Category: Words

Winter arrived (briefly) following the weekend with some properly cold weather and more snow, but rain this morning saw a return to mild damp conditions. I seem to have destroyed another pair of shorts. Some of my Oakley Ballistic 2.4 shorts which are now a good four years old have worn through. In fairness they’ve already been sown back together after coming apart at the seams during the Cham to Zermatt and that fix held up okay. At some point last year I cut the short liners out because they’d worn out so I just wore lycra shorts underneath. This time however the actual panels have worn through and I’m very tempted to try and get some Ventile cloth to make up some patterns and have them rebuilt. I still haven’t found any better shorts and most recent versions have all been a bit crap in comparison.

I’m also getting psyched up for this weekend which should mark the start of an ambitious plan. Riding for at least an hour non-stop everyday for 30 days. I’ll have to fit it in by various means and it’ll include some days of travel and racing too. Sustaining it shouldn’t be too difficult, but we’ll see. I’ll be turning the Harry Hall into a singlespeed commuting hack shortly to free up some parts for a cross bike build so that might make things a little bit interesting if a new frame turns up next month…

Riding in Calderdale today. It’s been far too long since I managed to get up to the valley, but it’s great to ride familiar trails with friends once again. A few more photos here.

The bogtrotters were riding in the area too. They ended their ride just as we were loading up the cars to come home. I did resist a golden opportunity to run over an infamous photographer in the carpark outside Singletrack towers as I left. It was a close call 🙂

It was August 2003 the last time I visited Guernsey, but early next month I’m returning to the island to catch up with old friends and ride a classic. The Herm mountain bike race is quite unlike anything else I know of. Herm, an island with a population of about 60 people and a surface area of just 2 square kilometres, is an unlikely venue for a race on paper, but the granite geology which forms the hilly backbone to the island and forces a steep climb up from the east and west coasts at least forces a quick division in the field between those with climbing legs and everyone else. It’s going to be ace!

After almost two season’s duty as the winter riding shorts, the Altura two-thirds shorts are no more. After riding with Neil Mottershead prior to the Cape Epic last year I went out and found some Altura Night Vision over trousers. Reasonably cheap waterproof trousers, which had some convenient reflective piping just below knee length which meant they lent themselves to having the bottoms cut off quite well.

A cheap alternative to more expensive Goretex alternatives and fantastic with Roubaix Bibknicks underneath. They’ve been commuting essentials this season as well as being fantastic for offroad riding and keeping the grime at bay. Anyway the arse ripped out of them on the ride home on Monday so that’s the end of them. Not sure if I’ll try and get some replacements or upgrade to some Sombrio alternatives.

Say Mr Brown and it might invoke all sorts of  thoughts and memories. Some one you knew in your childhood, a former colleague, a friend, a song by Bob Marley, etc. Maybe it makes you think about lots of those things. Say Sheldon Brown and then you’ve probably narrowed that thinking process to a very specific point. I’m guessing that Sheldon Brown is a fairly unique name. Certainly more unique than John Smith, David Williams or Robert Johnson. Ask a cyclist about Sheldon Brown and you’ll probably get a further polarised answer. If you were in the minority in web-savvy bike world who’d never heard of him, then you can read more at his website.

Sheldon passed away on Monday this week and the chances are that you probably know this already from having read about this sad news on different cycling sites. Sheldon didn’t have a big impact on my life. I can’t say I visited his website very often. Some of the bikes that he featured on his site like this Phil Wood Piss Off were interesting to say the least. Yet none of that really matters. He was a helpful forum regular. His website was a catalogue of facts and information that shop staff could fall back on when facing a difficult question about flange grommet diameters or the internal gearing ratios in a Sturmey Archer three speed hub. The fact that he took time to put this stuff on the web made a difference for a lot of people. His legacy is the kind of Internet work that puts sites like this in their proper context.

So I’ve been a bit slow in paying any homage to Sheldon Brown. BSNYC has said this which covers some of what I think:

Only the strongest personalities can infuse inanimate objects with life, and Sheldon Brown did that. Just go to his website and look at his personal bikes. As much as we all love bikes, I think we all know they’re just things. Sheldon’s bikes are things too, but they have a signature exuberance; they are simultaneously absurd and practical. In a subculture that obsessively categorizes everything, they defy categorization. When you reach a certain familiarity with bicycles they can sometimes speak to you about their owners, and Sheldon’s bikes speak with irreverence. They sing and tell jokes, and they have a Thelonious Monk-like ugly beauty. When you have as much knowledge and creativity as Sheldon did, you can build bikes that follow no template except your own.

There’s little danger that cyclists will forget Sheldon Brown. I doubt that there’s any cyclist who hasn’t consulted his site, or who doesn’t still. And as the architect of the cycling canon he’s done more for cycling than any pro cyclist, or critical mass, or white bike, or orange bike ever has. No matter what you ride, how you ride, how long you ride, or how long you’ve been riding, you’re a fan of Sheldon Brown.

On Monday I wrote elsewhere that I suspect he’s not going to be forgotten about any time soon. He was a legend.

I’ve notice that the grumpy* security guru known as Samuri has been using a nifty Google Maps Application recently to plot maps of his riding routes. I’ve been quite please with the simplicity of Gmaps-pedometer for sharing my recent local route exploration, but having just had to put something together for a website demonstration I’m giving tomorrow, I’m tempted to try Map My Ride out on here with a report on my next foray into the unknown.

*Jon’s quite justified in being grumpy. People in cars trying to kill you generally induces negativity even in the nicest of people. The people of Leigh seem to have developed a new sport that involves trying to take out cyclists (maybe they’ve watched Death Race 2000 too many times) or it might just be that they’re trying to tell him that he doesn’t fit in. Leigh: a local town. For local people.

When I had my S-Works steel back in the late 90s, I always used to swap between rigid forks in the winter and suspension forks in summer. It made a huge amount of sense then and as I’m now facing a big bill for a new crown/steerer assembly for a pair of Fox Vanilla Forx to go on the singlespeed, I’ve decided that the best solution is to save them from the worst of the winter from now on by swapping to something that is more suitable for the winter grime. I’ve managed to get my hands on some of the last of these bad boys:

Not madly keen on the graphics , so I’m not sure how long they’ll be left on but they’re pretty sure to knock about two and a half pounds of weight off the Deluxe while I decide whether to keep the old suspension forks going or get a new pair… Finally, Si sent this in. I suspect that it wasn’t a news item that made it into The Independent or The Guardian. Still newsworthy material you have to agree: