Category: Words

For the first time ever went up to Rivington. No bike this time, just hiking boots and great company. The route I think can be summed up as: Up past the hall to the Pigeon Tower, Belmont Road and then the foot path up to the ridge on Winter Hill, past all the masts and then down across the bog and up to the Pike and back to the car. It was nice, but windy – ended up with a hood up to stop the ear-ache. Would like to go again when it’s less busy with bikes.

Rivington Walk

Last month I picked up a Cotic Roadrat under the Bike to Work scheme where you make a salary sacrifice but then save a good percentage of the cost via a Tax break. It’s an interesting bike and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to replace the Harry Hall as an all year round workhorse. I’ve had a few niggles with it that I’m still trying to solve. The first is that the wheels just feel dull. I’m not sure if it’s the tyres or the actual spoke and rim combination, but they don’t feel as comfortable or sprightly as the S-Works tyres on the Bonty wheels I had previously.

The other niggles are firstly that the chain seems to be easily derailled off the chainring – annoyingly when starting off from a standstill (usually from traffic lights in rush hour). Despite using the chain tensioner to try and dial out the slack that is allowing this to happen, I’m still being irritated by this. Secondly, when you slam on the rear brake, the wheel gets pulled in the drop out to the non drive side. Which is annoying because you have to get off and undo the quick release to put it back in it’s place. I’m thinking that a new set of QRs or Allen key skewers are the way forward with that one.

Other than that it’s a great bike. The extra length certainly makes a difference when riding it so in all it’s a better riding position. Now it has some custom graphics on it and a few stickers, it’s certainly unique.

My sticker collection was running a little low and I decided I needed to get some suitable additions for the commuter…

I picked up a winter hat too (Owners’ Club t-shirt courtesy of the store).

Last night’s ride home was great. First of all I was keeping pace with a beautiful titanium coloured Aston Martin V8 Vantage past the Ferrari garage – they make such a beautiful sound. That V8 rumble put me in a great mood, then as I approached the next set of lights a double decker pulled out of the bus stop layby and I hooked up a great tow from the slipstream that sucked me along most of the way home. When he eventually stopped to let some people off, I had a great slingshot to clear all the other traffic lights. Ace!

So the ride in this morning was a full on waterproofs affair. Having been woken up by thunder it wasn’t a good sign and sure enough the weather was fairly torrential. Which was fine – I have no issue with riding in the rain, even less so when prepared for it. What I do have issues with are people trying to kill me in cars.

I roll up to the second set of lights and there’s a car in the oncoming traffic lane waiting to turn right across the junction. He’s stopped so I assume he’s seen me. There’s no other immediate traffic so I assume that he’s waiting for me to cross before making his manoeuvre. As I start to cross the lights he starts executing his turn. At this point I may have uttered something along the lines of ‘Don’t be a sitting duck’ and put the pedal down, not that it was going to do much good in avoiding the several tonnes of steel bearing down on me.

Then just as I think I’m going to be kissing him through his windscreen he stops. My heart’s dancing like Jimmy Somerville on speed. That was close. I can’t remember what car it was, even what colour or whether it was actually a male driver. Must having been thinking about something else at that point…

Monday morning ritual resumed: Retrieve bike from it’s hanging position in the hallway. Insert front wheel, check over the running gear, stopping today to adjust the chain tensioner in a bid to stop a third chain deraillment (I think I was clipping it with my heel when accelerating from a standstill). Descend with bike to the garage, inflate tyres to 120PSI. Clip in and get going.

Catch and pass two riders at the second set of lights on the way in by timing the change just right. Get into a comfortable pace on the long run past the Tesco garage. Stop at the 8 second lights and then find the right pace again for the following section to get the lights on green. Approach the penultimate set of lights and look right over my shoulder to check the traffic.

There he is. A roadie tucked into my not insignificant slipstream. The cheeky scampster, we’ll see how fit he is. I wind up the gear and put a 10m gap in almost straight away and keep building the cadence. Then checking the traffic again, swing right across into the third outside lane to be in the right one for the lights. He knows it’s over. He looks knackered even after a 50m burst of effort and I feel victorious. All I need to do is safely make it through the Bends of Fury (which will be slick with Diesel on this damp morning) and I’ll have made it into work.

It’s all fairly insignificant in the bigger picture of things. Chilly has been in France to ride the Etape du Tour and despite having a laptop with him hasn’t posted up again since his initial article on getting there. This I can assume means one of three things. One is that his room has been broken into and his laptop stolen – now being used to sell snow to Eskimos by a long lost African relative. The second is that he has succumbed to the French wine and cheese and is too chilled to care about a bike ride. Or thirdly he has paid the price for taking on Mt Ventoux and is now dead. We wait for news from the south of France.

First let me start this post by saying that I may be wrong. Given that cycling to me is a very personal thing that I take seriously (in the same way that some people take football seriously and could recount the names of the players in their favourite team) I’ll admit my ability to be objective about things relating to bikes is difficult.

So here’s my thought for the day: I think that the majority of people who commute by bike to where they work do so in their work clothes. I am not therefore , talking about the minority of cyclists who ride all year round in any weather and have all sorts of specialist and expensive gear for the job. For this very reason bike clips were invented to stop your Paul Smith suit trouser legs being shredded in the chainset. This is also why many cyclists want mudguards and a pannier rack and a bell and lights and a pump and a toolkit and a spare tube and pannier bags and… all sorts of other accessories that I would either never fit or only fit when it was absolutely necessary.

Yesterday for the first time ever I rode to work to my office job in effectively work dress. Trousers, shirt, tie, etc. Admittedly I wasn’t wearing a suit and the trousers were a pair of chinos that double up for hiking duty, but nonetheless it was a momentous event in my cycling life. Predictably it rained, for which I was prepared – with my smart casual ventile jacket. This was utterly useless in preventing my arse from getting soaked by spray of the back wheel.

Even after riding at a pace which could be descried as sedate (but felt glacially slow) I arrived at work hot and bothered, needing to cool off for a good ten minutes – even after taking off my merino base layer. At the end of the day I waited until it stopped raining before even considering setting off for home. At a set of lights as I started my singlespeed big ring charge off from the lights, sandwiched like the unsavoury filling between a double decker and a couple of black cabs, my chain came off.

I had to coast sheepishly in front of the bus to the side of the road and then get oily fingers sorting it all out. I am in no rush to do it again. In fact I have no intention of doing it again (ever). Quite how people do it every day I have no idea, but there must be some very sweaty people in offices up and down the country. I’m just glad I’m not one of them.

So some other loony tried to kill me on the way home last night. Hogged the road in his white Mercedes Sprinter van on a leafy suburban street lined with cars. There was room for a bike and him despite the cars, but no I had to slam on the anchors and pull into a gap to avoid joining the collection of dead flies plastered over his grill. I didn’t have one problem riding in France, but then again some of the places being explored by bike weren’t that crowded…

There are some things that are actually quite hard to do on a bike. The Switzerland Squeaker is one of them as demonstrated over the years by Jez Avery. Which it helps to do if you’re northern. Another is being the most successful at winning downhill mountain bike races against the best in the world. Which it helps to do if you’re northern too. Another is riding skinnies, where it seems to help if your northern and Canadian and they’re in the local woods for practice. Then and possible the hardest of them all is doing a front wheel skid on a road bike.

This is tricky because the tyres are generally quite grippy and that the back is usually the first to slide, yet this morning on the way to work, I managed to lock up the front wheel. Some numpty in a Micra was in the wrong lane in the dual carriageway just after the Bends of Fury and darted across for the left hand exit cutting up the car in front of me, who slammed on the brakes causing me in turn to slam on and swerve to avoid stuffing it into the back of his red Polo. So, it seems that it helps to be surrounded by daft northern drivers if you want to perfect your life saving front wheel skids.

Went running at the weekend, nothing spectacular. It’s the first time I’ve been on a proper run in about 6 years. New trainers were okay. Legs felt okay afterwards and my back hasn’t been impacted by it, so that’s good. Only did a 5km run from the house, but it was a chance to check out some new things – like the BMX track that has been built in the local park – and test the new kit. The Nike+ probably needs some more specific calibration, but it wasn’t far off the Polar calculations of calories burned. I suspect that my HRM needs some fine tuning too, so in all I’m pretty impressed. Cross training is back on the cards.