R O T H A R . C O M

I was talking to Cortos the other day who is at McGill doing a postdoc and mentioned to him that Dan & Laura were in Edmonton. He said that it’s so cold there that it makes Montreal look like it is on the Costa Brava. I said I hoped Dan had found a cheap supplier for goose down jackets otherwise he’ll probably freeze to death when he’s changing camera bodies. Not only is Dan still alive in Canada, he has managed to find his camera and a computer. Check out Bear Fodder.

Allegedly Dan has a huge down jacket that covers almost to his knees. As he explained to Cyclenaut, it screams ‘Look I’m a Brit in Canada’. i don’t think he cares. According to the news and here it’s currently -29C, but the important thing is the wind chill, which makes it -39C. That’s a bit chilly.

Unexpectedly I had a cold earlier this week. It’s still in my head making everything sound a bit muffled. Maybe that’s just Radiohead though. I’ve been riding the geared Deluxe a bit as I need to check it’s bedded in for the Peak District outing on Sunday. Of course it wasn’t. Chains skipping. Worn cassette and new chain and too much slack. Sorted that and realised I hadn’t tightened the clamp bolts on the crank up so they’d fallen out. That’d be the second time that’s happened then.

Cyclenaut finally posted her pictures up from Punk Bike Enduro. On the Sunday there was a bank of mist sitting in one of the valleys that was very surreal. I’m really pleased about this ace photo of Tim Johnson and me. There’s a lot of depth in the background:

Photo by Chris Garrison

Sold lot’s of kit. There’s a bit left here. Oh and Macaroons are ace and grumpy old Manc gits need a good kicking for upsetting people I love. Over and out.

Live. Buy. Consume. Die. Lots of kit for sale here. Selling stuff is such a faff. I stripped down the Enduro last weekend but it has taken until today to actually get everything cleaned up and take photos. Then there’s the whole businmess of trying to find buyers. If I don’t get takers by tomorrow for some of it, then it’s going up on eBay.

I’ve mentioned Robin Sharman before after he was picked for the GB team for the Worlds last year. He’s off to another flying start this season and has scored some more great publicity for himself and the recycling.co.uk team, courtesy of a Cyclingnews special feature. Robin works part time in Harry Halls.

I also thought I should give a running update on the tubeless wheels. I’ve been running tubeless on the Enduro (and the FSR before it) and the Singlespeed for some time now. Filled up with liquid latex in either the Eclipse format or Justridingalong’s Art Latex, they’ve proven to be really reliable. It’s reassuring to see the tyre self-heal after a thorn puncture and when I was changing tyres last weekend I pulled half a dozen thorns out of the tyres off the Enduro. Tyre pressures were being maintained, so the latex had done it’s job. All in all i’m impressed and will carry on running it in the singlespeed.

There’s a bit of a debate going on over at the DirtRag Forums at the moment on Identity Card scheme that is currently being mooted for the UK. I believen that the ID cards will be a massive waste of money and will never be implemented properly. There is a little talked about scandal simmering under the surface here in the UK at the moment along similar lines.

Several years ago the government decided to centralise the firearms register. Not many people have guns in the UK due to the tight legislation, but there are about 200,000 who either require them for the their jobs (game keepers, farmers, etc) or are involved in sport (clay shooting, olympic team, etc). Prior to the proposal gun ownership registers were kept by county police forces. There are 39 Counties in England, 13 Welsh ones and 34 in Scotland. The task set was to provide a central database into which each of the police forces could enter data so that there was a real-time record of gun-ownership and licencing. Sound simple doesn’t it?

The national firearms register was ordered in the wake of the Dunblane tragedy – a horrific incident where a lone gunman walked into a primary school in March 1996 and killed sixteen young children and their teacher. It is now ten years since parliament agreed the move to get a grip on more than a million weapons in private hands across the country.

The project has been delayed by a series of technical problems with the computer system set up to support the scheme for example being unable to print firearms certificates, and the police and other authorities involved in the licensing process complained it was running “incredibly slowly”. The flagship project has been hit by other delays including problems developing a link between the national DNA database and the criminal records on the police national computer.

Given the scale of this project and the faiilure to get it to work it is highly unlikely that the UK govenrnment and civil service will ever be able to successfully implement a national ID card scheme. The latest on the gun registration scheme is that the National Firearms Database Management System (NFLMS), will go live at some point later this year and efforts to link the system with the Police National Computer (PNC) will be given up altogether…

Which is okay isn’t it? I mean what possible correlation could there be between criminal convictions for serious crimes like armed robbery and gun ownership?

Finally there’s this which has come in on the email. It may not be 100% accurate.

Wendy sent this in.

When I was doing some fafing the other day i realised that one of the nicest sets of photos I’d taken hadn’t made it onto this latest version of the site. So today I put the Edale Loop ride photos back up on the site. I’ve also added Chilly’s photos from Dusk til Dawn from ’03 and ’02 since he was kind enough to burn a CD for me when I saw him a couple of weeks ago and the infamous Giant-Pygmy is back – you can check it out here.

For a long time I argued i didn’t need one. There was no point – When would I use it? Then they brought out a colour one. Then they brought out one that plays video. Add in a week painting and decorating listening to rubbish on the radio and having to put up with a skiptastic CD player in the car and I was decided. The time has come to join the hordes of iPod owners. It’s a tidy little number with a special USB adapter so I can download digital photos off the camera and store them on the ‘pod. Sounds ideal for this summers trip.

_ _ _

The Enduro is leaving the stable. I think I made up my mind after the Painscastle ride last month that we weren’t really getting on. I’ve thought about it a lot since then and I decided that it’s time is up. Not sure I’m that happy really. I feel the big Specialized bike has let me down, especially after I enjoyed riding the older version so much and my FSR being such a classic bike and solid ride for so long. I need something a bit more on-edge and responsive. The Enduro always felt like hard work.

So it’s all stripped down to just a frame set and forks. Everything will pretty much carry over to the new bike. The geared hardtaili has gained the Crossmax XLs and the XT chainset and I’ll use the Deus cranks and be getting a new set of wheels for the next bike. So there’s quite a lot of kit kicking around the flat that is looking for new homes, it’s all money that’ll be ploughed back into the next bike.

I didn’t get out riding today. Instead I dug out all my old rugby kit and played with the team. I think it’s about eight years since I played and although I am pretty rusty and not at what you would call match fitness I played the full match and escaped with only a fat lip and the usual stud-related scrapes, scratches and bruises. My back held up though which is a good sign, I was a bit concerned that it’d pop out.

Well my last day off was spent visiting Tim down at Sideways and getting in a last bit of riding before the big return to work. I’ve just picked up a pair of the new IRC Mibros. In the 2.25 version they’re about the same sort of size as Verical Pro 2.3s. Great thing is they’re a fraction of the weight and have an agressive tread design that looks the business. I’ve replaced the not-very-impressive Trailrakers that are on the geared hardtail and chucked them on and it now looks loads better. I suspect that if Tim’s words of wisdom on their performance are right that they’ll be a great Calderdale tyre. Seems like a fairly soft compound, so they should bee pretty grippy.

Tim also has some custom Phil Wood bearings in that are for replacing the standard units in either Race Face or Shimano Bottom Brackets. Combined with a special tool for doing the job I had a super smooth set of bearings in the Ti Deluxe in about 20 minutes (well in the bearings cups that live in the Ti D anyway). So I guess that means that I could get some of these stickers made up?

Anyways after doing some home work and having a chat about IF #4, Tim and Judith gave me some directions and I legged it cross-country to Delamere. For some bizarre reason having been in Manchester for all this time I’d never been to Cheshire’s equivalent of Thetford. Tim said he thought I might find it a bit shit, but I have to say it was ace. They even have some wooden elevated bits were a bit smaller (i.e. not as much of it as I’d hoped) than they’d looked from the photos I’d seen.

The main (big) bit was fine. I rode that both ways straight off and the skinnier dog-leg bit first time, but I had a complete mental issue with the bridge over the stream. I had to do about four run ups the first time to be happy that I had a good line. I think it would also be fair to say I was not ruling the dirt jumps, but I rode them anyway. It was a lot more up and down in a hilly-kind-of-way than I’d thought and there’s clearly a huge amount of trails to explore.

I’m thinking that once the clocks go back I’d be quite up for doing an offroad route from Sale Water Park towards Lymm (river run), backroads to Delamere fitting in cheeky bits and bridleways. Stop at the Cafe for food and then ride the forest and ride back. Probably 100+ miles. Good training for this year I reckon.

Few more people have posted photos up from the Oxenhope ride at the weekend you can find them here, here and here. There’s even some of me drinking beer. Lots of people are using Yahoo’s Flickr technology at the moment to share photos. I found these photos of explosions the other day athe thought that they were fairly inspiring – check ’em out.

I get the distinct impression that this isn’t true:

From: Mike
Subject: Speeding

A little story! While I was driving down the A40 the other day, (going a little faster than
I should have been) and as I passed under a bridge I saw a copper on the other side with a radar gun laying in wait. The copper pulled me over, walked up to the car, and with that classic
patronizing smirk asked:

“Runway too short??

To which I replied, “I’m late for work.”

To which he asked, “What do you do?”

I responded, “I’m a rectum stretcher”

The copper was surprised and confused. “A rectum stretcher?? And just what does a rectum stretcher do?”

“Well,” I said, “I start by inserting one finger, then I work my way up to two fingers, then three, then four, then with my whole hand in, work side to side until I can get both hands in, and then I slowly but surely stretch the hole, until it’s about 6 feet.”

Then the copper asked questioningly and cautiously, “And just what do you do with a six-foot arsehole?”

To which I politely replied, “You give him a radar gun and park him behind a bridge …”

Speeding ticket: £105.00

Penalty Points : 3

Court costs: £45

Look on copper’s face: Priceless.

Time off is great. 5am start on Friday and a four hour drive down to Powys, just north of the Brecon Beacons. Dan Barham and Mike Davis were doing a route guide for one of the big name mountain bike mags that will be appearing soon and I was making up the numbers. It was ace. There is something very special about riding in Wales and it is all of the grassy bridleways and fantastic views. I think we saw at least three Kites and we had probably the best weather of the year so far. That said it was a 48km route and at the end we were all happy to call it a day. There’s a lot of vertical and the wind can be a real killer. Photos are up here.

So it was a big old drive back up to the North and after a brief overnighter, it was time to get a whole load of kit together for another few days of riding and it was off up to Oxenhope for a weekend of riding with friends in the beautiful scenery of South Yorkshire. It was great and the fact that there was some hidden beer up on the moors was an added bonus. The speed drinking of Stella chilled to -5 and then racing immediately afterwards wasn’t necessarily a test of riding skill but rather the ability to withstand the urge to vomit over a prolonged period. Weekend shots are on this page.

Bit’o’news from Mountain Bike Action: In a continued effort to showcase their Contessa Sportswoman line of bikes, Scott USA has announced an expansion of their sisterhood. Australian sports model and graphics designer Niki Gudex has been added to Scott’s lineup of talented female mountain bikers. Already in the Scott camp is the Ford Cycling Team, which includes do-good Norba racers Kelli Emmett, Sara Bresnick-Zocchi, Kathy Sherwin and Melanie Meyers.

Mental note: Read emails properly. At some point before Christmas I had an email from Shaun at aegishosting to tell me that the name server settings for my websites were changing and that I needed to update my settings with 34SP who look after my domains. The thing is that i did get this email and read it (a bit) but the fact that I needed to do something didn’t really sink in until the old DNS settings were switched off at which point all of my websites went off line.

These settings take up to three days to propagate around t’internet under normal circumstances and so things have been off line for a bit which is a bit embarrassing. Thing is it gets better. About this time last year I decided that Shaun was doing such a cracking deal at aegishosting that I’d which this site from being hosted by 34SP over to Aegis and shortly afterwards the new look site appeared.

When I did this I had a bit of a problem in that I had originally organised the purchasing of the domain using an email account I no longer have access to. I then had to convince 34SP I was who I said I was before they’d merge my accounts and let me log in. Proof of id had to be sent off to them and it all was sorted out. Fast forward back to this week and it turns out that when I log-in I can see ifrider.com and manantes.net, but this site isn’t in the domain controller bit of the intranet. So I fire off an email to the support team.

Turns out that the domain ‘expired’ according to their records in March 2005 and it’s been running on borrowed time ever since then. I really don’t remember getting an email telling me that was about to happen… So I had the added fun of having to get that little mess sorted out too and now everything is back up and running. Woo and yay as the ‘midge would say.

What else is new? Well I’m redeveloping the IF Owners’ Club site. It’s been going for almost two years now and is due a face lift. I’m just trialing some new web apps and some of them may find there was into here. You can get some quite good blogging software these days and a recent trial of WordPress at work has been really interesting. I’m not thinking of a new mobile or camera, but thought these were both interesting. Why any one would want such a horrible phone is beyond me and this 39 megapixel camera is a cool $33,000 for the basic model. That’s more than a Beemer. Any guesses on how much the price of 39MP cameras will have have dropped in 10 years?

Rode the Makin ‘on-call’ route on Sunday for the first time in ages. this is the river run on the Trans-Pennine trail that starts for me at Sale water park and heads east towards Stockport and then on towards the Peaks. It looks like the council have been out and about building up the flood defences along the Mersey. Lots of the good bits have been lost and they’d even closed the steps by the school playing fields. Swines. Thing is it could have been like that for ages and I wouldn’t know as it’s been ages since I’ve done the local route.

The new bits found as shortcuts onto the old bits were a bit rubbish, but I did manage to link up the river run with the Fallowfield Loop Line route by heading up the hill from the Jodhpur Cafe and cutting through Reddish. It was an interesting change from riding up gert big hills, but the singlespeed managed to get just as muddy. Steve says it’s been like that for about three months now. The single track wooded section that used to be after the underpass and before the sports centre has been really badly destroyed and they’re built a wide cinder path. The singletrack is looking very neglected.

It’s not much but it’s offroad and at least it gets a bit hilly after Reddish Vale. As has been said there’s no cars – just dog shit and runners to dodge. Oh and herons to look at. There wasn’t much in the way of wildlife yesterday, but I did see:

As part of the work the council are doing here they’d built an earth bank on the path that was a fairly effective ramp. Just after riding it there was a little kid on a little quad bike, who rounded the corner saw it and said “whoa” rev’d the engine and took a big run up, at which point his mum, dad and sister come around the corner just in time to see him heading at speed towards the ramp and dad goes “oh no…” just as junior hits the ramp and gets all of about 3″ of air 🙂

Then just about here I could hear the sound of an engine as I rode along the river and a few seconds later a couple in their 40s on one of those really little motorbikes came around the bend.

See it’s not all just dodging turds.

Last update for the year and there has been a cracking day of riding yesterday around the beautiful winter landscape of Calderdale. It ranged from beautiful golden sunshine through to falling snow and was as cold as it looked and the Singlespeed ruled. Photos are up here.

Here are a few things that have come to light over the last few days. First up the notion of racing a train between stops takes on a different note if you factor in that it’s underground and you have to get to the surface before you can get to your bike and get on it, race downhill to get to the next station and then get back down to the platform and on to the train. Oh and there’s only 55 seconds to do it. Check this out.

The Chronic of Narnia rap was one of the funniest things I’ve seen out of America for a long time – well that said I watched team America last night which was hilarious so there is hope for the George Bush led country yet. As has been said, after that sketch how can anyone take gangsta rap seriously?

Just cleaned the Deluxe for the first time. Several weeks of commuting made up a bit of filth, but an truly fantastic Tuesday night ride in Calderdale really meant that a full clean up was in order. This may have been very appropriate timing as I’ve just realised I never put any sort of chainstay protector on and I’ve been lucky not to have scratched and chipped the frame to bits.

A classic nightride taking in legendary trails like Stanny’s Drop and Gibson Mill Up and Downer also seems to have proved a few things. The Stadiums are passed their best. It’s time for some battery recovery techniques and I’ve just ordered some of these bad boys as a replacement setup. Not quite the ‘jesus, that’s bright’ power but plenty (twice the burn time) of fantastic white light and a whole host of recommendations from people riding them. Less is more and that’s certainly true of the weight – I’m looking at a 2lb weight saving. New lights mean that the CX Worlds trip is off which is a bit of a bugger, I was hoping to catch up with Nige.

The recent ride has also shown that it’s not quite bike enough for the Calderdale trails in it’s current guise. A quick release seatpost clamp and some more appropriate tyres are in order. That means either some Big Earl’s or Blue Groove and Nevegal combo are likely in the near future too. Need to have a bit of a play with the forks too. They’re too quick on compression at the moment and need a bit for air in the spring to give them a bit more range. Other than that it’s a sweet ride.

Here’s a couple of top links. MBUK was the first mountain bike magazine I ever bought and I’ve still got that 1991 Christmas Special. These days a lot of people only buy MBUK for the legendary Jo Burt cartoon Mint Sauce. When I did a massive clear out a few years ago, I cut out all the old mint sauce cartoons, but now it seems that there was no need as Jo has teamed up to launch a dedicated website: this is why. So now you can read all the cartoons and consider the sanity of a cartoon based around animals riding mountain bikes. The artwork is as beautiful as always.

Not everyone’s taste so here are links to the photos of two friends from the local area whose photos have an international audience. Dan Barham has the contents picture in the latest edition of Dirt Rag and his shots have really been developing over the last few months. As an alternative here’s a link to Steve Makin’s Flickr photos. Steve’s black and white shots really are timeless and I think he’s a great eye for good composition and contrast. Steve’s shots have featured in many mountain bike publications including Singletrack.

Finally, we all know that Christmas can be a stressful time and that silly arguments are likely. It may be worth noting however that falling out over telephones may invariably lead to trouble.