejected over the bars, I wasn’t in quite the right frame of mind to have been completely civil and cool, calm and polite. Some expletives may have crept in as I pointed out that he was walking in the bike lane (pointing to great big painted symbols) and that the pedestrian footpath was right next to it. You know, the one with all the people on… many of whom were having a good gawp. Still, he was lucky he didn’t receive the full impact as I’d scrubbed off a lot of speed. Bet he’ll have a dead leg tomorrow though. The cock.

The Bike Lane. A strip of tarmac clearly defined from the footpath by a raised solid white line and further delineated by a a regular spacing of green painted squares with bike symbols and on the footpath side red squares with pedestrian icons.

The Pedestrian. More than 57 varieties of people for sure. Different in every case, friends and foes, from the streetwise to the green. A friend of mine once was hit by a bus he walked out in front of. Didn’t look where he was going and wound up waking in a hospital ward not remembering a thing.

The Bell. Fitted to the handlebars on the commuting bike. Sometimes you ring it and it works in reminding people that they’re in the wrong place or that you’re approaching from behind them. Sometimes it doesn’t. The cheery ‘ping, ping’ reverberating off the walls of the underpass seems to fall on attentive, but not dozy ears.

The End. My patience draws nearer to it everyday. One day soon someone is going to come to a sticky conclusion.

The Bike Lane Pedestrian Bell End. A combination of all of the above.