gordo's world of zoom

Going Downhill Fast

2012-01-27T13:56:00.001-08:00

This is old, I know but hey. Open a bottle of Theakston's Old Peculiar and put this onto full screen.

Carnage At Calshot

2012-01-23T11:36:00.000-08:00

The twitchers had descended on Calshot this weekend. Twitchers as in bird watchers, who had come from all over to see a spanish sparrow that had come ashore from the nearby dockyards. He had quickly seduced a local lass and set up a nest in a hedgerow and was being door stepped by a few score men (and they were all men)with cameras. It must have been like the bird version of winning X Factor.

I can't really mock, seeing as I'd just driven 35 miles to ride my bicycle round in circles for a few hours. And then, after driving the same distance home, I came back to the same place the following day to race there. That's a total distance of 140 miles in order to, as I just mentioned, ride my bike around in circles. By comparison, catching a train down from County Durham in order to add a bird onto your 'spotted' list seems quite sensible.

Saturday was one of our club sessions, which was all rather good fun. Sunday was the latest round of the 2011/12 league which was a little more fraught. The first prang came in the opening race for the under 16s, when a girl riding for the Jersey Youth Academy's rear wheel came loose. She was riding on an ancient old hack of a Dolan, with 'British Cycling Talent Team' stickered on the side. It was probably the same one Mark Cavendish had used when he was 14 and - worryingly - it was the same bike that I'd been riding behind for several minutes during the warm up. As soon as she started to wind the power on, the wheel shipped it's mooring and started to rub on the frame. This is the same as slamming on the brakes, which is never a good thing on a velodrome, and down she went.

She was ok, apart from a bruised bum, and we all got on with our racing until after the first sprint of the points race. The points race is 30 laps long and there is a 'sprint lap' after 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 laps, when points are awarded for the first 3 across the line. Normally, its my favourite race of the day but on this occasion, due to a low turn out in the 'A' league, the 'A' and 'B' league races were run concurrently. This meant that the 'A' leaguers went tearing off from the gun and most of the 'B' leaguers went tearing off after them. I was at or near the back, breathing out of my arse when there was an almightly stack. I have no idea what happened but it was kinda like this. I went high, as you're sposed to do (that's a tip, kids, if there's an almighty stack in front of you, go UP the banking - gravity will sort the rest of it out). As consequence, I didn't get to christen the elbow protectors that I'd bought myself last week, nor get a scratch on my newly repainted frame.

This, sadly, is more than I can say for Alex, who, at the time of writing, still can't bend his leg fully. On the plus side, his frame survived, unlike the last time that he crashed. Also involved were Adele, who smashed up her helmet and so had to retire from proceedings and Nick, who destroyed his £120 Assos winter long sleeved jersey. The race was restarted from 24 laps to go, minus Alex and Adele and, secretly grateful for a few minutes breather, we got on with the racing. Even then, the fractiousness continued, as Nick incurred the wrath of another rider for cutting a little close in front of him. I was right behind this particular incident and didn't really see the problem but hey, everybody was a bit jumpy.

Tim, the comissaire, was kept very busy indeed this afternoon with all these incidents, as well as the ongoing feud between Joe Truman and (Poole Wheeler's own) Harrison Fielding. Then in the handicap race - a youth race in which the riders are lined up, from the little tiddlers at the front to the ones who are starting to shave at the back - one kid pulled his foot out of his pedal and did a crazy zig zag up and down the banking. By some consumate skill, he managed not to hit anybody or to have anybody hit him and the velodrome breathed as one.

By nothing more than process of attrition, I came into the final race in quite a good position. I'd even found myself in a position to win, or so I thought. I was in a group of three, including Nick and a guy from Fareham Wheelers who, as soon as he came to the front, immediately dropped the pace. We were coming up to lap a group of riders and I was planning on whipping round these guys and putting the hammer down to loose the kid from Fareham. However, as we lapped them, the rider on the front of this group decided to swing up. He pushed me right up to the fence - with me bellowing 'OUTSIDE!' to get myself a little room - and this totally dropped me off the back of our little group. I was a little peeved at this, not least cos I'd thought the win was mine for the taking. As it was, the Fareham Wheelers rider got it (and don't think for a minute that I'm criticising his tactics) and then, much, much later, when I got the official results, I discovered that I was actually fifth. Alex's departure had reduced the number of 'A' leaguers so they were all dumped into the 'B' league and what I thought was the front of 'our' race was actually a lap down.

And so, in conclusion, maybe I should take up bird spotting? Or maybe driving down listening to 'A&E' by Golpfrapp is not such a good idea. Stay safe, people.

Nowt To Do With Bikes But...

2012-01-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

...I found this somewhere and just had to show it. And if you don't love rally cars and Van Halen then SHAME ON YOU.

Rally Jumping Compilation by Antti from Istvan Andrasko on Vimeo.

If You're In A Hole, Keep Digging.

2012-01-19T12:29:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post suggesting that the only way to get good at cycling was by cycling. Sound words, or so I thought. However, to quote the legendary economist Maynard James Keenan, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"

It seems the facts have changed. It goes like this: I got back to work last week. A good week later than everybody else, I know, but believe me, I more than made up for it. January is a quiet month and so it tends to be that all the rubbish clearing up jobs fall in the January period. And, lo, the thing that I was required to clear during the January period was a field. Of trees.

Well, ok, it was seventeen trees and I had a week. They were all beech trees, a couple or three years old and about 3 meters high and each had to be dug out. I couldn't just cut them down with a chainsaw - which would have taken me a morning, including chopping them up into hearth-sized lumps. Nor did I have access to one of these:

All I had was a spade and an axe, and its fair to say that the week was not a gentle one. By Wednesday (the day of the Poole Wheelers evening chain gang) I was pretty sure that I'd permanently injured something. My elbow was throbbing from all the attempting to cut through inch-thick roots, using an old fashioned technique called 'hitting it with a spade' then, when that failed, digging out enough of the surrounding soil so that I could hit it with an axe. The rest of my body had that weird, all over ache and - in the middle of January - I was down to my t shirt and sweating out several litres a day. Then, once the trees were felled, they had to be lifted out of their holes, the stump sawn off, chopped into hearth-sized chunks and deposited on the log pile.

I had it all done by Friday afternoon and, having had hopes dashed for an early reprieve ('wow, you did that quick, here have the rest of the day off for working so hard'), struggled to home time, rode 6 miles home on my ancient mountain bike and then collapsed onto the sofa for the rest of the weekend. Come 11.30 on Sunday, the time that I definitely had to be leaving for Calshot, I was on the sofa watching the cartoon network. Then went and walked the dogs.

Now, rolling forward to Wednesday and the aforementioned Poole Wheelers chain gang, I turned up well aware that, other than my daily 6 mile commute, nary a pedal had I turned for a week and a half. Expectations were low and yet I found myself matching the pace. Or at least I did as soon as a certain Mr Adam D'Arcy Wykes had dropped out with a mechanical. Then, on the second lap, I managed to drop everybody. Mark, who I can best describe as 'silent but deadly' then came thundering past me, saying "where's everybody gone?" and took up the pace, disappearing into the distance. I ended up riding on my own for the next lap, before the rest of the guys caught me back up into the headwind on the final lap.

So, in conclusion, a week spent bent double in a trench, shovelling dirt, does wonders for your quads and lower back. And this is a good thing if you are a cyclist. Think former miner Jean Stablinski, who knew how to push those pedals.

Right, enough, right enough. Get thee to a trench. Get shovelling. And don't forget to thank me when the wins come pouring in.

Kneed For The Bike

2012-01-10T11:39:00.000-08:00

Its been a while. Quite a lot of months. In fact, I think it was July that I last raced. Since then its all been a bit rubbish with (on going) knee problems and... well, just that. Its been so long with the whole knee business that I have no idea whether it's slowly getting better or I've just got used to it. In fact, my return to the racing sphere is mostly down to the fact that I've got bored waiting for things to get better and just got the hell on with my training. Its amazing what you can do with a knee brace and an ice pack.

So, having decided to get the hell on with my bike (as mentioned earlier) and having got my uber bike all back together (as mentioned last week), I suddenly found myself with no excuses left to duck out of the latest round of the Calshot Winter League. So I went and did it.

It had been a while, like I said. I've been a regular to the series for a couple of years, now, plus a few seasons before that where work commitments (read: being too knackered) had me missing either the beginning or the end of the series. And, on turning up, I was greeted like a lost son by many of the old hands. 'Where've you been?' They all asked and I made the sheepish excuses mentioned earlier. Somewhere in the last 11 months, I'd forgotten what time the league actually started and was signing on while the warm up was coming to an end. All, in it was quite a rush for me to just make it onto the track for the first race and from then on... ...Calshot takes a little bit of getting used to and so it is generally not advised to jump straight into your first race with no warm up at all. It takes time to over ride the messages from your brain going 'WOOOOOOOOOOOAH! WHERE'S THE GROUND? OH MY GOD THIS IS MENTAL' And that's just in the easy first few laps.

By the time of the points race, I'd remembered how to ride a track bike, managed to stitch Greg up like a kipper, ride the final 2 km of the race as a solo time trial and nab myself third place. Not bad considering I sucked major balls all afternoon. By the time of the final race, I'd even got so self confidant as to try something foolhardy, fail and limp home in seventh place.

Onwards and upwards. Or at least sideways and staying roughly in the same place.

Rotterdam 6

2012-01-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

Discovered the live stream here, with a little help from Stephen Bradbury. If that doesn't work, click on this URL: http://um.sport2media.com/zesdaagse-rotterdam/ or copy and paste. I should point out that its LIVE, so you have to log on between 6pm CET and midnight between Thursday 5th January (yesterday) and Tuesday 10th January to actually watch anything. And the commentary will be in Nerderlandsh. That said, its the best quality live stream I've seen. A full program of events can be found here.

In unrelated news, next time someone lays into you about 'not paying road tax', try throwing a curveball back at them, about the huge public subsidy involved in finding places for everybody's car to park. More details here. (Thanks to Harold for the link).

And finally, the proper results came through for my running type race and my actual time was 44 minutes 39 seconds, a full 5 minutes slower that what I'd thought. Obviously, the '39' shouted as I crossed the line was the thirty-nine seconds past the (forty fourth) minute. The winner was nearly a full 10 minutes up on me. Ouch.

Behind The Wheel

2012-01-05T01:59:00.000-08:00

As promised yesterday, these are the wheels of my uber bike:

The rims are Campagnolo Omega V, that I got from Rod Langley years ago. He was never much of a trackie and, amazingly, back then track stuff had practically no value. 'You like track, you may as well have them' He said. Needed the space in his loft. They had perfectly functional but hardly fantastic Suzee hubs that served their purpose very well up until when I found some Campag Pista wheels.

Then, this year, at Beaulieu Autojumble, I found a pair of brand new Miche track hubs and immediately learnt a hard lesson in negotiation: You do not open the box containing your desired item and shout 'WOOO! Fuck, yeah!'. This puts you at an immediate disadvantage when trying to negotiate a price. Anyway, I bought them, then counted the number of holes (this is VERY important) and discovered that they fitted the Omega V rims mentioned above. All that was then needed was someone to bung all the bits together.

I put a call out on various social media asking 'anyone know a good wheel builder?' and got various answers 'I know a guy in Durham but I think he's dead' and so forth until my sister, Zoom Sara, replied 'Er... yes'. She is romantically involved with a bike mechanic, who had just completed a Cytec course about building track wheels and wanted an opportunity to try out his sick skilz.

Sorted. Come Christmas, Zoom Sara made her way from London to Somerset with a pair of built up wheels, tied and soldered like they're sposed to be, all in a humungous cardboard box. This was then squeezed, along with myself, Mrs Zoom and two dogs into our miniscule little Citroen C1 and taken back to base. (Her: We could leave them here, we'll be back in a fortnight. Me: No, THEY ARE COMING WITH US). And that was it, really. They stayed in the garage until I had a chance to build the whole bike up properly (see yesterday's post).

So, a BIG thank you to Luke, who works at Bike Plus in Croydon. If you want a trick pair of track wheels built, he's your man. Tell him Zoom Gordo sent you.

The Greening Machine

2012-01-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

It lives. Well, it already was living. It had been living since 1991 and had been in regular use ever since, its just that it's way cooler now. It must be, it's got me sitting on it.

A few months back, I heard on the club cycling grape vine that Dave Marjoram's bike was up for sale. This was actually his son's bike, built back in 1991 for racing at the infamous 'old' Calshot. The it was made from Italy's best Columbus cro-moly steel tubing, and built by famed local bike builder Tony Greening. Now, Tony and I go back a long way - I worked at the same place as him briefly and am friends with his son, drummer in world-renowned doom-metal bands Electric Wizard and Ramases. Tony and my Father in law go back even further, which helped alot when getting permission from the management for my second track frame purchase in as many years. 'Well, if its one of Tony's' agreed Mrs Zoom and the hard earned cash from my teaching school kids to ride that summer went Mr Ward's way.

The bike came complete and ready to ride, which I did, to find it the best, sharpest, track bike that I'd ever ridden. There was one tiny problem: it was painted a mixture of lime yellow and bright green which, as anyone who's ever met me will tell you, is really, really not me. I'd already asked, as condition of purchase, whether anybody minded if I had it resprayed. They didn't. 'What colour do you want it?' They asked and I answered: 'Black', which was usually met with a disappointed 'Oh'. Day glo colours may have been big in the cycling world in the early 90s but I wanted my bike a bit more grunge. I like black, it matches my soul.

Then came the problem of, not so much who to paint it but when to get it done. With Slades open, there wasn't really the necessary 6 week gap in the season to get the thing resprayed without missing any racing.I had to strip the frame down, then drive up to Argos Cycles in Bristol. 'What colour do you want it?', 'Black', 'Oh'. I'd wondered about getting bits of it chromed but that put the build cost up by £100 so that was a no no. It would've take longer as well and, with the Calshot season already well under way, I wanted it back some time before spring.

A month later, it was done - powder coated in satin black with special, rubberised, chip-resistant paint and 'Greening' emblazoned on the head and seat tube. Ready for another 20 years of use. The decals were Tony's own, and had held up the respray schedule a little as he had searched the loft for them.

So, come the xmas holidays, the bike was all ready to build and I paid a visit to my old work colleagues at CSG (formerly Hotwheels) to borrow their workshop facilities. I had acquired enough parts to build up one absolutely shit-hot track bike. The parts list is as follows: Campagnolo pista cranks; Campagnolo Record threaded headset; Cinelli 120mm quill stem; Cinelli pista bars; generic Campagnolo seat post; Fizik arione saddle; Fizik handlebar tape. I'll get to the wheels in a later post but the piece de resistance was the bottom bracket. This was from the Chas Roberts lo-pro track frame Mrs Zoom had found in a skip a few years ago (no, seriously). I'd always thought it had a Shimano dura ace bottom bracket and took it with me, to extract and transplant. Upon removal I discovered it was even better than dura ace, it was a Royce titanium cartridge bottom bracket. If you're not into bike bling (and you haven't got bored and gone back to facebook yet) that translates as the absolute dog's bollocks. And, even better, my bike remains Shimano-free!

All it needs now is a decent rider. Boom boom.

Cost of that Chas Roberts frame, including Royce bottom bracket and Campag seat post? Fifty Pence. No, seriously.

Oh, Cinnamon, Where You Gonna Run To?

2012-01-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

If you read books about the early days of cycling, you'll hear that, at the time of its invention, the bicycle was the fastest thing on earth. This is a bit wide of the mark, seeing as there'd been these things called trains way back in the 1850s, which were capable of moving at a fair old whack. But APART from trains, before bicycles came along there were only two choices of transport: shank's pony and... a pony. In the meanwhile, the bicycle has been repeatedly voted the best invention ever - the horse that needs no hay, a mass transport of the future, running on porridge, bananas and water and, on a distance covered to kilojoules burnt, matched only by soaring birds like the condor and albatross. It got us to work before cars were invented and will continue to do so after the oil runs out.

So, bearing all that in mind, how come I went and did a running race, then? As in running with your feet, like people used to do before bicycles were invented? The story is long and complicated, going back to last winter's mini ice age. One of the bicycles major flaws is that you can fall off and hurt yourself and, after years of people telling me the exact same thing, it finally twigged that, if I went out and ran for half an hour in the dark on a cold, wet, winter's evening, it would do me a darn sight better than bimbling around on my bike for the same, trying not to get knocked off. There were complications to this plan that delayed my departure onto this new path: namely smashing myself up in a track bike pile up in the summer, then a knee problem through the autumn, not to mention a suspected weak metatarsel that turned out to be a glitch on the x-ray machine. Long story, don't go there. On the plus side, as a frequent shopper at Lidls, I'd managed to acquire a load of running kit at dirt cheap prices, as well as a quality pair of trainers in a discount warehouse shop. Last August, wide spread rioting had largely targeted sports shops (this is the UK, even the rioters are acquisitional Thatcherites), which was a boon for thrifty sportsmen like myself.

Then, me being me, as soon as I started running, I had to start looking round for places to run. Goal setting, I think it's called. Before I knew it, I'd entered a 10km 'fun run' around Somerly Park near Ringwood. This slightly changed the parameters of what I was doing as, for starters, I had no idea what distance I'd been running up until then. An Ordanance Survey map and a bit of guesstimation indicated that I was perfectly capable of doing 10km without either injuring or embarrassing myself. And lo, I signed on the dotted line and, come 11am on January 2nd 2012, found myself lining up for my first running event.

This was, as I mentioned before, billed as a 'fun run' - a title that I find hugely condescending to the competitors although I suspect that that's just me. Obviously, it was more fun for some that it was for others and pretty much all walks of life were represented at the start line. When moving across from one sport to another, you tend to take with you a certain arrogance that 'your' sport is more 'pure'. Or something. Here, I suspect, it was the other way around: running is not, never was and never will be 'the new golf'. There is no Rapha in running. Or at least none that I've noticed in the few weeks that I've been doing it.

With a few minutes to go, there was a request for the few hundred of us doing the 10km to line up at the start with the 'fastest to the front'. This resulted in some very British shuffling, as everybody modestly self-selected. Not that it made much of a difference more than 2 kilometers in. I'd already told myself not to chase anyone, and to start at a 'sensible' pace. There are two tactics: hard at the start, slow at the finish or slow at the start and hard at the finish. Well, there were two for the likes of me, for the speedy guys, it seemed to be hard at the start, hard at the finish but they were all out of my sight within the first kilometer. No major change to a cycle race there, then.

From then on, it was a case of holding a pace that my legs could stand and plugging on. When running on my own - which is all the running I've done so far - I'd always found the going both painful and painfully slow. On this occasion, the competitive spirit kicked in and I was all right so long as I was going about roughly the same pace as everybody else. I think with both cycling and running, there is a certain wildebeest mentality - the rush of the stampede, the gloating smile as you move yourself forward in the pack and become one more wildebeest away from being eaten by a leopard. Then there was the endurance factor, as you tried to pace yourself according to the signs every kilometer. Both the 5km and the 10km runners used the same course, yet had their markers at different points. This made things very confusing - rather like having random numbers shouted at you 'Two kilometers done, SEVEN, five to go, THREE, NINE' and so forth. By the second lap, I'd decided that the 3km sign must actually mean 3 km and started upping the pace, reeling in the mountain biker ahead of me. Dressed in a large aerated Fox motorcross jersey and MTB shorts, he was either a downhiller - in which case I simply had to beat him or I'd never live it down - or a motorcrosser - in which case, I'm amazed his ankles still worked well enough to carry him that far. Anyway, urged on by the spirit of Conan ('Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentation of their women') I pounded the last few km, catching the tail end of the 5km and crossing the line as someone shouted '39'.

Thirty nine minutes? That's all right, isn't it? To be honest, I have no idea. The full results aren't published till tomorrow. But yeah, 39 minutes, I'll be happy with that. Although, if she was shouting out every minute to the time keeper, then I must have just missed out on 38. Dammit, if only I'd leapt that cattle grid like a roe deer instead of running round it. Damn, damn damn it.

Ah well, there's always the next one. I'll do that one properly.

The Institutional Cyclist’s Christmas Lecture

2011-12-30T09:31:00.000-08:00

Back in May, my friend Rob died. He was in his 40s, in,quite literally, the prime of his life. He was in good health, fit and gettingfitter. He was of sound mind and possessed of such levels of quiet self confidencethat he was an inspiration not just to myself but to a good many other people.

The man who killed him bore him no grudge. He did not evenknow him. He, too, suffered no mental or physical impairment and was using amachine that he had proved himself able to operate to a level of competencyrequired by law. He had proved this within the last twelve months. His machinewas fully road worthy under the current law, was taxed and insured.

The incident happened on a wide, straight, stretch of road,in good, clear conditions, in the full daylight of an early summer’s evening.

Rob’s wife, Jane, had this to say about the event:

‘We were looking forward to achange-around in our life together. Robert had left British Cycling andcompleted a Return To teaching course so that he could get a job based nearerto home and spend weekends and holidays with us. We were looking forward to aphase of financial and domestic stability. I felt really happy thatthe change would enable us to be closer, have a more relaxed and creativeway of life.
‘Now I have lost all of thatand can’t look forward to all those things. Eve has lost her lovely Dad. Georgehas lost his fabulous stepdad. I have lost an affectionate lovely companion-a–once-in-a-lifetime-perfect match for me. Loads of relatives, friends andcyclists have lost a zany, warm, funny, talented, big hearted friend. Robert isutterly irreplaceable.
‘I have lost the emotional andfinancial support and warmth and companionship that Robert gave me.
‘I have found it really hardto write this because the words do not say accurately enough how truly horriblelosing Robert in this way has been. The depth of grief is hard to explain inwords. I can’t even cry properly and Eve has said the same because it feelsinadequate and unquenchable all at the same time once you do start crying.
‘I feel angry about a systemthat allows young drivers to take on a responsibility for others lives thatthey are not ready for. I feel sorry for [the driver] that he has had to find that outthe hard way and have his life ruined as his actions have ruined ours.’

The point is this: behind thestatistics, lie people. Each of the hundreds of cyclists killed every year,each of the thousands of other deaths and injuries on the roads each year arereal people that have families and friends. Each death is a family devastated.Each death affects a hundred friends. For a hundred deaths, read ten thousandpeople grieving. A small town’s worth of grief.

The point is this: This is nota war. This is not genocide. This is not a disease. These people are no one’senemies. Their deaths are not meant as a warning to others. Their deaths arepointless and banal. They are not killed out of spite but out of ignorance, outof foolishness, out of incompetence. They die because others send textmessages. They die because others misjudge speed and distance.

The point is this: The peoplethat kill these people do not want to kill them. We must never forget to sparea little pity for them. They are only there because the gamble that paid off onall the other times failed to do so on this occasion and the video game realitythrough the windscreen suddenly became horrifyingly real. They are, after all,only acting in that way because the society that we live in allows them to andonly suffers to penalize their actions when people die.

Cars are made of metal, peopleare made of meat. And, in this equation, meat usually looses. Fire me at 70mphat the side of a Vauxhall Astra and I will still loose. On the roads today, wehave a level of potential devastation unseen outside of an arms depot and yetwe have few qualms about who we let loose with this arsenal, still fewer abouthow we restrain them. The potential is there for mayhem and yet, amazingly, thefact is that road deaths are the exception rather than the rule. The majorityof people, whether drivers, cyclist, pedestrians, will get through their liveswithout a major accident. The majority will get through without knowing anybodyinvolved in a major accident.

The one thing keeping us allsafe is self restraint: the Mutually Assured Destruction of a traffic collisionand a fear of being the person that causes the death of another. That pedestrian,that cyclist, that motorcyclist, that kid on the scooter, that old lady on thecycle path, those guys digging up the roadside, that mother walking to schoolis a human being, who has a family and people that love them and will missthem. This is greater than that desire to arrive at work a full 20 secondsearlier thanks to passing them on a blind bend. This is greater than skimmingpast them, to tuck back out of the way of oncoming traffic. This is why we looka second time before pulling out of a junction. This is why failing to see theaccident victim still does not make it their fault.

Please: stay safe in 2012. Foryour own sake and for everyone around you.

Scream If You Wanna Go Fatter

2011-12-28T07:29:00.000-08:00

The Zoom Gordo Christmas Diet Plan

Tuesday: Drive to work. Feel twinge in my knee from the medial ligament injury I've been suffering from since the summer. Ignore this. In fact, try to magically cure this by doing a half hour run the night before*. The jury is definately out, as far as magically curing medial ligament injuries by half an hour of cross country running is concerned. My knee stoicly fails to magically cure itself. Digging out a good half a dozen 2-3m high conifers at 50+kg each and then loading them onto a pick up truck does little to help my knee. Nor does my boss explaining how he used to dig out trees four times that height in half the time back when he was my age and didn't have time to yelp in pain cos there was a war on don't you know and the Germans might hear.

Wednesday. Drive to work. Hobble around with my leg bound so tight my toes are numb. Pretend that a bit of rest will make it right as rain by the 'morrow. Fail to get enough rest. Get home. Cry a little. Then go to the pub. Blow my xmas bonus on 2 pints of beer and a portion of chips.

Thursday. And so begins two glorious weeks of holiday. Lucky, lucky me. Wake with a hangover. Drag my fixed wheel winter ride out of the garage and ride, very gingerly, for a couple of hours. Luckily, the aforementioned ligament injury is not effected by a normal pedalling action. As a sport, cycling is good for your joints. Unlike rugby, say. If anything, the fact that poor pedalling action results in pain can be a useful aid to maintaining good technique. Return home. Ice pack to affected area plus heavy strapping shows knee who's boss. Mrs Zoom returns from work with a bottle of red as a Christmas tip. We drink this. Vote for Cav on Sports Personality Of The Year.

Friday. Wake with a hangover. Intend to increase number of laps on my training route by a factor of 1: namely three laps, three hours, sixtyish miles. Starts raining on return leg of second lap, so session is ended prematurely. Riding back into a headwind is surprisingly easy due either to; it not being headwind; my gear being very small; or all the lifting 50kg trees out of holes having built up my back muscles so that I am now ripped like a fighting bull. Ice and support on knee. Pub in evening, rammed so tight I can barely breath. Still manage to get adequately drunk.

Saturday. Christmas Eve. Wake with a hangover. Double the length of my cross country run route. Basically, add two 5km-ish runs together to make a 10km-ish run. Just to see if I can. I can. Pain in my knee is now dwarfed by the pain from my achilles tendons - shortened by years of cycling - being forced to do some work. One of our neighbours invites us round for drinks. They all seem amazed that I'm out running on christmas eve. Dedication, I tell them: Lance Armstrong, Jonny Wilkinson.

Sunday. Christmas Day. Wake with a hangover. Up to my parents with Mrs Zoom and the dogs. She takes them for a walk to calm them down, I go for a run to wake myself up. My whole reasoning for running is that you can get a lot more out of half an hour's running than you can half an hour's riding. This may be true but after 'just' half an hour, my body quickly reminds me that it is not yet recovered from yesterday's efforts. Still yet to experience a 'runner's high' yet, it mostly feels painful and slow. Then off to the folks for a stupendous amount of food and alcohol. Get home to watch the Dr Who Christmas special and last year's Tour de France DVD. This time, the race ended on Alpe d'Huez and Andy Schleck got to win. My dvd, my rules. Go to bed happy.

Monday. Boxing Day. Wake with a monumental hangover. Calves still hurt from last 2 days efforts. A 2 hour ride does at least redistribute the discomfort to other parts of my body. Get home. Get down the off-licence** for beers and, on the way home, have a moment of panic: I have absolutely no idea what day of the week it is. Eventually decide that it's Monday and get on home. Friends round in the afternoon. More food and alcohol, followed by more food and alcohol. Trip over the dog and twang my knee again.

Tuesday. Wake with a hangover. Decide to have a rest day.

*Running. You'll be getting to hear about this in good time.
**Off licence: Where you buy alcohol in the UK

Mod In Heaven

2011-12-22T10:34:00.000-08:00

Rumours that this blog just steals stuff straight off of The Inner Ring are a little close to the bone today, as that's kinda exactly what I did with this here video. That's kind of how the blogosphere works anyway.

But, getting to the point, the video in question is 2011 Dauphine Libere winner Bradley Wiggins being interviewed on a radio show called 'the modcast'.

A bunch of blokes rap about Mod music, one of these blokes being Bradley Wiggins. That's about it, really. Having spent the 90s with black hair down to my arse, listening to Rammstein, I listened to one of my cycling heroes talking about being into Ocean Colour Scene through my fingers. Why Bradley, why?

Ah well. There's probably a full podcast available on iTunes or something.

A Forest

2011-12-18T11:11:00.000-08:00

Well, it seems ages since I marshalled a race. Come to think of it, its ages since I last posted on here. December 9th, that was AGES ago and, in all truth, I don't have a valid excuse for why I haven't written anything.

Anyway, yeah, so I went and marshalled a race: Poole Wheelers Christmas Cracker Cyclocross on the popular Wareham forest route in Wareham forest near Wareham. This was a little more involved than my previous marshalling experiences, as it involved getting to a muster point in Wareham forest for 7.30am on a frosty December morning. I arrived about 10 minutes late, having been distracted by a documentary on farming methods in China while eating my breakfast, then being unable to make time on the drive there due to lethal slippy roads.

As it was, those helpers who had arrived were already well dispersed around the woods, meaning that I had to spend another 10 minutes wandering around, asking bemused dog walkers if they were here for the race until I ran into someone that I knew. It turned out that I wasn't alone: others were coming in in dribs and drabs and soon enough, we had an enough helpers to get the course laid out way ahead of schedule.

A cyclocross race, as you've probably already gathered, is a bicycle race held on any surface other than tarmac. Its less 'technical' than a mountain bike race (less annoying fiddly bits) but has various different surfaces, a few 'gnarly' descents, climbs that you have to carry your bike up and, on this course, a bit called 'the sand pit', which is fairly self explantatory. I wanted to have a couple of hay bales swinging on a bit of rope on one of the tighter sections to make things more exciting but it was a bit late for me to suggest things. So, the route was mostly on fire breaks around a few acres of foresty commission pine forest on a course laid out with a humungous reel of red and white tape. The riders all ride round for a set amount of time, then the first one across the line wins. This all requires the aforementioned armada of helpers, plus red and white tape, stakes and lump hammers. (A track race, meanwhile, requires one person to keep score, a lap chart and a bell. Just saying).

As mentioned above, the Poole Wheelers did their club proud, turning up in droves to get the course laid out, then enjoying a hearty breakfast and waiting for the competitors to turn up and race. A couple even did the race: Ryan Hodgkyns taking the first win of the day for the club in the under 12 category, helped by a HUGE amount of encouragement around the course.

Jordan Wade got a third place in the juniors race(under 18), John Burrows rode the vets (40+) while none of our crowd fancied riding with the the seniors (aged 18-39). They were a bit quick, especially Mike Cotty, who seems to have forgotten the time that I accused him of being a wheel sucker. Not that he was doing much of that in this race. I was stationed on a rather lovely, rooty, off-camber descent, my job being to pick up the pieces if any of the riders hit a tree stump and went into orbit, as well as to liase with members of the public who might be passing by. The woods were popular with dog walkers and it was my job to greet them politely and warm them that about 40 sweaty guys and girls in muddy lycra are about to come thundering down that hill, so it would be as well to keep the dog on a lead for the time being.

This was largely successful, except for one guy, who started effing and blinding about how he'd fought in three world wars and if he wanted his dog run over by a cyclist then that was his right. Or something like that. It turned out that I was the third or fourth marshal to get the 'you bloody cyclists ruined christmas' treatment and I wasn't the last. There's nowt so queer as folk. At most it gave us all something to talk about afterwards.

So, everybody rode round the woods and stuff. Mike Cotty won and then we all pulled the tape up and went home.

Quite a laugh, this cycling lark. If you want to read about what happened in the actual race, then have a look here. Its got photos and everything.

Zurich Six-Day On Board

2011-12-09T11:50:00.001-08:00

More 6 day action, this time from Zurich. Found by Mr Jon Cannings, no mean madison pilot himself. I have GOT to get me a pair of those chequered shorts.

Turns Out Riding A Bike's Not That Dangerous After All

2011-12-06T13:11:00.001-08:00

The BBC recently produced a national road map for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Norn Iron, showing road fatality between 1999 and 2010. Have a look here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15975720#
Enter your postcode (or indeed any post code) and it will show your area, with a dot marking every traffic fatality in the last 11 years.

In the top right, you can sort by vehicle and its worth comparing the number of dots for 'all' to just those for cars and just those for bikes. We come out of it rather well, I think.

Obviously, in the interests of scientific rigour, I should point out that a great many more people drive than cycle and that I'll bet that those bicycle deaths involved a car somewhere along the line.

But still, I know what I'd rather be doing.

Getting In With The Right Crowd

2011-12-05T13:05:00.001-08:00

A couple of months back, I made an attempt to compare anarcho-syndicalism by using the metaphor of a bicycle race. I'm pretty sure I did, it was a long time ago - read what I wrote and then correct me if I'm wrong, I can't really be arsed. Anyway, a similar thought occured to me yesterday while I was on the Bournemouth Jubilee Wheelers 100km reliablity trial. This is a reliability trial over 100km, run by the Bournemouth Jubilee Wheelers. You turn up at Merley at about a quater to nine on a Sunday morning, sign on, giving your start time (9am for most, 9.15 or 9.30 if you were confidant on making up those 15 or 30 minutes on the rest of the ride). Then, you go for a pee and come out of the toilet to find that everybody's gone without waiting for you, the sneaky sods.

Luckily, the route (available on a sheet of A4 paper, or downloadable onto your Gamin if you have one) starts with a complicated dog leg around Merley which, to which I knew the 'short cut'. Each year, the route is run in the opposite direction - one year clockwise, the other anti clockwise - and it was vitally important that I got the direction right. Obviously, I could've pulled the route map out of my pocket and checked but that was far too uncool and anyway, my sneaky short cut brought me out just in time to spot a selection of brightly coloured jerseys heading into the distance.Which sort of brings me to my original point, about cycling in this context being a great metaphor for the rat race. That's the rat race as in getting by in the modern world. Bear with me on this, ok? In cycling, your life gets a lot easier if you've got enough people around you. If you're out on your own, life suddenly gets very complicated indeed.

It went like this: I saw the tail of the bunch heading up the road and set off after them. This involved riding faster than them, which was harder for me, as I was on my own. Luckily, the riders at the back tend not to be riding quite as fast. Which is why they're at the back. The next problem is that, because they're not riding riding as fast as the riders at the front, the riders at the front tend to get further away. And so, for the first five km of the ride, the bunch was splitting faster than pack ice in the arctic summer. I was on the drops in 'zone 2', continuously bridging across one gap to the next. Occasionally, I'd find a friend in one of the little groups and chat to them before spotting another gap opening up ahead. 'Anyway, see ya' I'd say and leave them there. Just like the rat race, eh?Eventually, I found myself happily tucked into the 'front' group and life suddenly got very easy. I'd made it to the happening end and, while those at the front did all the hard work for me, all I had to do was make damn sure I stayed up this end. That and try and loose the annoying songs that were rattling around inside my head (first this then this).

This worked great until we came to a big hill. One of the short but sharp ones that you get in the purbecks. I climbed it ok(ish) but was a little less... committed on the descent. Basically, I suck at going downhill and found myself out of sight of the leaders. Bollocks. Then I took a wrong turn, had to double back and found myself even further behind the lead group. Moving onto a long, straight, bit of road with the wind behind me, I saw them up a head again and made a prolonged effort to get back on. Unfortunately, they also had a long straight road and the wind behind them and so, by the time we got back into twisty lanes and head winds, I was just following their tyre tracks. I s'pose at least all that time watching Ray Mear's World of Survival finally paid off.

To drag this creaking metaphor out for one final time, while I was up with the main pack, life was fairly easy. But the very moment that I got left behind, it got very hard indeed. I blew a gasket trying to get back in with the movers and shakers and, when that attempt failed, I was completely spent. There followed some moments of riding round in circles, consulting the map, looking for tyre tracks, passing people on the same ride as me going in the complete opposite direction, stopping, consulting ('are you going the right way?' 'I don't think so, are you?'), following mirage like cyclists in the far distance, who then turn out to be just on a day's jaunt and finally giving up and going home. Ah well. I'd guess you call that dropping out, which is kind of my default position in the rat race anyway.

Anyway, take it away, Brian:

Keirin School

2011-11-29T11:01:00.001-08:00

A documentary about the famed Japanese Keirin school*, made in 1987. So that's keirin, in Japan, in the 80's and with an 80's sound track. It really honestly does not get better than that.It's all in Japanese, but you get the gist of it. *Keirin is a form of bicycle racing popular in Japan, used for gambling, like greyhound racing in this country. The whole sport is owned by a company, while all the riders have to graduate via the 'keirin school' featured in the documentary above.

2011-11-26T11:03:00.001-08:00

Sadly, it seems that Gordo's World of Zoom favourite Daniel Lloyd has not had his contract renewed at Garmin-Cervelo. After two Giro d'Italias, one Tour de France, one early breakaway in the Tour Of Flanders, a top ten in the Tour Of Britain and plenty more mixing it at the top end of the world's toughest sport he is currently hunting a position in 'the real world'. He says as much on Eamonn Deane's cycling website here (of, if you still can workout hotlinks, here: http://blog.sportsmassagebournemouth.co.uk/2011/11/daniel-lloyd-interview.html ).

However, despite being dropped by the Garmin team, his legacy lives on, as I spotted by the Garmin display stand in the Currys mega store today:

Obviously, it may well be the other 6 foot plus rider in bont shoes riding for Garmin but I'm pretty sure. I dunno, I was s'posed to be buying washing machines at the time.

Anyway, a big cheer for Dan, for all his hard work on behalf of Carlos Sastre, Thor Hushovd and friends and for giving us someone to spot at the front of the peleton in the early hours of road races.

Brick By Brick

2011-11-24T13:03:00.001-08:00

My late and very much lamented friend Rob once told me something about training. I'd just spent the day pushing wheel barrows full of bricks up a hill and wondered to him if it'd have an effect on my sprinting.

'It'll have an effect on your sprinting.' He said, then: 'Though whether it'll make you any faster is another thing.'

My hypothesis was that, by pushing barrows full of bricks up hill, I'd basically had a hard day power lifting at the gym. This would have made various muscles in my legs bigger, thus making me faster. Unfortunately, its a little more complicated than that but the short answer to 'will it make me faster?' is 'no'. The slightly longer answer is that no, as pushing barrows of bricks up a hill will make you better at pushing barrows of bricks up a hill. Riding your bike will make you better at riding your bike, as Fausto Coppi explained all those years ago. There are no shortcuts. There are no miracles.

I've spent most of my life hoping, against all evidence, that I might somehow miraculously get really good at something. 'I do X, therefore I'd be good at Y' goes the logic. The reality is that, no, you only get good at Y by practising doing Y till you're blue in the face. Or red, in the case of cycling.

The latest plan has me getting really good at cycling by riding a bike to work and back. Now, I've done this before with a similar total lack of beneficial results. I've spent years riding a bike to work and back and, each and every time, if I've wanted to get race fit, I've had to go out and do a bit extra in the evening. I mean its not like Fabian Cancellara won five world time trial titles by commuting to the office and back every day. My latest 'secret weapon' has been an old mountain bike, plus all my work gear, which have a combined weight of about half a metric tonne. That, added to the positively mountainous route to work, had me thinking 'wow, I'm gonna be flying next year'.

I was helped in that delusion by missing the Poole Wheelers Wednesday night chain gang for the past month, due to it raining EVERY SINGLE Wednesday for the last four weeks. Weirdly, after a day working out in the rain, plus a dark 5 mile ride home in the rain, I am not in the best of moods to go out for an extra 15 or so more damp miles. So, I had stayed home instead.

So, when I finally got out this Wednesday, I was immediately struck by how fantastic it was to not be on a 20 year old mountain bike with shagged bearings from all the weight I'm carrying. It was a nice evening - about 7 degrees, no wind to speak off and no rain. There was a good turn out and I went off in the 'medium' group and everything was going swimmingly until somebody suggested 'Enough of this Sunday ride, lets hurt a little'. Which it did. Turns out that, while I have trained myself perfectly for riding old mountain bikes loaded with panniers up hills, when it came to riding in a high speed bunch, I was somewhat lacking. I lasted the first lap then, just as I'd got dropped, happened across a friend of mine. He just happened to be riding past and I managed ti stop and chat to him just long enough for the 'medium' group to complete another lap and tag back onto the back.

Then it was another 6 miles home afterwards, followed by a hefty meal and about 9 hours sleep. Then, I got up, rode into work and spent the day pushing wheel barrows full of turf over a gravel drive.

And, no, that has definitely not improved my sprinting.

London Derriere

2011-11-18T12:15:00.001-08:00

In case you haven't been paying attention lately, London will be hosting the Olympic Games next August. This is, on the whole, a good thing. I'm cool with it - they built a velodrome five miles from my house as part of the 'Olympic Legacy'*, and as consequence, I'm so on board that the IOC could be exposed as sacrificing kittens to the dark lord Satan and I'd still be in favour.

Which is not to say that there haven't been disappointments along the way. The first was the announcement in 2009 that half the events would be dropped from the track program. Well, actually, there would be an equal amount of male and female events, rather than the slightly male biased ratio that went before. Being male, I was outraged by this. Similarly, being male, I reckoned I could have made a better choice of events, dumping the team sprint to make way for the madison. It seemed a no brainer to me: replace the team sprint (3 guys riding around the track 3 times**) with the madison (the best endurance riders hand-slinging each other in a 60 minute, 200 lap slug fest of pure speed and bike-handling). Unfortunately, not having influence with either the UCI nor the IOC, this did not come to pass. And, lo, I flounced off. Stuff your Olympic track event, I thought, and when the opportunity to get tickets for the track events came up last summer, I didn't bother.

Not that I'd have got any if I had as the event was hilariously over subscribed. You know that thing about the entire world population being able to fit onto the Isle of Wight? Well it was a bit like that. Track cycling had suddenly become incredibly popular and applying for tickets was like playing the national lottery. You applied, and, if your stars were in the right alignment, you got your tickets. In fairness to the organisers, what exactly were they to do? With 150,000 people vying for each available seat, they had to come up with the fairest allocation system and I genuinely think that they did. My club secretary, Ros Spencer, bagged tickets for the team pursuit. Lucky so-and-so. I'm sure she'll send a postcard.

Meanwhile, I sat smugly back and waited for the 'London prepares' warm up event in the February before the games. It'd be pretty much the same thing. There'd still be no madison, as it seems the British hold massed-start track events under deep suspicion. 'The madison is a lottery' they say, which must explain why the Mayer brothers keep winning. Anyway, a little naively, I'd not expected the warm up event to be just as over subscribed as the real deal. Or at least, the realisation had dawned late.

Tickets went on sale on Tuesday for British Cycling members and, so, I went to work with my membership number sharpied to my arm. They went on sale at 9am but I didn't get a chance to get on the website until we had a break at 11, whereupon I discovered that I didn't have mobile coverage and that I'd left my wallet at home. I got home at 5pm, by which time the tickets were long gone. They would be made available to the plebs on Thursday, so I asked Mrs Zoom to have a go. 'I'll be at work' She protested but I stamped my little foot till she relented. She works unsupervised, unlike me, so was less likely to be told off for spending half an hour shouting at her phone in frustration when she should be ferrying barrows of turf up and down someone's driveway.

It turns out that ticket master doesn't accept payment from mobile devices. And, by the time she got home, a whole 1 1/2 hrs after the tickets went on sale, they'd sold out. All 7000 of 'em.

Ah well, didn't want to go to your stupid test event anyway.

Fear not, though, dear reader. The pringle won't be pulled down as soon as the games are done. And who knows, maybe track cycling will be a little less popular by then?

*Also thanks to about 15 years of badgering by Alan McRae.

**Two riders riding around the track twice in the Women's event.

Foxy Lady

2011-11-16T11:28:00.001-08:00

Should you be passing a branch of WH Smiths any time this month, you might want to drop in and look for a magazine called 'Cycling Active'. Its blue, with a guy riding a bike on the cover, which should distinguish it from all the other cycling magazines. Have a flick through to page 82 - 83 and read the insightful guide to winter rural commuting therein. This isn't the first time something I've written has got in the mainstream cycling media but it is the first time I've been acknowledged for it*.

So, yeah. I ride to work on rural roads, which is apparently a big deal. By 'rural' I mean that there's no street lighting and fields and horses and stuff either side of the road. And dead foxes. I was riding in yesterday, when I spotted a car pulled over ahead of me. A woman got out and I was wondering whether she had a puncture and whether I should gallantly offer assistance or ride on, eyes forward, and studiously ignore her. But she opened the boot, got out a plastic bag and walked over to a dead fox lying on the verge on the opposite side.

"Bit of a jigsaw." She said to me, in a South African accent as I passed.

"I wouldn't bother." I replied. "They taste horrible."

I continued on my way. Then, on the same commute this morning, she waved to me as she overtook. Obviously, we've bonded over a shared moment. Where our relationship goes from here is anyone's guess.

*Can you guess which bit of THIS got blatantly plagarised by the "humorous" section of a mainstream cycle sport magazine?

Don't Just Take My Word For It...

2011-11-13T09:16:00.001-08:00

Fixed gear isn't just for hipsters in Toxteth in London or where ever. As former Ras* winner Tommy Evans points out here, riding fixed is both an inexpensive and an efficient way to get yourself fit through the long winter months. He says as much on Sticky Bottle, the official blog of the Ireland national squad.

If you don't understand how hotlinks work, then click here: http://www.stickybottle.com/coaching/coaching-former-ras-winner-and-olympian-tommy-evans-talks-fixed-wheels/

*The Ras. Its a big race in Ireland.

Lanterne Rouge

2011-11-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

Pete Warhurst, a veteran member of my old club, had a story that he told, of when he was doing his national service in the RAF. They had Sundays off, and so he'd get on his bike and ride back home for Sunday dinner with his family. There was quite a distance between the two, so it would involve getting up at some ridiculous hour, riding for hours, sitting down with his family at about midday, eating the meal then getting back on his bike and riding hours back again. He would get back well after it was dark, then have to be up bright and early the next morning. "It's just what people did back then." He said. Which is not to say that everybody did that - far from it - its just that riding his bike was the only mode of transport available to him.

I'm starting to get what he means. As those of you with long memories will recall, my van suffered a blown engine back in April and things have not moved on much since then. Well, they've got more fractious and expensive but as concerns getting the damn thing back and working, after six months of 'it'll all be sorted by next month', things took a fairly terminal turn for the worse when the thing got broken into last week. All the doors were jimmied open and everything is now in the hands of the insurers who may or may not bring the whole sorry episode to a conclusion be writing the damn thing off. This may or may not work out in my favour, depending. Probably not.

The upshot is that riding my bike to work is my only option at the moment. It is not a matter of lifestyle choice, or a deliberate decision to hone my thighs by pumping up hills on a paleolithic mountain bike with panniers, it is a matter of necessity. Not, of course, that it's been bad for my thighs. As soon as I jump on a light road bike without panniers, I just fly up the hills although, I've noticed, I do now ride with a slight list to the right, to counter act the weight of all my work stuff in the left hand pannier. Unfortunately, experience has taught me that riding 6 miles to work and 6 miles home ever day is insufficient mileage to get me race fit. Even on a steel mountain bike.

This was brought home to me today on the Bournemouth Jubilee Wheelers 50 mile reliability trial. The Bournemouth Jubilee Wheelers used to be 'my' club - as it is, still, Pete Warhurst's club. Not that several other members seem to have noticed. It wasn't quite welcomed like a lost son but there was an awkward moment as I was asked to produce my membership card at the sign on and I had to explain that I left the club 3 years ago. 'Did you?' Yes, yes I did. Sorry. Its not like it was a major issue: everybody was welcome and the numbers at the start were an excellent indication of how cycling is booming at the minute. A reliability trial is kind of like a sportive, but cheaper, smaller and populated exclusively by people you know. 'Do they close the roads off for this?' Asked a young exchange student from Luxembourg when I explained the whole shebang to him a few years back. No, no they don't. We set off and we all ride a circuitous 50 mile route around little country roads. Everybody sets off at 9am, except for the fast bunch (Dan Lloyd, Eamon Deane, Gary Dighton etc), who set off at 9.30 and make the time back up.

I, meanwhile, ran into my old buddy Rod, with whom I worked for 5 years and who more or less got me into bike racing. He doesn't ride 'seriously' any more, preferring to play with guitars these days and was suffering some sort of hip related niggle. This kept our pace quite slow, which suited me just fine as I'm just getting out the good end of suffering my own annoying tendon related niggle. Had I been on my own, I'd have probably tried to keep with the fast guys and blown at about 2/3rds distance, ending at more or less the same time.

Basically, we weren't quite last on the road but we were damn close. But hey, it was a lovely, dry, autumnal day and what would you rather be doing than riding out in the lanes? Well, in Rod's case, sitting on the sofa with a cup of coffee and nailing the guitar riff in 'black dog' by Led Zeppelin. As the fast group swept by us, we looked at one another and asked 'but who of us is having the better time?' We thought for a moment before agreeing 'They are, aren't they?'

But, late or not, we got back and I returned home to a roast dinner and the world cup from Kazakhstan on Eurosport. And I didn't even have to ride 100 miles back to my base afterwards, nor serve 2 years national service in the military. Kids today, eh? Don't know they've been born.

(ps, I should mention Lanterne Rouge are a local, cycling themed band, featuring James, who was on the ride today. I've never seen them, but I'm sure they're really good).

2011-11-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

Take cyclocross, take country and western and take Belgium. Put it all together and what do you get?
This:

'De Cross Gaat Door' By TatYana Storm (Thanks to inner ring).

Meanwhile, in Australia:

Jimmy Savile

2011-10-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

Good bye to Jimmy Savile, a great friend of cycling, a competitor in the Tour Of Britain in the 40's

The Glamorous World Of Cycling Media

2011-10-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

You'll be pleased to know that Lord Chompy-Chops is very happy now. As I mentioned, he prefers rain water to tap and, boy have we had a lot of that in the last week... Yes, folks, that rain that we haven't had for the last six weeks came all at once, like a delayed payment on a very expensive sofa and, in two particular and related ways, helped prevent my moment of glory in a popular monthly cycle magazine.

It goes like this: There was a call on various social media networks for an article on 'people who ride at night', which I answered, as I ride at night. Well, I will do next week when the clocks go back. I get the impression that, of those that answered, all were urban commuters, while I alone braved country roads. I laid it on a bit thick, sort of portraying my commute as an episode of Countryfile. Which is pretty true, I mean I spent today dragging fir trees across a field in the rain like a character in 'A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch' and it really doesn't get much more rural than that.

Anyway, they liked it and called back, wanting photos of me doing the stuff that I said I did. The picture manager* started talking about his vision for the cover shot, of me riding through 'that ford you were talking about'. This is a ford as in a stream crossing a road and, while there absolutely is a ford on my route, it only floods when it gets really really wet. It had been really, really wet for the past few days but, crucially, not for the previous six or so weeks and so the river level was actually pretty low. As well as this, it was right at the end of my route, about five miles away and, having ridden all the way back from work, I didn't really fancy riding all the way out there and back all over again.

Come yesterday, the photographer turned up, called Simon and looking about as much like a professional photographer as was possible, with a couple of grand's kit stuffed into the boot of his Smart car. His CV included a portrait of Alberto Contador on the cover of Cyclesport (or possibly the other one) a few issues back. So, I got photographed by the guy that photographed Alberto Contador. From the sublime to the ridiculous. Feel free to bask in the reflected glory. We talked over the predicament mentioned above, as Simon explained that night shots generally aren't taken at night. Apparently, you can't see anything at night. Who knew? I forgot what it was that they normally do instead, maybe take the picture during daytime, then colour the back ground in black with photoshop.

A closer location was discussed and we made our way out there. A nice puddle and slurry filled layby off of Cowgrove lane, from where we could make the obligitary joke about local farmers with shotguns. He set up his several grands worth of kit in the light drizzle and got stuck into some portraits. This involved me standing, holding my bike in the rain, while he crouched down in a puddle.'You must have done worse shoots than this.' I asked him.'I'm struggling to think of one.' He replied, grimly.'Hm..' I said. 'We're really selling commuting by bike, aren't we?'There were a few more 'action' shots of me, riding past on my bike, which apparently didn't work so well as, due to the pitched blackness, his camera couldn't focus on me. Or something.

Then, it started to really wazz it down and, by mutual agreement, we called it a day. Simon packed up his, now sopping, kit and set off to his home back in Exeter (about 2 hours of windy rural A roads away). I don't think I made the cover.

Anyway, the magazine is 'Cycling Active' and will be coming out very soon, if all the talk about tight deadlines is to be belived.

Rest assured, I WILL keep you posted.

*The picture manager asked me about where I rode as 'he used to live round here'. I asked him 'Are you Roy's brother?' And he nearly fell off his chair. How do I know that? What can I say? Its a small town thing.

An Oldie... But Worth Watching Again

2011-10-25T11:56:00.001-07:00

D'you remember when fixed gear was all about street racing ninjas, instead of bunny hops?

War Horse

2011-10-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

So, I started a new job. I won't bore you with details as I do like to at least to pretend that this is a blog dedicated to cycling. And, believe me, in my previous job I was sorely tempted to start a blog called 'my boss is an arse' and dedicate it to stories about his behaviour (if you've ever watched Futurama, he played Zapp Branigan to my Kiff). But then I got a better job.

Now, getting back to the subject of riding bicycles, one of the many aspects of my new job that are better is that its only five miles away, so I can ride there. This required a 'winter proof' bike, that I got together in a great hurry last week. Unfortunatley, 'Bertie' failed at the final hurdle of being unable to carry the humungous amount of kit that I require to carry to work with me each day. One of the things about riding a bike is that you tend to arrive at your place of work soaked through with sweat. This is the case, I've found, in virtually all weathers. The solution is to take a change of clothes and remove all the sweaty items when you arrive. This is all very well, but you have to lug all these clothes with you, along with your lunch, your thermos etc and that's just not possible without panniers. Well, technically, I could carry it, in the manner of an ant carrying a caterpillar, but it wouldn't have done my spine much good.

What to do? Well, luckily, back in 1989, Mrs Zoom bought herself a mountain bike. Her beloved horse had gone lame and she wanted to get out on the same byways, so joined the late 80's mountain bike boom. These past 22 years, it has lived through various guises. Its taken her to work, its taken me to work, its spent many, lonely, years gathering dust at the back of the shed and, again and again it has come back.

The latest incarnation was born last year, when mudguards and a pannier rack were added (thanks to local bike shop Samways), followed by a little more languishing in the garage. And then, it was back. I'd wanted pannier racks for Bertie but didn't have any of the correct fittings, so, from its pile of dust at the back of the garage 'war horse' (as I have since named it) coughed politely.

One week on and its going very well. Riding a 22 year old finest british gas pipe diamond back with fully loaded panniers up hills to work and back everyday is doing wonders for my thighs. And, much as I expected, it has so far been utterly solid. It has mudguards, it now has enough LEDs on it to distract passing aircraft. This is looking good.

You Wait Ages For A Post And Then Three Come Along At Once

2011-10-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

Just out of curiosity, is it obvious that I've had a week's holiday?

Not here, unfortunately.

And definitely not doing cyclocross...

2011-10-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

So, I acquired this venus fly trap. I can't remember quite how but, given my current occupation*, I thought it best if I at least try to keep it alive. Googling 'venus fly trap care' was quite illuminating as, along with the fact that they get most of their nutriments through photosynthesis and so don't require you to 'help' flies into their trap, no matter how much you want to, was the fact that tap water was bad for them. The soil has to be kept moist, but the stuff that gets put in water to stop us humans dying of cholera and so forth is actually bad for the plant. Rain water is better, which is all fine and dandy if its rained any time in the last fortnight.

Now, I know what you're thinking: We live in England. Well, I do. And it rains all the time in England, doesn't it? Well, actually no. Not through most of the spring of this year and definately not for the last few weeks that I've been dutifully leaving waterproof containers outside over night, hoping to catch enough drops to keep Lord Chompy-Chops** happy.

On a not entirely unrelated note, do we all remember Bertie, the Bertin that we last saw in a rather sorry state, after I'd bent it in a race crash back in Reading in May? This was the frame that I'd bought from Herne Hill salwart Wally Happy. It was a fixed wheel winter trainer bike that I'd converted into a full-on track machine, via some colombus forks and local frame builder Tony Greening.

This did me very well through the 2010-2011 track season, till it got dinged in the aforementioned pile up. Then, while it was being bent back into shape by Mr Greening, I acquired one of his earlier creations. An out and out track bike, which didn't flex while under full load at Calshot. This soon became my track iron of choice and left me with the dilemma of what to do with Bertie. I could sell it, as steel track frames are still reaching ridiculous prices on ebay, but we'd been through a lot together and it just didn't seem fair. Then I wondered, if it had been built as a winter trainer, maybe it should become one again?

So formed a plan, which I sat on for some months after an early restoration attempt was foiled by the fact that the origional forks had gone missing. They'd slipped through one of the many wormholes in the space-time continuum that exist in my garage, only reappearing about a month ago when we were tidying up. Then, it was game on, picking through all the rest of the junk I have lying around until enough bits were found that - crucially - all fitted together. Not long later, I had a working bike, built almost entirely from the junk pile needing only new brake blocks, cables and shrouds, and some bar tape in new parts.

And some mudguards, which was the important bit. This was a winter bike, for getting to work on, and the fact that the front forks had mudguard eyes was one of the main factors in me building this frame up and not just using my Charge Plug as normal. This creates a bit of a paradox, as the entire point of a fixed wheel/single speed is simplicity (and cool) but the addition of mudguards immediately makes it hugely more complex (and less cool). They also rattle, buzz and generally get on your tits almost as much as the damned bluebottle that Lord Chompy-Chops has so far failed to capture. They needed a test ride but, as I mentioned above, it has failed to rain for the last fortnight.

Or at least, until last night. A bit of dreich turned into -hooray! - full blown rain and off I merrily spun, with my flashy LED lights and my rattly mudguards, splashing through puddles and yet returning with neither a damp stripe up my arse, nor soaked feet. Even better, I had a finally had a cup of rain water for the venus fly trap. So that was two of us made happy by a shower of rain.

That's gotta be a first.

* Gardener. Although, I prefare the more accurate job title 'bloke who mows lawns'.

** Not my fault, I didn't name him/it.

For Sale

2011-10-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Not mine, I'm putting the pictures around on behalf of a friend.

Ron Cooper track bike. 54 cm, with a long top tube. Fully uptogether and in good condition, with newly glued on tubs. Pista cranks, Cinelli bars & stem. £250 (and it would smooth the sale considerably if you mentioned that you were intending to ride it on Bournemouth's new track).

Christchurch area.

Speak to Rod 01425 610 747

Crash, Bang, Wallop

2011-10-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, it's been a little quiet around here lately. This is due to a spot of tendonitis that has had me off my bike since about mid august. Its hard to write whimsical witticisms about riding when you're not actually doing any riding and there's only so many amusing you tube clips to link to. If things don't start getting better soon, then I might just put a permanent link up to the Simon's Cat website and have done with it. Or maybe change the whole theme of the blog into one full of whimsical witticisms about knee excersizes.

One thing that I have been doing is coaching, but I don't want to write about that: Its all very well laughing about all my hilarious bike related errors, but its not really fair to catalogue those of others and, more to the point, laughing about them on the interweb afterwards tends to undermine the coach-rider relationship. Maybe I will in due course, when I'm a little less ideological and have run out of things to write about. However, I will share this one with you:

There was a club track session at Calshot on Saturday morning. The turn out was poor, in fact, if you include myself and Jason, who are trainee coaches, along with the qualified to the hilt Graham and Adam, the coaches outnumbered the coached. However, looking on the bright side, we had the whole velodrome to ourselves for three whole hours, which was really no bad thing.

Anyway, to finally get, wheezing and coughing, to the point, at one point I was effectively handed the keys to the session. I need to log 'practical coaching experience' and this was a fantastic opportunity to do so. Now, so far, all my coaching experience has been with rank beginners and children, with whom I have no problems about projecting a certain gravitas. However, amongst my peers, many of whom are hugely more experienced than me at both track riding and coaching, things were a little harder. I'd thought up a little excersize, based on one of the many pearls of wisdom that the late, great Rob Jefferies offered my way*. I described it, everybody listened intently and then, as soon as I'd got the riders on to the track, two of them clipped wheels and went down. Or, in brief, it went like this: Here you go, Gordo, d'you want to run the session for a bit? Sure thing. BANG crash, tinkle tinkle tinkle.

The good news is that everyone was fine, apart from a bit of lost skin and a holed pair of shorts, and we got everyone back on track once the hanger had stopped spinning and had a quite jolly time of it all. Having riders crash in your sessions, while hardly the desired outcome, is not unusual. In fact, a week ago, Graham Hewson had run a charity training session on behalf of the Alzheimers Society which apparently turned out a bit like the normandy landings for carnage.

Still with that, as with this, it all came good in the end and, after the session, about two thirds of us ended up in a pub a few miles down the road for a spot of lunch. Later still, dropping Jason off (to whom I had given a lift) I was accosted by his physiotherapist girlfriend, who soon has the floor of her flat strewn with medical text books, and me doing bizarre excersizes with a massive elastic band.

My water bottle is definately half full.

*Want to know? I bet you do. But you'll have to join Poole Wheelers.

The Art Of Falling Apart

2011-09-29T11:59:00.000-07:00

Back in February, my old buddy and competitor Nigel Burrows emigrated to Australia. The last time I saw him, we were leaving Calshot on a pretty typical winter's day at Calshot: Wind, a bit of drizzle. 'Take a little of that view with you'. I said to him. 'You Jammy sod'.

A little before that, he'd told me about turning 40, about how it has this falling-off-the-edge-of-a-cliff effect on your performance and general sense of well being and how it gets steadily worse, year on year throuughout that decade. Well, I'm 38 now and maybe all that partying has tired me out early, for it seems that my body is falling apart already.

Remember back in May when I had a fairly major prang, then spent the next few weeks trying to convince myself that I was in good healthy. Placebo effect, see? Its sposed to be very effective. Anyway, apart from another skinned elbow and a patch of gravel rash on each shoulder blade, my left hip swelled up to the extent that it was actually painful to walk. As in, the sheer weight of the bruising on my hip meant that, every time that I took a step, the bruising would wobble. Painfully. Being me, I gritted my teeth and got on with it, enjoying an appallingly bad road season, even by my standards.
Retrospectively, what I probably had was a hairline fracture to the crown of my hip, which took 6 weeks to heal up as bones tend to do. There is no treatment for this, as you can't really immobilise the top of someone's hip and, if you did, it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference to the outcome. Generally, the treatment is to... well, do what I did. Although, maybe without the competeting in a road race every thursday bit.

So, that was the road season scuppered and, just when I was starting to get back a little form, I was afflicted with major knee pain. Tendonitis or something definately tendon related, caused by crouching down wrong at work. (It certainly wasn't caused by too much riding or pushing too high a gear). The best solution was to stop riding, which I did. The tendon strain went away, leaving some wierd knee pain, possibly residue of me falling off a cyclocross bike two years ago.

I'm not entirely sure where to go from here, especially as, after a several months not riding a bike, my lungs seem to have fallen apart, too. A dust allergy problem, usually negated by me pumping out my lungs regularly by riding bicycles up hills, had me in its grip and the chiselled athlete of late April is now a creaking, wheezing, hobbling carcass.

The solution, according to Doctor Gordo, is to get back on my bike. Pump my lungs out with clean air. Get my knee working in a linear and non stress-bearing field of motion. Stop driving or, specifically, stop the whole lifting off the throttle and onto the brake twisting motion that is screwing my knee up.

Or, failing that, emigrate to Australia. I'm sure Nigel will have me.

2011-09-28T10:06:00.001-07:00

Worth watching again...

Life Just Keeps Getting Better

2011-09-19T12:38:00.001-07:00

Blood, Sweat, Gravy And Egg pt3

2011-09-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Tour Of Britain Stage 6 Taunton to Wells

And so, I arrived in Wells. After yesterday's debacle, I was extremely keen to get on. I arrived in town a little before the race, parking in a suburban street about half a mile out of town and then making my way towards the sound of Hugh Porter's voice at a light jog. I made it just in time to catch the race, who had made it just in time to catch the breakaway, then duly swept on through the town and up another epic hill somewhere in the Mendips. There was a loop of about 40 mins before they got back again to the finish proper, which gave me time to get my breath back and have a look around. Wells is a rather pleasant cathedral town, as towns on the TOB tend to be.

'Hot Fuzz territory' said some wag. It wasn't, though. There was no model town. Anyway, Lars Boom won, from a breakaway that included GWOZ favourite Daniel Lloyd, who moved himself up to a very nice third position overall.

And then, it was back to the market square, into which the entire race entourage had been squeezed. Back in July, I'd been talking about the Tour de France and how the race's vastness made it difficult to get anywhere near the riders. Here the atmosphere was considerably more chilled.

Gerraint Thomas held audience at the door of the Sky bus, surrounded by cooing teenage girls and not looking at all bad for someone who'd just slammed into tarmac at 50km/h a few hours before.

From the stalls, there was a request for an autograph, to which the mighty G announced: 'Yeah, sure, just let me put some trousers on'. He stood, to reveal that he had a towel wrapped round his waist. Which might have explained the high girl count.

Just to confirm, THIS is what Gerraint Thomas looks like with trousers on. He signed so much stuff he was at risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. Top bloke, etc. And that was before a 5 hour ride to Norfolk for the next day's stage.

Unfortunately, that was well out of my way, so I had to wend my own way home.

Can't wait for next year...

Blood, Sweat, Gravy And Egg pt2

2011-09-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

Tour Of Britain Stage 6 Taunton to Wells

Cheddar Gorge

Cheddar gorge is a gorge near the town of Cheddar. The stage passed through it and it seemed that I was not the only one who thought 'wow, what an epic place to watch from'. Its not like spectator numbers of the TOB are poor to start with, but if you squeeze them into a narrow pinch point with limited parking facilities, then it really brings the point home. I managed to clamber onto a precarious ledge on a cliff at the narrowest point on the road and sat there and waited for the race to come through, watching an armada of amatuer cyclists wheezing their way up to a better vantage point. I can't really joke, since I was doing the same, with considerably less success, the day before. The commentator car, which precedes the race, could be heard echoing off the cliffs from way down the valley. They failed to mention that Gerraint Thomas had just pretty much just lost the race a few miles before in Cheddar village. You don't watch from the roadside if you want up to date info on the race. That's what the telly is for. But then, you don't get to watch a bike race while clinging on to a rock face if you're sitting at home and watching on the telly. Or not in my experience anyway.

Once the race was through, there was a mass exodus of bikes and people, pouring down the hill. Seriously, I've seen less well attended sportives. And then, we all headed the 10 miles to Wells, along a narrow, twisty 'b' road. All of us - cars, bikes, motorbikes, trucks, white haired old spinsters wondering why the road was full of pushbikes all of a sudden.

Blood, Sweat, Gravy And Egg

2011-09-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

Tour Of Britain Stage 6 Taunton to Wells

Friday's stage went rather better, as far as I was concerned. This time, I went by car and the only thing that I forgot was my camera. However, I had my phone with me, and, if I was going to be taking poor quality, out of focus, shots then I could do worse than use the 'retro camera' app on my phone, which made everything look as if it would if the 2011 Tour Of Britain had been happening in the 40's. The people in tweed riding the old school bikes were therefore a bit of a boon.

Can you spot Sean Kelly in this photograph?

No Sean Kelly in this one, just the Motorpoint team mascot.

I spent ages hanging around outside the Radobank team bus, waiting for an audience with track legend Theo Boss. Turns out, he'd quit two days ago. 'Too many hills' Joked the mechanic when I asked. The lack of a giant sized bike (a Giant for a giant) leaned up against the bus was a bit of a give away.

This, meanwhile, is definitely not a bike for a giant, its a Specialized for Mark Cavendish, which I originally mistook for a particularly blinged up kid's bike. There was a bit of a scrum outside the HTC team camper van. No one at all was hanging around the Leopard Trek bus, which made me feel a bit sorry for them. I hung by there for a while in solidarity but was distracted by Thor Hushovd coming out of the Garmin bus.

He signed autographs for all the kiddies like the nice bloke that he is. A guy from Topspoort Vlaaaanderen later handed his bottle to a toddler in the crowd, as pro riders are obliged to do. The toddler seemed to need some persuading before taking it from him, which slightly defeated the point. Still, its the thought that counts.

Meanwhile, the race set off and I made my way up to spectating point no 2, in Cheddar Gorge.

Devon Knows I'm Miserable Now

2011-09-17T15:08:00.000-07:00

Tour Of Britain Stage 5, Exeter - Exmouth.

If a man goes with the intention of watching a bike race yet, in doing so, fails at any point to see bicycles being raced, then can he claim to have been watching bike racing? The intention had been noble: Stage 5 of the Tour of Britain started in Exeter and finished in Exmouth, which are about 10 miles apart. However, being a race for professional bikies, 10 miles was not considered long enough and so Exmouth was reached via the scenic route. I, meanwhile, took a good look at the race route, got out my ordnance survey and plotted a route that I could ride on my bicycle, catching the race at various strategic points.

Now, ordinarily, I follow bike races by car. Generally speaking, I prefer to follow sporting events by car. Back before I had a car, I used to go to motor sport events by public transport, which was just about possible, although horrificly expensive. As consequence, I know the closest railway station to Thruxton (Quarley), Snetterton (Grately) and Brands Hatch (Borough Green). And that was for motorsport events that stayed in roughly the same place: There was one time I tried to follow a rally by bike and ended up in a bog. In short, it is not generally a practice that I would recommend. There is a reason why teams have support cars. I'm afraid that, however much that you may love pedal transport, support rickshaws just do not cut it on the pro scene.

So, ignoring all of the above, off I set, leaving the start area half an hour before the proper riders. They were heading north out of town, I was heading south-west. So far, so positive. I'd parked the car off the road between Exeter and Exmouth, right alongside a national cycle route and had been escorted into the city with a group of school kids. Two of their teachers were keen cyclists and had gathered a group of about twenty who were all mad keen to ~~get out of school for a day~~ go watch the start. Their enthusiasm seemed very much the order of things: I rode out of town along the first few miles of the stage and already, with over half an hour to go, crowds were begining to line the route. At the village of Ide, I went my own way, intending to cut across the bottom of a big triangle and meet up with the route in Bovey Tracey and from there on to Haytor Cross on Dartmoor. This was about 15 miles and I'd told myself that I could do 15 miles easily in an hour. Just to be on the safe side, I'd given myself a half hour extra. 'If I can't do 15 miles in an hour and a half' I joked to myself 'I think I'll just give up bike riding'.

So, already many of you will have spotted how this post is going to shape out. Now, to paraphrase some noted wag - Winston Churchill or Dorothy Parker or one of those people with the witty put downs - golf is a good walk ruined. Similarly, chasing a road race by bicycle is a great way to ruin two otherwise enjoyable activities. As I pointed out above, the point of a bike race is to actually watch a bike race and the point of a nice ride in the country is not to have to stick rigidly to a schedule and then have your mood plummet as you repeatedly fail to achieve your objectives. In fact, I doubt so much effort has been expended for so little reward since the first day of the Somme. After the first stupendously long and steep climb, I felt like one of those reality TV contestants who break down on camera and start blubbing about how they never knew what they could achieve until they believed in themselves.

There were a few more like that. To cut a long story short, I made it to Bovey Tracey in an hour and a half and so get to continue to ride my bike. I neither fell off, nor caught my pump in my trouser leg, however the town had the look of the village in The Prisoner to it. It was utterly deserted - everyone was just outside of town watching the race pass by. Yes folks, the one time that the race ran ahead of schedule was the one time that I was a few hundred meters away in the next street. Damn.

Next came phase two of the route, from Bovey Tracey to Starcross on the Exe, from where there was a ferry crossing to Exmouth. I was knackered, despondant, dehydrated and the next 15 miles would be no less hilly than the last. I did think briefly about just riding straight back to Exeter but that seemed just as long and so off I set. Once again, there was a schedule - the ferry left at quarter past every hour and it was absolutely vital that I get there by at least 1.15pm. That was 2 hours away and, seriously, however knackered, if I couldn't make 15 miles in 2 hours then, never mind give up the bike, I'd probably go to the vets and have myself put down.

As it turned out, this 15 miles was considerably easier than the first and would have been enjoyable had I not been in such a foul mood. I had plenty of water with me but had been carrying it in a rucksack, which meant that I had to stop to take a swig, which I hadn't done 'cos I'd been in a hurry. Dehydration is not generally known for its euphoric properties and as such I sat in a huff on the ferry across the Exe, surrounded by day trippers with squalling toddlers. They, plus a few other cyclists with equally epic tales, gave the ferry a sort of refugee chic. Last boat out of Starcross. Once again, I'm sure it was lovely, I just wasn't in the mood.

On arrival at the finish point in Exmouth, I discovered that the race was running an hour behind schedule. Yeah, exactly, NOW they run an hour behind schedule. Thanks guys. For some reason, hanging out for an hour in a seaside resort didn't appeal so I had another fantastic idea: I would ride back to where I'd parked the car, up the race route, catching the race as it passed me by. About 2 miles into this stunning wheeze, I realised that the route back to the car was not the same as the race route. It was about 5 miles east of me.

So to sum up, as far as day's spent watching bike racing goes, this was a total and utter failure. Even the TV highlights were canned for the sake of some chipper of a football match. Everton, I think. Are they a football team? Are they worth showing instead of 100 miles of awesomeness over Devon's hardest roads? I think not.

Spotted At Beaulieu... And Eddie Beck

2011-09-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

We went to Beaulieu Autojumble at the weekend. This is mostly oily, engine related stuff but I did spot some interesting bicycles, which I had to photograph. The first is this peculiar contraption, a bike powered by a da Vinci-esque arrangement of levers. A classic case of finding a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, if you ask me.

Slightly classier was this effort: Made of hexagonal aluminium tubes, screwed (yes, screwed) into ornate lugs and with a classic simplex derailleur.

I say this with a certain sadness, having lost one of this blogs loyal followers, as well as a friend and a decent bloke in the shape of Eddie Beck this week. He'd have liked those pictures.

Whenever we met, Eddie would always come over and say hello, talk about what ever I was on about this week and usually asking me 'so what's this fixed gear thing all about then?'. I don't doubt he'd seen a lot and done a great deal himself but it was always about the future and what everyone, especially the next generation of cyclists, was up to to that interested him. Myself, I was only vaguely acquainted with the next generation of cyclists and struggled to keep him informed but still the fact that he was suffering terminal cancer for pretty much the entire time that I knew him never once came up in conversation.

As well as this, he had a perfect cyclist's name: Eddie Beck, two syllables for the first name, one for the second, as in Eddie Merckx, Rick van Loy, Charly Gaul.

A proper cyclist. Quite.

The Cycling Tour Part Two

2011-09-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

Part Two (so, if you haven't seen part one then scroll down)

Monty Python's The Cycling Tour (vostf) 2/2 by sutter-cane

The Cycling Tour

2011-09-08T11:56:00.001-07:00

Monty Python's The Cycling Tour (vostf) 1/2 by sutter-cane

Maths And Velodromes

2011-09-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

Don't look at me, I can barely add up. I DEFINATELY can't do sums and ride a bike at the same time, which makes points races interesting. However, by way of typing 'velodrome' into iTunes, I discovered THIS little blog called Maths And Sport.

Yeah, if ever two subjects were mutually incompatible. As I recall, the kids who were good at sport were rubbish at maths and vice versa. Having said that, cycling is a sport almost invented for geeky skinny kids with poor social skills, so maybe there is some cross over. Anyway, the podcastis a twenty minute interview with the designers of 'the pringle' - London's Olympic velodrome. It goes on about the roof mostly and has an infuriating bicycle bell right at the end, which just makes me want to punch whoever had that bright idea. It seems every time you hear reference to a bike, or see one on the telly, it has to have a bicycle bell dubbed over. Similarly, the podcast starts with the whirr of a freewheel which TRACK BIKES DON'T HAVE. But I'm just splitting hairs, here.

Twinnings Pro Am Tour

2011-08-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

D'you know what's the best thing about bike racing in this country? Its that you can get a major race like yesterdays Twinnings Pro-Am Tour and it will be organised and run by exactly the same people who will be out on some god forsaken dual carriage way the next tuesday evening, organising their club 10.

Ok, it's a little more complicated than that but the point remains that the very top end of the sport and the bottom are served by the exact same people. And that has to be a good thing. To wit, the aforementioned Twinnings Pro-Am tour, organised by Andy Cook of Chippenham Wheelers, helped out by the great and the good of the local cycling scene. Moving round the circuit, it seemed that every second person was somebody that I knew.

This was a two day event, based around the pretty little medieval village of Wilton near Salisbury. A sportive run on the Saturday, (the 'am' part of the equation) plus a round of the premier calendar on the Sunday. That was the 'pro' bit, in the sense that some - although by no means all - of the riders get paid to do it. The premier calendar is the highest level of domestic racing in the country and, for various complicated reasons, is based predominantly in the north. 'No racing south of Birmingham' goes the joke and, in an attempt to correct this, the Twinnings Tour was set up. It met all the nessecary criteria for a round of the Premier Calendar - a pretty little medieval town (see also Lincoln, Melton Mowbray), a name containing the either the word 'tour' or 'classic' and a rolling course winding through some twisty little lanes.

This being Britain, a road closure, even on a Sunday in a quiet rural location, would cause an uprising that would put last month's riots to shame,(see here although it's kind of depressing). Instead, a rolling road closure was put in place, with the road progressively closed by Police motorbikes as the field passed through. 'Blummy' As one old boy said, standing outside of a pub. 'Wor a load o'motorboikes'. Indeed.

And so, after six laps of the 'big' circuit, with its 15 per cent climb and its long, straight 40mph descents, the field went onto 10 laps of the 'little' circuit, looping around Wilton. The roads, amazingly, were still open and, standing on the cross roads, 50 meters shy of the finish line, we were entertained by the traffic cop directing traffic away from this pinch point. The thought of the 100 rider field arriving to find a load of backed up traffic certainly had me worried, although I had felt the same at Cape Frehel on the Tour de France, watching all the team cars parked up on the finish straight with the race little over 5km away. Then, as now, the organisers held their nerve, the traffic was cleared and, other than a guy from Cyclepremier/Metaltek, who was a long way out the back of the bunch anyhow, it all came good.

Some bloke won and I think its fair to say that the race went well and everyone had a good time. Those that volenteered got a 'goody bag' from Twinnings and, seeing as my blood is about 8% Twinnings, this may intice me to help out when the race returns next year.

Yeah, bike racing's great, isn't it?

Daniel Lloyd On The London-Surrey Classic

2011-08-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

You know that time when you're pounding the roads on your favourite training route and you think 'wouldn't this make a great route for a one day classic?' For Dan Lloyd, that came true last Sunday.

Though originally from the New Forest and now living in Bournemouth, he lived for some time in Sunbury in the south west of London. The Surrey hills were his stomping ground, as they are for thousands of London based cyclists. And, last weekend, they were the route for the warm up to next year's Olympic road race. I asked him some questions:

-How was it, riding familiar roads but in a race situation?

It was a fantastic experience, it's amazing how much difference it makes when you know the roads by heart, the race just passes by so quickly. It was hard to take it all in, there were so many people along the side of the road, and this was just the test event!

-How do you rate the course?

I think it's a very testing circuit. The route in and out of London is pretty simple, no particular challenges, but the circuit itself is hard. The climb is a steady gradient but it's about 6-7 minutes long, and it doesn't go immediately downhill at the top. Positioning going into the climb makes a huge difference, as on the circuit you make a sharp left hander into Box Hill which is a narrow road. The road surface isn't perfect, but I understand the organisors are looking to improve that before the big day next year.

-How much harder will it be with another 7 laps of the box hill loop?

It will be a completely different race - we all understood that though on the day, it wasn't a true representation of what will happen next year by any means, but it was just good to race over the circuit. Cav knows he will have to be on top form to repeat the win next year, and I'm sure a few people will write him off having seen the circuit, but he never fails to surprise on big days, and nobody will want to win that race as much as him. The other factor will be that it is only 5 man teams, impossible for one nation to control, so GB will be hoping that other nations help controlling things.

-You've must have done box hill loads of times in training. Did 'local knowledge' give you any advantage?

Only in the fact that I knew EXACTLY where each turn was to go into the climbs, but that knowledge will be shared by everyone after a couple of laps!

-Does riding box hill on your own in training relate at all to riding it in a group?

I wouldn't say so, as I said it's a steady climb, big ring when the race is really on, so there is definitely an advantage from being on a wheel and initially difficult for attacks to stay clear. The final laps will be a different matter though, the climbing and distance will hurt the legs and gaps will start appearing for sure.

-You were riding for the English squad. Who was your lead rider and what was your plan?

We had Steve Cummings on good form, so he was free to go with attacks on the circuit, and Russell was our man if it came down to a sprint.

-What was your job in the race?

After the circuit, it was obvious it would come down to a sprint, so I rode on the front from there until 4km to go with a couple of others to bring the break back, before the proper lead out started.

-Did the England team harbour any thoughts about upstaging the GB team and grabbing all the glory for themselves?

Everyone to some extent was free to do their own race, but when it comes to a sprint, what can you do against Mark?!

-Is there much of a difference, going from a trade team to a national team? Is it a case of same job, different jersey?

For me it is, yeah. The GB team has done a great job over the last few years getting all the riders from Protour teams together at regular intervals so that we get to know each other and gel as a team. There is a really good atmosphere these days and it feels a team just like any trade team. Obviously the guys at British Cycling always come up with a plan, and we stick to it - that's when I do best, when I've got a specific job to do in the race.

-Speaking of Garmin Cervelo, what races will you be riding this autumn and what are your hopes for next season?

I am in Colorado at the moment for the race which starts on Monday, by the end of that I'll have had two weeks at altitude which I hope will bring me to a really good level for the last part of the season. I then have the Tour of Britain, hopefully the worlds, Franco Belge and Paris Tours. It's a good program, and I've never been so fresh or motivated at this time of year, as I haven't raced as much as previous years. I haven't signed anything yet for next year, so I'm concentrating on doing as well as possible over the next 2 months.

Simon Richardson

2011-08-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

Just heard the terrible news that Simon Richardson has been hit and seriously injured while out training in Wales.

Simon was a salwart of the Children In Need Trackathon, as well as a multiple gold medal winning paralympian and a general all round top bloke. Our thoughts and hopes are with him and his family.

Further details here.

With Binoculars, On Top Of Box Hill (The London Surrey Classic)

2011-08-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago, I wasn't into bikes at all, I was into motor sport and, if ever there was a sport to inspire a kind of stolkholm syndrome in it's fans then it was formula one. Every year the ticket prices went up and up, every year the access got worse and worse but still we came back for more. That, obviously, was back when they actually ran races in Europe, and for a fan like me, the prize became to sneak into the areas where the great unwashed were normally barred from and, to this day, I feel a swell of pride at the thought of my skinny teenage hips squeezing under that gap in the harris fencing at Spa-Francochamps.

Then, a decade ago, I got into bike racing, which was a bit of a culture shock. Access at bike races was all areas. In Britain at the time, cycling was even more of a cinderella sport than it is now and to bar spectators from the races would be like insisting on security and back stage passes at your local pub's open mic folk night. Over on the continent, where people actually watch bike racing, there was a whole different ethos. This was 'the people's sport' and 'the people' got to almost literally take part in it. Or at least get considerably closer than either safety or common sense would suggest.

To push this point a little further, around 10 years ago I went to a Formula Three race at Castle Combe (think 2 lower than Formula One). Literally no one was watching and yet all of the teams had there areas in the paddock screened off, to keep their drivers and mechanics from being bothered by the non-existant spectators. The F1 mentality had trickled down to the lower rungs of the sport, despite the lack of any need for it.

Maybe that's just sour grapes but it all came to mind at the London-Surrey Classic this weekend, the dummy run for the Olympic Road Race that will be run on the same roads next August. Originaly, this race had been routed around London, running so many laps of a circuit, climbing Richmond Hill before heading back into town. For some reason, this circuit had been rejected and another one had been drawn up, heading out of London via the posh, non-rioty bit and looping around a hilly circuit near Dorking in Surrey, heading up the famous Box Hill. Then, suddenly, it became apparent that "Surrey's answer to Alpe d'Huez" was a site of stunning natural beauty or something and the National Trust, who owned the site, shat a brick at the thought of countless thousands of cleated shoed loons trampling all over the wild orchids. I'm guessing that they didn't spot the irony in the 'alpe d'huez' tag and assumed it would be filled with drunk Dutchmen for a week.

To cut a long story short, access became limited to people with one of these on:
...The famous wrist band, handed out to people who knew people. If you were one of the above (and a big thanks to Matthew and Jane for letting me join these happy few) you were allowed access to the specially designated viewing area on box hill.

Now, one of the things I love about road racing is the free access. With a little guile and a decent map, you are able to find yourself a decent spectating point. And, while in no way do I wish to sound ungrateful for Jane and Matthew's efforts in getting me in to the holy of holies, the spectator enclosure on Box Hill was not quite the spot that I would have chosen to watch from. Having driven up to Surrey that morning, I'd passed miles of parking restrictions to he herded into an extortionately expensive car park/field, then hauled my way up the 1 in 1 footpath to the top of the hill, then managed to end up wandering for several km in completely the wrong direction. Before the event, the forums and certain weekly cycling magazines had been having kittens about the whole limited access hoo-ha: 'SPECTATORS BANNED FROM WATCHING RACE' and so forth, which was cobblers. Other than the actual zig-zag path up the hill, the entire route was open and free. I'll just say that again to make clear OTHER THAN THE ACTUAL CLIMB PART OF BOX HILL, THE ENTIRE ROUTE WAS ACCESSIBLE. It seems that the message had not got across, and subsequently spectator numbers were way down on what had been expected. In their desire to restrict access to a small part of the course, the organisers had driven away the larger part of the crowds and the, very friendly, ubiquitous security staff seemed to out number us by about two to one.

Not that that meant that any of us could see a damn thing. In the 'spectator area' there was a decent view for people about two deep by the barriers while, for the rest of us, there was a nice view across a beautiful valley, the far side of which was fenced off like a disputed border post. Added to this was the positively surreal list of things that you weren't allowed to bring (see here hopefully), including cross bows, handcuffs and 'unreasonable quantities of food'.We joked about watch towers and machine guns, while a woman bellowed over the tannoy at us all to stay safe. This was kind of what it would be like to live in an autocratic state governed by Joyce Grenfell.

The race came through, climbing the hill, riding the 'loop' of about 10km and then climbing the hill again. They looked considerably more shagged out the second time they did it, which bodes well for next year's race when they do it 9 times, then rolled on back through Bushy park to The Mall. Mark Cavendish won. We, meanwhile, filed our way back through the woods (being careful not to run on the rough surface, we don't want anyone getting injured, now) and I headed off with Zoom Sara and Luke (who has yet to acquire an adjective to go with his name) for a very nice pub lunch in London's leafy suburbs.

And so in conclusion, I would offer the following advice for would-be spectators at next years Olympic race:

-Turn up. Ignore the moaning, there's plenty of places to watch for free.

-Turn up on a bike. Unless you want to be completely fleeced. Or have your car impounded. And then be completely fleeced.

-Don't be fussed if you can't get a fancy wrist band, the whole of the route is open, bar 2 km on box hill and the finish straight on The Mall.

-Don't bring handcuffs.

The race was part of 'London Prepares', a series of (as the name suggests) preparation events for the big one next year. As such, from my point of view, it worked fine. I know exactly what I'll be doing.

As for the event, it's open, its free and it's going to be mental and you won't have to squeeze through anything. See you there.

(Public Image Limited: possibly the best band to ever mention Box Hill in a song. At 1m33).

Jens Voigt Soundboard.

2011-08-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

For anybody that hasn't discovered this already, it is the Jens Voigt Soundboard. A soundboard of Jens Voigt's best quotes from these guys. Seriously, don't expect to get anything done for the next hour or so.

Even better, you can get it on your smart phone or generic MP3 player through iTunes or android here. Best $1 you'll ever spend.

Acting Your Age, Not Your Shoe Size

2011-08-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago at Moreton, Stu turned up with a box full of shoes. Like most cyclists, he has far more kit than he really needs, added to which, he is a sponsored rider and works for a cycling magazine that you've definately heard of and gets stuff to 'test'. Anyway, he found himself with a shoe surplus and had decided to liquidise his assets. He has the same sized feet as me and, for what he was offering and for the price that he was offering, I was very tempted indeed. However, on closer inspection of one of the shoes in question, as I admired it's feather lightness, I noticed it's gossamer-thin covering, through which the weare could clearly see his toes. All of a sudden, I had moved from making an opportune purchase to one of my favourite cycle clothing rants.

You see, on the subject of cycle clothing, or specifically cycle clothing in Britain, there are two things that have to be born into consideration. The first is that Britain is a cold country. The second is that, despite the huge growth in interest in cycling in the last decade, Britain is still a bit of a back water as a cycling nation. This is an issue if you are a manufacturer of bike clothing, in that in order to lower your overheads (or whatever)you have to appeal to your largest market, which is in countrys like France, Spain, Italy, Australia, America. Which are all hot countrys. So, as with Stu's shoes, the outfit is designed from the principal of not causing the wearer to collapse from heat exhaustion while climbing a mountain in 35 degree heat.

At the beginning of this week, Britain was in the grip of what it would describe as a heat wave - the mercury soaring to a dizzying 29 degrees centigrade*. As usually happens when 'extreme' weather hits the UK, the whole place went into meltdown. By Wednesday, it felt like the entire country was making a rush for the south west, making my journey home particularly slow. At the track that evening, the sweat was fairly pouring down my forehead. And you'd think that I'd be calling myself a fool for not buying Stu's shoes. Had I got them then I'd have been laughing, riding around Slades Farm with my toes open to the breeze.

However, as the tabloids were quick to point out, this was a 'heatwave', 'the hottest since records began' (it always is, isn't it?). The general gist of all these adjectives was that the conditions were 'freak' or, at least, that this was the couple of weeks every year that a Brazillian or an Australian, say, would describe as 'quite warm'**. As for the rest of the year, the main worry upon setting out on a long journey is not the dissapation of heat but it's retention. Until barely a week ago, arm warmers were still a consideration. And for God's sake, don't forget your gillet. It might rain and you'll freeze like a popsicle in the damp breeze.

Wierdly, the evolutionary tree of cycle clothing took a turn in favour of hot countries about 15 years ago, when cycle jerseys stopped being made of that fleecy material that actually stuck to the skinny ribs of cyclists like me and started to being made out of the sort of material that you'd strain fruit pulp through. And they don't cling to you like a second skin, resulting in horrors like Alberto Contador's Astana shirt sleeves flapping around his skinny biceps. You never got that with a Cafe de Colombia jersey. Nowadays, those of us in the north have to shiver or layer up, or restrict their riding to early August. Enough of this, I say. Let us join our northern brethren - there's got to be more than two cyclists in Norway - and demand jerseys that actually match the description of a jersey. Let us encourage merino wool, let us leave the mithril, gossamer uber sports fibre for those who need it.

So, I didn't get the shoes but stuck with my trusty old Sidi's. As for Stu? He didn't make the sale, but needed the shoes back for a bike test in Colorado. Apparently, it gets quite hot there.

*Apologies to anyone who works in farenheit. I have genuinely no idea what 29c is in farenheit.

**If they were Australian, they'd describe it as 'Quite warm?'...
...Rising inflective national stereotype joke. Move along.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2011-08-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

1, My fixed gear friends in Chicago are building themselves a velodrome. And if you're building yourself a velodrome, you'd want to have a ride on it, wouldn't you? Why bother waiting till its finished, just get up there and get going...

2, The Major of Vilnius in Lithuania or somewhere has a novel way of dealing with illegally parked cars. Any hope that Boris Johnson follows his lead? I won't hold my breath.

I knew a girl from Lithuania (or possibly Latvia). She was also mental.

3, Here's summat about Herne Hill. (happy now, Shea?)

Get It While You Can

2011-07-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

I forget when exactly, but I was describing my job to somebody. I mow lawns in the New Forest. 'Wow' They said. 'Sounds idyllic'. I have to say that this took me back a little. I'm not saying that my job is particularly hard, or poorly paid. Its nowhere near the worst that I've done* and, given the current economic climate, I'm lucky to have one job never mind three. Anyway, the point that I'm inching my way towards is that all the problems in my life right now are the sort of problems that you'd want to have.

Problem number one is that, having returned from the Tour de France, my life mowing lawns in the New Forest doesn't quite have the required level of glamour. And by glamour, I mean driving across rural France for hours, spreading crumbs from my baguette and saucisson all over Mrs Zoom's car in order to take 36 blurred photographs of the peloton whoosing indifferently past me. While standing in a ditch. The obvious solution to this problem is either a) get a grip or b) have a thought for all the people who didn't spend a week bombing around France in a Citroen C1 and get a grip.

This segways neatly into problem number two, which is that the aforementioned holiday has pretty much bankrupted me. Again the solutions are simple either a) don't go on holiday to France or b) get a grip.

Now, coming to the third problem, this is not entirely of my own doing. Well, it is a bit: I went to France for a week and it seems that, while I was away, everything fell apart work-wise. For starters, I wasn't there to do it all and, of the people left, one twisted his ankle, the other cut his arm open with a hedge trimmer. So, on my return to work the bulk of the work load landed on me again, which meant me working late every evening. This had various consequences: I work in the New Forest, as I mentioned, which clogs up with grockles** every August, as does the road home, creating a perfect storm as, the later that you leave, the worse the traffic gets, making a late day even later. That's all very well unless you have to be somewhere in the evening which, generally speaking, I do. I'm either doing Bikeability*** in Poole or opening up Slades Farm track for various sessions. Some amongst us have the keys to the place and are allotted the task of opening up the container with all the bikes in and so forth.

I am one of these people so, having finished the last lawn of the day, I set off home, occasionally taking the considerably longer but traffic free scenic route. On arrival, I unload the mower etc, switch it for my bike, change, down a mug of tea and then head for the track. I'm usually home sometime between 8 and 9, just giving me time to eat my dinner, shower and then go to bed. Weirdly, despite seeming to be at work in some shape or form from 7.30am till 9pm everyday I still appear to be bankrupt.

After a fortnight of this, plus a weekend of it to come by the looks of things, I'm starting to feel the burn a teeny bit. Again, the solutions are obvious, either a) get a grip or b) sleep more. Or there's option c) which is do less. But to this, I answer with a resounding 'hell, no'. Well, I'd like to mow less lawns but I don't see that happening till everybody's ankles and arms are fixed. As for the other tasks, what else would I honestly rather be doing on a summer's evening?

Anyway, I'm gonna take some of my own advice and get an early night. I'm opening the track tomorrow morning.

*A week on a night shift in a food production plant. All I'll say is don't eat Wall's Sausages. Seriously.

**Grockles

***Bikeability

A Town Called Panic - The Cycle Race

2011-07-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

Tour de France Stage 6 Dinan to Lisieux (Part 2)

2011-07-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

It was a long way still to go and the most direct route was already taken by a bunch of guys on bikes. The other way was to take the autoroute to Caen, head around Caen and branch off south-easterly to Lisieux. This I did, riding through the rain storm that had soaked me back at Mont St Michel*. As I drove though it, I found myself suffering a moment of existential doubt: I would be driving to Lisieux, about 60km from Caen and then, once I had gone there, I would have to double back to Caen, get around it in the rush hour and then drive a further two hours to Cherbourg. A part of me was thinking 'Sod it, stuff the race. Just drive straight to Cherbourg and have an espresso'.

It didn't help matters that the road from Caen to Lisieux was slow and overcrowded. I'd not seen a traffic jam in my whole time in Brittany, or not one that wasn't race related. And then, when I finally made it to Lisieux, I had to check on the route guide that this was the right town. The Tour? Here? Where was the bunting? The 'tous fous pour le tour' posters? The ubiquitous tatty old Peugeots mounted on roundabouts? Lisieux looked kind of like Southampton and I drove around aimlessly until I finally spotted a 'route barre' sign. My first clue. My second was a suburban road that had considerably more cars parked on it than one would expect. My third came when I parked up, switched the engine off and heard a commentator rattling over a PA. By complete fluke, I had got myself to within a few hundred meters of the 2km to go banner. Result.

And what a finish, rising up for a couple of kilometers with the last 1000 meters on the flat. And then, as the rain shower that had chased me all the way from Mont St Michel hit and everybody ran for cover, I managed to nab myself a spot on the fence in the last few hundred meters. So... uphill finish to a flat last km, a recent rain storm, a brooding sky and Gerraint Thomas leading out Edvald Boassen Hagen for Sky's first Tour win. Could this be any more perfect? I could head home happy now.

*See previous post.

Tour de France Stage 6 Dinan to Liseaux

2011-07-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Mont St Michel

I was, by now, getting the hang of French roads. As I have already pointed out, French roads are fantastic. French road signs, however... French roads can have anything up to three different road numbers and interchange between them as they see fit. Sometimes they bother putting one of these road numbers on the actual road sign, sometimes they don't. Sometimes, if you're really lucky, they put the correct road number AND the town you're heading for on the SAME sign. Sometimes, they even paint this onto BOTH sides of the sign, so that you can spot the correct turning from either direction.

Generally speaking, it helps if you already know where you're going to and, in fairness, once you get off the main roads, a lot of places are one's that you'd never go to unless you had a reason. My reason was that the Tour was coming to town and the main road was shut. By careful study of my michelin map the night before I'd worked out an alternate route. Then I prayed. Sometimes, michelin maps are about as much use as something drawn on the back of a beer mat but, with a bit of common sense, a bit of intuition and a bit of following any car I saw with Belgian plates, I'd got myself around the blockade and within 2 km of where the route passed the famous monastery of Mont St Michel.

This is a kind of Lindisfarne with nobs on - a gothic cathedral built on a rock in the English channel. I'd wanted to visit for years but, ironicly, on this day it was closed due to the race passing. Still, it made a good back drop and, as soon as I found myself a nice position to take a picture, I found myself surrounded by race photographers and their motos. Great minds think alike, obviously. Even the race convoy thought so, as amongst the great many support vehicles, the passengers were whipping out their digital cameras and taking a quick snap as they passed.

This was about an hour into the stage, so a break had got away and got themselves a decent gap. They, along with their team cars, all craned their neck to get a good look at the monastery and then, as they vanished by the road, so did the Mont. A shower of rain completely obscured it, thus removing the whole reason that I'd been standing in this ditch for the last half hour waiting to line up a shot.

Luckily, it cleared just before the peleton came by. Unluckily, all the photos that I took turned out to be rubbish. Except this one.

And maybe this one, which doesn't have the mount in but is at least in focus.

And so, Graham Watson and all his chums all got back on their bikes, while I started walking back to the car, stopping for about 10 mins to shelter under a tree as the rain storm swept in from the sea and hurled itself down onto the quickly dispersing crowd. Then I managed to loose the car: I knew it was in the gate to a field and I knew that the area it was likely to be in was relatively small but I had worries that some farmer had taken exception to my parking and shoved it into a ditch to get to his potatoes. It took about 45 mins of walking up and down lanes till I found it, unscathed. By now, traffic was flowing freely but I was a long long way behind the race and had a long long way still to go.

Tour de France Stage… Do You Know, I Have No Freaking Idea, Although I Think Its Wednesday.

2011-07-11T12:58:00.000-07:00

A Wednesday In Frehel

Today’s start town was too far away to even contemplate trying to get to, so I had a lazy start, then a fun afternoon bombing round the Breton capital city of Rennes on a Velib – Morocco’s bicycle of choice. The stage finish was at Cape Frehel, bang slap in the middle of Asterix country and a beauty spot and site of special scientific interest or whatever the French equivalent. This had caused ructions with local enviromentalists who, understandably, did not want thousands of people trampling all over the rare flowers.

You had to admit, they had a point, as this was the first finish that I had visited so far that really had me slack jawed in amazement. It was heaving and, being in easy riding distance of St Malo, had the largest British contingent of any stage so far. All were routing for a Cav win. Well, all the Brits were, the French went loopy at the very mention of Thomas Voekler. On his customary uphill attack with 2km to go, they drowned out the commentator with their hammering on the boards. Cav won, from a position 10 riders back with 250 meters to go, which is quite impressive, really. And these ten riders included Thor Husovd, Phillipe Gilbert and Edvald Boassen Hagen, who are hardly slackers. Obviously, the boys got talent.

Now wise to the ways of the tour, I abandoned my viewing point on the top of a bank and ran for the finish area. The Tour is a bit of one of as world class sporting event. I mean it’s not like Rafa Nadal has to serve next to a bloke in an afro wig waving a Spanish flag and bellowing ‘GO ON MY SON!’in his ear. Its not like Jenson Button has to nudge his way through excited crowds on his way back to the paddock. The Tour, however is a rolling fete as well as one of the most grueling races in the world. There’s the racing, then there’s the people getting pissed on the roadside. There’s the fast moving train of 200-odd riders, then there’s the people getting pissed on the roadside. And, when the riders all finish, they have to run the gauntlet of these hordes of people, back to their team bus.

To see it from their point of view, it must be terrifying – three weeks in a goldfish bowl, being gawped at by hundreds of people, peering through the blacked window, pawing at your shirt when all you want after a hard stage is to get into the shower. It must be like being in a zombie movie.

Not that any of that stopped me from running around with my camera, ‘bagging’ riders and generally getting in everybody’s way. Most were safely barricaded in their buses but the podium riders all still had to come through and I lay in wait like a crocodile at a river crossing. Look, there’s Cadel Evans! I really can’t be described as a massive Evans fan but I still jumped like an excited little child. Look, its Cadel Evans! The real Cadel Evans! Right there, in a spotty jersey! Look, Sylvain Chavanel!

Best of all, Bradley Wiggins, the mighty Wiggo, was tempted out of his bus for an interview with French TV. All were immediately crushed into a scrum of people, mostly British, who all cheered and wished him luck as he made his escape back into the bus. Form of his life or not, he was so skinny that he looked ill. Say what you like about the 90s but the riders looked a lot more healthy then. Nowadays, to get over mountains dope-free, you have to be so slight you look like you’ve just been liberated from somewhere. Pity the poor pro rider. He has a hard life.

Tour De France Stage 4 Lorient to Mur de Bretagne

2011-07-09T13:48:00.001-07:00

Bring On The Wall

They say that everywhere the Queen goes smells of fresh paint. It’s sort of the same with the Tour de France, except that the smell is of recently laid tarmac. Not that the majority of French roads need fresh tarmac: France is twice the size of Britain with half the population and every last little town seems to be connected by a recently completed dual carriageway. Still, however wide, however well surfaced and however traffic free, the one things that these roads will not do is warp time. This was a bit of a problem for me as, after an epic ten hour sleep, I’d woken too late to make it to Lorient for the start. More specifically, I’d woken too late to make it to the start village, watch the sign on, shoot the breeze with Bradley Wiggins and so on.

I was town in time to watch the race roll past in the light rain towards kilometer zero, nearly getting mown down by Alex Vinokourov in the process. Damn, those Astana rain capes are bright when you see them close up. They were heading out west, past Quimper, before doubling back to a place called ‘Le Mur de Bretagne’ – the wall of Brittany – which was actually only 60km north of Lorient. I took what I thought was the easy option, driving due north, following the little orange arrows for all the Tour support vehicles that didn’t have to follow the race route*. This led to a junction that had been barred – ‘route barre’ - to everybody not carrying the right sticker. This, I decided, must be the foot of the ‘mur’.

It was actually the village of Neulliac, which had recently acquired a new roundabout. The Tour requires certain standards of its roads and so there is a great deal of lobbying from villages like Neulliac to be on the route, purely in order that they can get their high street resurfaced. In fairness, though, the village had more people in it at that time then it had probably ever had in its existence and, if you were going to be on live tv all across the world, you’d want to get a bit spruced up, too. However, as I squeezed through the eager crowds, I noticed that this was not the foot of the ‘mur’. The road was starting to slope downwards and, on the outskirts, was the ‘10km to go’ banner.10km. Damn. I took a long, hard, look at the soles of my all stars, sighed and pushed on down the hill.

Soon enough, the long, straight, descent kicked up into a short, sharp, climb, like the lip at the end of a ski jump. This had to be it, I thought. Crowds were packed thick on the climb, whereas the preceding descent had been empty except for a bunch of guys enthusiasticly waving a stuffed badger dressed in a Renault jersey at everyone who passed.

And as I climbed this hill, along came the publicity caravan, a kind of psychedelic carnival of bizarre vehicles full of drama school graduates throwing stuff at you. This was the second time that we had met and, by now, I was starting to learn ‘the rules’. Basically, it helps if you stand in one of the more densely populated parts of the route – a steep climb at 6km to go, say. It helps if you stand close to some children. It helps if you then use your advantages of height, reach and manual dexterity to catch the free stuff as it is flung at you. If you choose to use your strength and weight advantage also, it helps if the father of the child you are choosing to bully is not close by. It helps if you can jump like a salmon. It helps if you are prepared to utterly humiliate yourself in order to briefly attract the attention of one of the chuckers – remember, you are a grown man jumping and waving like a child - and, finally, if all else fails then barter with those around you. I attempted to swap a packet of ‘Couchonous’ random pork products for a polka dot hat with a girl next to me. She had two but one was ‘pour mon cheri’. Lucky boy.

I do quite genuinely wonder about the sort of people that do this job: it must take a huge amount of mental toughness to get through 3 weeks in the open air, strapped to a kitsch sculpture, smiling and waving and chucking scoop fulls of free stuff at grinning, waving fools with Lady Gaga bellowing out of a speaker behind your ear. For three weeks. And loading it all up at the end of the day and driving on to the next town. And getting sepp blattered in the hotel bar every single night. A few days later, I nearly had my head taken off by a girl on the Vision Express truck hurling a lens cloth at me while thundering past at 50mph, possibly shouting ‘Shoulda gone to specsavers’ at me in French over the tannoy. She missed, so presumably did not score any points.

Anyway, this jollity over, I continued my way up the hill. There was no sign of a 1km to go banner (that walk HAD to have been 10km by now) but matters made themselves clear when I got to the top of the hill. There, in a hilltop picnic spot, with trestles set, a bar and a barbecue in a scene that could have straight out of Asterix the Gaul. I should have stayed. It was a good spot and I’d have been on page 4 of L’Equipe the next day but no, I elected to continue wearing down my trainers and push on to the finish. The 1km banner was still no where in sight and, as I walked on, I suddenly noticed that the race was getting awfully close. When you see the helicopters then you know its getting really close and I was still going down hill. The town of Mur de Bretagne was in sight and the last bit was done at a run, at a heart rate similar to what George Hincapie was rocking as he hit the bottom of the same slope a few minutes behind me. I had basically done the equivalent of a biathlete, running a distance and then trying to calm my breathing enough to take a photo. But the road was heading uphill, the crowds were out, the church bells were ringing and the crowds cheered in a rolling roar, matching the peleton’s progress up the hill.

And then it was over, bar the stragglers, bar the convoy of team cars, the motos and the voiture baille. The stragglers were cheered home and the crowd evaporated away. Where there had been a solid wall of people, there were now empty streets. Banners flapped in the wind and the ubiquitous row of haggered old Peugeot bikes hung forlornly from their mounts. The race was several kilometers on, now, and my legs hurt from the run. I was dehydrated, my feet were blistered and I had a 10km walk back to the car again.

I sighed, pulled the freebie packet of haribo sweets out of pocket and started to walk.

Tour De France Stage 3 Somewhere in France to Redon

2011-07-08T14:10:00.000-07:00

If ever I wanted to give a physical demonstration of the expression ‘the arse end of nowhere’ I could do worse than drive 3 ½ hours to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Redon. This was where, for better or for worse, the ASO had elected to end the third stage of the 2011 Tour de France.

It had been a long drive from Cherbourg, all on my lonesome, which had made the usual driving game of ‘French spotting’ a little boring. This is basically a game where you spot ‘French stuff’: A collection of old scrotes smoking gitanes on a park bench; a woman who looks quite hot from a distance but, on closer inspection, turns out to be old enough to be your nan; a group of surly-looking mid-teens on hilariously boyed up scooters; a long haired child of indeterminate sex roller blading down the road carrying a basket full of baguettes. You get the idea. Ideally, your aim is to better the ‘Frenchness’ of the previous score but this doesn’t really work if you’re on your own. Nor does the other game: ‘Twingo’, where you shout ‘TWINGO!’ every time you spot a Renault Twingo. With this game I admit that there is a fine line between playing a game and amusing yourself by bugging the hell out of your fellow passengers but, either way, its boring on your own. And makes you look like a proper looney if you’re still playing it while queuing for the car park with the windows wound down.

The end result was that, after a four hundred kilometers of driving in the best heat that the French summer could throw at me, I was directed off the bypass and into a recently mowed field. I was here for The Tour, as was everybody else and it wasn’t like there was much else for anyone to do in Redon that day.

As you probably already know, The Tour is big business and towns pay handsomely for the privilege to host the starts and finishes. This stage, by a quite staggering coincidence, finished right outside somebody’s bike shop but still, the rest of the town did not look anywhere near the size to handle a Tour finish. It looked… sleepy, suburban, with a tiny little shopping arcade and a load of grotty industrial units. It looked an almost identical copy of the race finish at Yeovil Football Ground on the Tour of Britain a couple of years ago, which just added to my feeling of underwhelmed…ness. Of all the things that I had expected to compare to The Tour – the greatest bike race in the world – I had not expected to compare it to anything at all to do with Yeovil.

Of course, what I didn’t know was that, a few kilometers back up the route was the fairly decently sized town of Redon, with its cathedral, its medieval center and its quay onto the river Vilane. It’s actually quite a large town. I know cos I spent 40 minutes in it, hopelessly lost on my way back after the stage, possibly suffering a beasting for doubting The Tour’s awesomeness, possibly just lost due to my lousy navigation.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. I’d given myself plenty of FAT* to get there and so had several hours to wait, frying on the tarmac, leaning on the barrier at the 90 degree turn at 400 meters to go, playing a little more ‘French spotting’. There was the half dozen women in hijabs, wandering around with bemused expressions on their faces as if the last 18 months of build up to this day had completely passed them by, the Gendarme who seemed to be personally acquainted with every single person for a good 3 meters either side of his spot on the barrier. Just sit back and enjoy, it’s the biggest bike race in the world and it’s gonna happen right in front of me.

*Farting About Time. Or a similar acronym, using the same initials.

If You Can Fill The Unforgiving Minute With 60 Seconds Of Distance Run...

2011-06-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I wasn't really into cycle touring. Not that I have anything against cycle touring, its just that I don't like riding slowly.

So, the inevitable question rumbles into view, like a very large, loaded, cannon: If you don't like riding slowly, why do you do track racing? Yes, aha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Very droll. You see, dear reader, I am also the butt of my own humour. Its like having a teenage kid stuck inside my head, ripping everything I say or do apart for not reaching some totally arbitary target, such as being 'fake' or 'trying too hard'.

Trying too hard is not usually an issue with me. And the targets are not at all arbitary, as was the case on Sunday when, as a thank you for helping out the day before, there was a free coaching session with former national coach Geoff Cooke. Geoff Cooke is a good example of what's great about bike racing in this country: Its still small enough that a coach who's worked with former champions like Tony Doyle, future champions like his current protege Ellie Coster and current champions like Darren Kenny*, still finds time to do the odd session with numpties like me.

This was 'sprint' training and involved lots of hoofing from a standing start to flat out pace, as well as the opposite, 'flying' starts, which involves an out-of-saddle, downhill sprint from the top of the banking to the start line. What was most bizarre for someone that describes themselves as an 'endurance' rider (that's track endurance, which is anything over a minute) is the amount of distance that it took me to feel completely cream crackered. Or rather the lack of it.

Think of it like this: we did a warm up, which was probably about 5km. Then we did a 'flying 100 meters', with 2 laps warm up, making a total of 750 meters. We did that twice, which was 1500m, then we did a standing start 100m, with 150m of warm down. We did that twice, which was another 500m. Then there were two flying 200 metres, which was another 1500m. Then a standing start 200m (another 500m), and finally a flying 500 meters - two laps of the track with 2 laps warm up. Adding all that up makes a total of 9500 meters, which I may as well add up to 10 km, which is just under 6 miles in medieval.

These 10km had me more knackered than my usual 60km Sunday morning jaunt and that's without having to chase Ryan up every molehill in the Purbecks. It also had me going a lot harder in my evening 30km leg turner today. Just fancy that - training hard makes you go faster. Blow me, who'd a thunk it.

Anyway, the times were all published on the interweb and, despite the fact that, at the time, the scenery was going past me in a blur, like the jump into hyperspace in Star Wars, my times ranged from 'meh' to 'meh'. Chris Hoy can sleep well. It seems I'm not an undiscovered well of talent.

Maybe I should take up cycle touring?

*Darren Kenny. Multiple Paralympic gold medal winner, multiple world champion or, to as Geoff himself put it, 'someone with enough gold in his top drawer to bail Greece out on his own'.

How To Build A Velodrome

2011-06-26T13:11:00.000-07:00

About 8 months of holding my camera phone up over the harris fencing (plus a couple of sneaky trespasses onto the site) has netted this archive. It is now my pleasure to share it with you all.

Now That's What I Call An Opening (Slades Farm Track)

2011-06-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

Well wadda ya know, it got built. Slades Farm Track, aka The Bournemouth Cycling Center. After about two decades of fighting, we got our selves a track built. There isn't room to tell all, so if want to read the whole story, see here, here and here. Obviously, a BIG thank you goes to Alan Mcrae, who did most of the fighting.

Today was the big opening. Mrs Zoom took her camera, as I was busy helping out with the public demonstration, representing the journey of a rider from track novice to accredited rider, which was a bit of a laugh, as most of the "novice" riders had a darn sight more experience than most of the riders taking part in the demonstration races! But it's Bournemouth Arrow Cycling Club's track and they got the place built so I s'pose it's only fair that they get to do the fun bits.

This being both Wimbeldon fortnight AND the weekend of the Glastonbury festival, rain was almost guarenteed. However, despite a very wet night, and apart from a few spots, it held off. So a big thank you to the rain gods, also.

There were some races put on to wow the crowd, including this coach vs young charge match sprint. Youth beat experience in this instance.

Les had acquired one of Calshot's old hire bikes, which seemed to come with a self loosening chain. This was soon taxing the not inconsiderable pool of cycling talent gathered around the track. I was particularly keen to get the problem fixed, as I was riding behind him in the demonstration.

Bournemouth Arrow followed with a 5km scratch race, slightly coreographed in the fine tradition of track racing.

The big joke was that no one had ever seen so many members of the Arrow in the same race before. And if you thought that that was sour grapes from those of us who didn't get to join in the fun, you wouldn't be far from the truth.

Poole Council and Sport England didn't spend half a million quid just so us bikies could have fun. Racing over, some novices got to ride the track.

And I really do mean novices!

Most of them survived the experience and big grins were the order of the day. The mark of a fantastic facility is that it can be used by everyone from the elite to the novice and, with a bit of luck, there'll be a few people asking Santa for a track bike come this Christmas.

Rouleur Host Rob Jefferies Auction

2011-06-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

Check out HERE for an auction of some rather fantastic stuff by Rouleur macazine. A Pinarello bike, a yellow jersey from the Dauphine Libre signed by Brad Wiggins and a whole tonne of other stuff. All proceeds go to Rob's family who, quite frankly, were deserving of a bunch of money just for being awesome way before anything tragic happened. Happy bidding.

Calshot

2011-06-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, I was watching one of the music channels and came across this video:

Some bloke dressed as Napoleon Dynamite rollerskating around Calshot. I immediately forgot who it was by, or more accurately remembered the name as Tom Vega. Suzanne's brother, maybe? Turns out his name's Tom VEK and he doesn't go above the blue band. Lightweight.

Then came this oddity, curtosey of David LeGrys, who starred in it. This is weird, even to me and I speak as a someone with a taste for 'unique' music. Match sprinting, set to prog synth rock, kinda like an old episode of Doctor Who, where Peter Davidson finds himself on a planet of track cyclists. Anyway, the important thing is that the track is the legendary old track at Calshot - the one that makes the current track look like a seafront promenade.

Enjoy.

Pushing on a Pashley

2011-06-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

As we are aware, cycling is a broad church, with a little niche for whatever takes your fancy. Me, I like going fast. Mr Charlie The Bikemonger likes going slow. He proudly showed me a bottle cage on his tourer recently that was perfect for holding a bottle of wine, as well as a messenger back that you could just fit a trout into. That's his kind of cycling. Mine is where you hammer yourself over fifty miles then come home, eat food out of the fridge and then go to the pub.

Now, I say this in case anyone might take what I am about to say as a criticism of cycle touring. I am not a critic of cycle touring. I appreciate that many people love cycle touring and good on them, its just that I'm not one of them. I like bikes to be light and to go fast and, while riding around the world does seem an awful lot of fun, if I really wanted to do it I reckon I'd have a darn sight more fun doing it in something like this. Obviously, I'd have a bike in the back and go for a ride when now and again. While listening to Kyuss. Obviously. Anyway, my point is that if I want to enjoy my riding then I wouldn't want to ruin it all by lugging a tent and 6 month's worth of food around with me. Each to their own and all that, but there's a reason why my bike's made of titanium.

This week, Mrs Zoom was busy. There is a thing on in my town - Wimborne Folk Festival, which is a basically a weekend of hard drinking for the local teenagers, plus a few folk bands and morris dancers and stuff - and Mrs Zoom had been collared to spend the day demonstrating spinning. As in spinning wool, not riding a static bike. This meant that I had to do the shopping and was duly packed off to the market with an idiot-proof list including instructions such as "eggs, dozen (12)". Normally, Mrs Zoom has a shopping trolley to lug all this around in, as in a genuine old lady shopping trolley, cadged off of a genuine old lady. Say what you like, she says (and I do) but you try lugging a sack of potatoes home. I have, on my head, African style, but for this endeavour, I wheeled her Pashley out of the bike shed.

This is her year old Pashley, that I have repeatedly championed as her way to go shopping at the market without looking like a complete oddball. Here was my way to prove its worth and so, to the market I rode, duly loaded its basket full of groceries and wobbled home. With hindsight, panniers would have been more stable but I made it unscathed, unloaded and turned the bike around and headed into town for a morning coffee with my beloved.

This is the point where my racer's instincts kicked in. A Pashley tourer may be an old maid of a bike but you can ride it hard should you so wish. It can be thrown into corners at quite an angle. On the exit, the weight, the build and the low saddle don't lend themselves to you 'honk'ing it out of the corners, roadie style, but with a flick of the thumb you just drop the hub gear down through the 'box and spin like a mad eejit. Roads were blocked off by market stalls and such but armed with the Pashley and local knowledge, I scythed through town traffic, rattling mudguards and clanging the bell down the shared foot and cycle path. I hadn't had that much fun in literally days. I duly arrived at my coffee appointment wheezing and red faced. 'Its fun, isn't it?' Agreed Mrs Zoom.

Now, the fact that people are capable of riding 'roadsters' at high speed will be of no surprise to residents of Cambridge, nor indeed any European university town. 5 million students can't be wrong.

As concerns the market shopping, I reckon there's just enough room in the shed for a rickshaw.

Rob Jefferies Velo Youth Fund

2011-06-12T02:57:00.000-07:00

From Eamonn Deane's blog (http://blog.sportsmassagebournemouth.co.uk/ I'll get the link working soon, Eamonn):

A fund has been set up in Rob’s memory to encourage young riders. Donations can be made to

Poole WHS/ Robs Velo Youth Fund

C/O James Smith FD
60a Kings Road
Swanage
Dorset
BH 19 1HR

Ride For Rob

2011-05-30T09:43:00.001-07:00

If anyone can think of a more fitting tribute to the man than 70 of us riding up a hill into a headwind in the rain then I'd like to hear it.

I have now retrospectively tagged Rob in all the GWOZ posts that he appeared in (look to the left of this and scroll down). More (better) photos here and a really nice post here from Steve Birtwhistle.

Rob Jefferies

2011-05-27T12:20:00.001-07:00

As best as I recall, the first time I spoke to Rob Jefferies, we were climbing up the hill to Kingston village in the Purbecks. Actually, we’d probably just climbed the hill. Kingston is not a hill for idle chit chat. I was on a ride with my then-club, the Bournemouth Jubilee Wheelers. This was also his club at the time, although he’d been out riding as a free agent and had met us and tagged along. On the climb, the group had strung out but Rob and I had set a similar pace up the hill. This was worthy of note because at the time I weighed around 70 kilos, while Rob weighed a little bit more than 70 kilos and we remarked how the climb had been a perfect demonstration of power to weight ratio. I had the weight advantage; he had the power advantage, although as he pointed out, he was a long way off his best at the time. The conversation continued on the plunge down to Worth Matravers and to the café stop in Swanage, where we found that we had a mutual distrust of carbon fibre as a frame material and a broad knowledge of 80’s musical genres.

So began our first rambling, free flow conversation. The first of the many that we were to have, each starting at a fixed point – one or the other of us calling to talk about chain rings or next weeks race at Calshot – and then pursuing a meandering path through a variety of unconnected subjects. At no point did I ever manage to steer the conversation in the direction that I wanted it to go, which says a lot about Rob’s indomitable streak, but instead soon found it was easiest to just let it ramble. I may not get to where I wanted to go but it would always lead to somewhere interesting. Rob seemed to enjoy the conversations too. I was invited to ‘help’ him drive the lead car in a Wessex League road race once purely, as he later admitted, to keep him entertained for the race’s 2 ½ hours.

Occasionally, biographical detail would slip out. On the way to Reading at the beginning of May, we started talking about the track world championships. We’d been over why Australia were handing Team GB their arse, about Cameron Mayer, about the Madison, about Peter Schap and Theo Bos, then about Dutch track legend Robert Slippens, when Rob dropped ‘I did a race with him once’ into the conversation. ‘Oh, really?’ I said and pressed him further to discover that in that race, a point’s race in Holland in the 90’s, he had formed a strategy of sitting on Slippen’s wheel the whole race. This being Holland, he figured that none of the 30 other Dutchmen in the race would dare chase the guy down so, he stayed with him, got a lap up and finished an eventual fourth. Rob told this all in his usual matter of fact way, neither self aggrandizing nor overly modest. Then there was the time trial where he beat Bradley Wiggins and the couple of times that he out sprinted Chris Hoy.

In time, this became something of a jibe: ‘How many times were you national champ, Rob?’ we would call to him and he would answer, truthfully and indifferently, with the nonchalance of a man who had been close to the top of the talent mountain. Achievements are all very well but nothing to be shouted about. He had done well, he was proud of his achievements. Others had done better, others had done worse, and it was all irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. The whole point was doing the best that you could manage.

Which brings us to the other thing about Rob: the encyclopedia of track knowledge that he was. As a regular of the Calshot winter league, I’d defected from the Jubilee and moved across to Poole Wheelers, joining the ‘dream team’ that was Rob, Paul Harris and Mark Moss. On my first race in a PW skinsuit, Rob had announced to me: ‘Seeing as you’re in our club, now, I can show you how to set your bike up’. I’d recently near crippled myself in a 24 hour trackathon so was all ears, as he raised my handlebars and moved my saddle as far forward as it would go. Next race, the difference was startling, as if I’d been turbocharged. Then, he taught me how to ride a points race, how to use the tight track at Calshot to over take. Suddenly, I was a contender in the races. Suddenly, I was riding to win.

It would be fair to say that everything that I have achieved on track, I have achieved thanks to him and I don’t think that I am in any way alone when I say that. Rob was known. Rob had many friends in the cycling world and beyond.

And so it made it particularly tragic when I heard this morning that he had been hit by a car while out riding and killed. I got the call about midday, followed immediately by several more. The news had dropped into the pool of the local cycling community and caused a tsunami. As if it was not already tragic enough that a man in the prime of his life, with a wife and daughter, was struck down in this way. But this is Rob: the colossus, the uber-mensch, the alpha male. Rob the legend, cut down with the tarmac literally setting on the Bournemouth velodrome.

This is not fair. Life is not fair. We are miniscule specs in a vast and indifferent world that is in it self a tiny spec in an even vaster cosmos. Shit happens to good people.

Rob.

I’ll miss you.

See you up the road.

2011-05-22T13:34:00.001-07:00

Endurance Penny Farthing Racing by 5minSports

Anarchy In The Uk

2011-05-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite things about bike racing is using it making metaphors for for political systems, and then picking apart those same metaphors with logic and reason. To this end, I will deconstruct the philosophy of political anarchy through the medium of a TLI race at Moreton:

Or something. Obviously, there's anarchy, then there's anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho punk and the more recent economic liberalism, which is a kind of economic anarchy - popular with the far right and practiced in third world slums. These are all vastly different but share a common cause in being against top-down power structures. Power should be in the hands of the individual or, in the case of anarcho syndicalism, in the hands of small, self governing groups or, in the case of neo-liberalism, in the hands of the people with the most cash.

In this sense, the TLI is a very anarchic organisation, with a philosophy that can be summed up in the phrase 'come and have a go if you think you're hard enough'. Want to race? Bring your helmet, bring your bike, pay your £8 the same as everybody else and away you go. There are different groups, the weakest go first, the strongest last. This is not especially anarchic, as it involves someone being in charge, and deciding the length of the handicap that each group should receive, and this person is usually self appointed in the sense that they're organising this race so can run it as they damn well please. But then we, as riders, are under no obligation to enter the race and are free to race elsewhere should we prefer to.

Luckily, 60 of us decided that we did want to ride and duly paid our hard earned on the line (the sign on was particularly anarchic - Carolan, you are sorely missed). We assigned ourselves to our respective handicap groups, using a system of honour and honesty. Which, incidentally, is the main failing of anarchism, in that it relies entirely on the honesty and integrity of the individual. Should you be a very fast rider, who fancies an easy ride, there is little to stop you deliberately entering an easier group. Well, nothing but the sarcastic comments of your peers and a lot of moaning if you use this advantage to grab yourself a win. The handicap is set, but can be modified with enough ear bending before hand. Enough riders badgering the organisers can get the rules changed, which is anarchy rather than anarchism, where rules would be changed by a popular ballot. But there isn't usually time for a vote and cyclists are notoriously reticent when it comes to speaking with one voice. And anyway, there's a race to be getting on with.

When it comes to the racing, a sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic comes into play, a wildebeest style stampede. Unless you are in the scratch group, in which case it becomes a cheetah-like pursuit of a herd of wildebeest. Riders in their respective groups can work together to stay away or catch the group in front, or they can ride for themselves, sitting on the back and sucking wheels in order to keep a fresh pair of legs for the sprint. Ideally, if the handicapping works well, then the riders should form into an ever larger group, all coming together, sixty strong, in the last couple of laps. If this doesn't work then the whole field can join together with 5 laps and about half an hour of racing still to go, which can get a little scary (sixty riders on a narrow country lane, think about it). Or the groups cannot catch each other, in which case they moan like crazy afterwards. Except for the group that stayed away, obviously.

Now, in your 60-strong group, another form of natural selection takes place. The fast riders tend to ride at the front of the bunch and, with a dead-stop hairpin bend every mile on the course, the stronger riders tend to be better at hammering out of hairpin bends. This means that there will be a group of fast riders on the front and, just behind, a group of not quite so fast riders gritting their teeth to stay with them. Behind them will be another group of riders attempting to make up what they're going to loose on the exit of the corners by out-braking everybody on the way in. They slam into the corner, back wheel in the air like Valentino Rossi on a hot lap, then squeak through it, then get out sprinted by a bunch of pissed-off riders who's noses they've just chopped off. Like I said, natural selection.

Now, coming to the final lap, we see the very text book definition of anarchy. By a combination of testosterone, adrenalin and all higher brain function being shut down in an effort to pump all available blood into the lower limbs, a certain mindset develops. The self becomes centered in the moment or, more specifically, the moment when you cross the line. All other priorities are over ruled. At this point, were the very devil himself to offer you a trade of your eternal soul for a place in the top ten, you'd sign like a shot. After six years of running races here, the marshalling crew know to stop all traffic as soon as the race enters the final straight. The thought of a soccer mum in a 4X4 meeting a score of het-up racing cyclists, foaming at the mouth and filling the road from side to side does not bare thinking about. But, happily, that doesn't happen very often.

Once again, the St Johns ambulance pack up and go home, their first aid kits unopened. Once again, the top 10 is decided by commitee, based on what everyone thought they saw. Once again, everyone hangs around for half an hour afterwards, scoffing back the best cake in the known world and explaining to each other why they didn't win.

Anarchy. On this evidence, a fantastic basis to run a race.

Deconstruction Of An Excuse

2011-05-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about Moreton... Moreton is a lovely place to have a bike race. There's a clubroom, there are kitchens where a lovely lady sells some of the best cake in the known world and I am on at least nodding terms with a good proportion of field. However, there are downsides: the course, with its three straights and three tight bends, isn't the most exciting in the world. Well, it is when the oncoming traffic doesn't make any effort to either slow down or pull over, which is most of the time. Then there's the racing, which is never anything other than flat out. This is not nessecairily a bad thing until you factor in your form.

Let me tell you about form... Form comes in four stages. First, you build, then you peak, then you maintain, then it all goes horribly wrong and all you can do is stop, rest and then start to build all over again. Which is where I'm at at the moment: I've been hammering it since last October, I've built some half decent race form and it has all gone horribly wrong. Oh, and I've smashed myself up in a race crash, which really doesn't help and made my week's 'rest' more of a week's hobbling about, wincing. However despite all this, I went into the opening round of the Moreton Kermis Series fairly confident. I was race fit, or at least so I thought. There was just a tiny little bit of a massive great problem waiting for me as soon as I started the race. I was fit for racing but just not that sort of racing.

Let me tell you about specificity... Other than being a word invented by sports coaches, and being quite hard to spell, specificity is the act of training specifically for one sport. Lets say I threw the javelin, if I did a lot of it, my body would adapt to throwing the javelin, meaning that if I were to suddenly start doing the long jump, say, my javelin-fit body would not be very good at it. In a cycling context it goes like this: I race all winter on a velodrome, spinning a small gear fast and occasionally very fast. Then you I on a road bike and ride a combination of flat motor racing circuits and flatish velodromes, riding in a big bunch and spinning a variety of gears fast and occasionally very fast over a slightly longer distance. Then I get to a road course consisting of three straights and three hairpin bends, where I have to slow to a crawl, get around a tight corner and then get out of the saddle and hoof it down the straight. It is at this point that I realise that, while my ability to spin a gear fast and occasionally very fast is fantastic, my ability to hoof it, out of the saddle, out of a hairpin bend, has atrophied since about.... oooooh, last August when I last rode this course.

The other thing about Moreton is that it is a handicap race. The souped up 'red' or 'scratch' group go last and have to catch the first group nearly a lap ahead of them. Other groups go in between and pride had me joining the second fastest group. However all the guff I wrote above had me dropping out of this group after a few laps, whereupon I tootled around until the 'red' group caught me and I rode around with them for a few laps more until my lack of hoofing abilities had me dropping out the back again. Then, a lap down now, I rejoined the group that I'd started in and continued with them, effectively doing the road race version of a madison. In short: my first really rubbish race this year. Well, excepting the one I crashed in, and the one where I was eliminated on the first lap.

No matter. There will be more and I have been hoofing it out of corners all weekend. Next time I will be better and then I will tell you all about that.

Derny

2011-05-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

As you will recall, last Sunday we were riding the Bordeaux-Paris meeting at Palmer Park velodrome in Reading. The race was named after the old epic-distance classic from Bordeaux to Paris. Riders would start in the early hours of the morning, ride through the night and then, at dawn, the field would be individually paced by dernys over the remaining distance to Paris. This slightly anachronistic event died out in the 80's but Gordon Sherrat in Reading based this track event around the race, as a chance for people to race behind dernys at an amatuer level. On entering this race a few years ago, I'd been asked if I had any experience riding behind a derny. I hadn't but explained that, with only the top 9 going through to the main race, chances are it wouldn't be a problem.

As mentioned in the previous post, the Bordeaux-Paris race was split into two parts. Part one was a 40 lap scratch race where, after 40 laps, the first nine riders in the race were pulled out: their position had earned them a place in Part Two. So, while the rest of the field fought out the remaining places, the first nine rushed to their bikes to gear up for the 30km derny race.

So, the big question some of you will be asking is 'so what the chuff is a derny? Well, a derny is kind of a motorbike. Kind of. It has two wheels and an engine, but is more reminicent of those funny mobilette things that use to buzz round villages in the south of France in the 70s. The tank is on the handlebars, the throttle is operated by your thumb and there are a set of push-bike style pedals that, as far as my interegation of Rob on the way home revealed, have no active purpose. The engine is a buzzy little two-stroke with a flat exhaust note producing a very modest number of horse power and the vehicle's entire purpose on earth is to be ridden in front of cyclists.

Without a cyclist tucked in close behind, what you have is a very slow race between some really shit mopeds. However for the cyclist it's all good, as he (or she) can hide behind the derny and so can push as hard as he (or she) likes. He (or she) can push a huge gear and doesn't have to worry about the mega headwind on the back straight. Hence the mad rush to 'gear up'. The riders all line them selves up, as do their respective dernys.

Anyway, Rob got second. Matt Gittings won but appeared to have been practising beforehand, which as we all know is just not British and if you fancy having a go yourself there are regular derny training sessions at Palmer Park

In Reading, No One Can Hear You Scream

2011-05-02T06:01:00.001-07:00

I think I'm in the wrong sport. The guy I work for went on a golfing jolly to Turkey a couple of months ago and, by a mixture of wagers, prize money and being quite good at golf managed to win the cost of his flight and accomadation. Meanwhile, I've just managed to trash my skinsuit and helmet, plus bend my front wheel and frame in a race where the prize money barely covered the petrol costs.

This was the final race of the Bordeaux-Paris meeting at Palmer Park track at Reading, basically a last chance trophy dash for all riders that didn't get into the titular headline race. That race had been held in two parts, with the first part being a 40 lap scratch race, which had been flat out for most of the way, the field strung out in one long line with me at the back, chewing the handlebars. I'd been hurting after last week's efforts in Portsmouth, had had an emergency rest week and turned up for this event still sore and knackered. If it hurts when you're on the rollers then you know you're in for a bad day. Anyway, for the first race I'd sat in the bunch, surviving up until the last lap when I tried going for a long one with Frazier Carr. That tactic was not successful. I had no power and there was a monster of a wind on the back straight.

So, we came to the 'part 1' of the Paris-Bordeaux feature presentation: as I said, a 40 lap race. As I said, very, very hard. Well, for me anyway: I was riding right on the redline with the occasional couple of seconds below threshold to 'recover', then hard on it again, until I popped with a few laps to go. I dropped off the back and rolled over to Sharon, Alex's chauffeur/soigneur/Mum and was talking to her about rubbish cars we have owned when there was a crash at the back of the bunch.

This is where Alex had been, replacing me as the race's tail end charlie and showing a huge amount of tenacity, fighting his way through the headwind to get back into the bunch each lap. Then, some one in front took out his wheel and he went down, taking Frazier with him. He was ok, barring a few scrapes and a bit of blood but his bike wasn't:

Yes, folks, that is a carbon fibre Condor frame in two distinct pieces, which soon became the talk of the meeting. (See HERE). A crowd gathered to inspect the damage, marvel about how thin the tubing was and point that this was why steel was better.

I'm not sure how the race ended, but the first nine riders got the opportunity to run in part two of the race, which I'll be describing in detail in the next post. The rest of us got a nice rest, in my case long for me to spin out the lactic in my legs on Rob's rollers and start the final race feeling fresh and up for a rumble. I soon got one: with a few laps to go, the pace slowed and two riders in front of me clipped wheels. I'd watched enough track racing to be able to guess what was about to happen and sure enough, I t-boned the rider who'd gone down and did a forward roll, landing on the back of my helmet, then shoulder, then hip. I reckon if I'd been going a little faster I'd have completed the roll, got back on my wheels and carried on but no such luck. Physics won out and I ended up flat on my back, sprawled across the track, smarting from the sort of pain you'd expect from hitting tarmac at 25mph but essentially ok. Generally speaking, you know when you're hurt bad and I wasn't: just bruised and making a racket for nothing.

Oh yeah, and with a hole in my elbow. The other elbow, not the one I bashed up in January. Oh and slightly concussed. Luckily, I'd got a lift up with Rob (more on him in the next post), so had a responsible adult to get me home safely with all my stuff.

And now, here I sit, on the eve of the Moreton kermis series, battered, bruised, knackered, with a wrecked helmet and a bent bike. Steel, it turns out, is not kryptonite. It won't explode but it does bend and will have to be bent back before I'm riding the Bertin again. So it just remains to thank the army of first aiders at Palmer Park. Unlike frame builders, they repair you straight away and for free.

2011-04-30T14:06:00.000-07:00

I have occasionally been accused of being a bit cryptic and weird on this blog. On which note I present this:

It helps if you're into Einsturzende Neubauten.

In Portsmouth, No One Can Hear You Scream

2011-04-25T08:25:00.000-07:00

The wheel of the year rolls on and the unseasonal heatwave keeps on burning. This Saturday, there was a choice of two races, The Sandie Radford Memorial Road Race and The Kingsbury Cup track ominium. The Kingsbury Cup is traditionally held on Easter Saturday and, as such, is traditionally rained off. So, I elected to enter the track race and, if the weather looked bad, head to the New Forest and do the Sandie Radford instead. Shame I couldn't do both but you know how it is, you wait ages for a decent local event and then two come along at once.

This year, it was most definitely not rained off and so we sizzled on the 1/3rd mile tarmac griddle for the entire four hour duration of the meeting, in my case chugging back about 4 litres of water and sweating about the same. And, in between all of the sitting around in the shade, we even got to do some racing. This was only my third event on an open air track and some fairly useful riders had turned up, so I went in with fairly open expectations. I was, therefore not a little pleased with myself to get a second in my first event.

This was a sprint heat and, if you would allow me to get a little bit technical, is a little bit different to the sort of sprint racing that I'm used to. I usually race at Calshot, which is very tight and technical. They say that if you can ride Calshot you can ride anywhere, which is not entirely true but sprinting there is a case of getting it through the corners with the power on and, if you can get to the front and hold it on the black line, chances are you'll win. Portsmouth is not a technical track. If you can't ride Portsmouth then you ought to have a serious talk with yourself. However, this does not make the racing easier, as a lot of things that are fairly irrelevant at Calshot become very, very important when racing here.

The fundamentals are the same, though: sit on someone's wheel, then nip past them in the final meters. There was a whisker between 2nd and 3rd but Graham Hurst, my club president, was the line judge so I was pretty sure I'd got it. I had and suddenly I was in the quarter finals in a discipline that I had never excelled at. Normal service resumed very quickly, as I found myself up against Will Macke (AW Cycle) and John McCullough (Agiskoviner) who were both fairly useful. I was already on full gas in the final corner when they both lit the blue touch paper. I'd like to say that I went too early but in truth I just didn't go enough. Luckily, we still had Rob to fly the Poole Wheelers flag in between catching up with all his old Herne Hill buddies.

Then came the one mile scratch race - three laps of brutality, 1609.344 metres of pain. It basically went like this. I didn't win that one either, nor the points race, where there was a sprint for points every single lap. That's every third of a mile which, again, is just a tiny bit brutal. I did spend a large part of the same in the leading group of 10 or so riders. Or when I say 'in' the group, I'd bridged across from the main bunch and managed to catch onto the back, just in time for them to start winding it up for the next sprint. Then I would catch back up as they slowed just across the line. Essentially, I was in a permanent, all lap round, out of the saddle, sprint for about six laps, before the rest of the field caught up with us. Then with four to go, I went for a sprint myself, got fourth (the first 3 places are counted), then blew up in all senses of the word. I crawled the remaining 3 laps home. I could have packed but wanted to maintain my 100 per cent finishing record this season.

Obviously, when I say my unblemished finishing record, that's for races where I was allowed to finish. In the devil, or elimination race, the last rider across the line each lap is eliminated. There were 30 of us in the race, and the first rider out was... me. Boxed in, yadda yadda yadda. Luckily, Portsmouth is a big track and there's plenty of space on the back straight to give full vent to your emotions. In Portsmouth, no one can hear you scream.

Looking on the bright side, I had plenty of time to rest for the final 15 lap scratch race, unlike Rob who got second in the devil, then won the sprint repecharge, got third or fourth in the sprint final then, with barely a few minutes rest, started the big finale.

The titular Kingsbury Cup offered a dizzying £50 to the winner. Alex was rather taken with the idea of racing for money, at least till the old hands pointed out that, once, practically every chipper event used to offer money. 'Why did they stop?' He asked, a little disapointed, much as were the veteran riders. Anyway, with all eyes firmly on the prize we started what was actually the slowest event of the whole day. Or to start with at least. There was a lot of stopping and starting and farting in the middle, which is very exciting if you're squeezed into the middle of the bunch on a fixed wheel bike with no brakes. A few of us went grass tracking but that's no huge surprise for this track. We rolled back in afterwards to be greeted by Alex's Mum, Sharon. 'Don't tell me, boxed in at the last corner?' she laughed, parroting our usual excuse. No actually, I stopped sprinting on the back straight because I was convinced that I'd actually split my trachea through breathing so hard.

Damn, I love track racing.

More From The Paris Roubaix

2011-04-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

No further comment needed:

Silver Linings

2011-04-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

Sorry, dear reader, but this latest post should have been full of photos from the Paris-Roubaix. GWOZ had been getting a little stale and samey and what was needed was a big continental adventure, plus a load of 'atmospheric' black and white photos and a big storey about how me and my retro 35mm SLR camera failed to interact this time.

What SHOULD have happened is this: I get up at 5.30am, get in the car and drive the 3 and a bit hours to Folkestone and getting the chunnel to Calais. From there, its 2 hours to Valencienne and La Tranche d'Arenberg, where we had been intended to watch last time. This time, however, I find my way there and stand next to the guy with the tornado tom frites banner, or possibly Dirk Hofman Motorhomes. Then, once the field has gone through, I head back to the channel, get home, go to bed, get up and go to work.

What actually happened was that I was on my way home the Wednesday before, having worked out the schedule as described above. It was my intention to book the chunnel ticket as soon as I got home but, half way there, my van started belching smoke like an old F1 turbo. Anyway, long story short I had to buy a new engine, which put the kybosh on not only my Paris-Roubaix plans but pretty much all my other plans till about 2013.

Ah well. Jon tried to put something of a silver lining on proceedings by explaining that the Paris-Roubaix isn't very good. He'd been out watching the Ronde Van Vlanderen, which is apparently WAY better. Not my words but those of an veteran of the Belgian amatuer scene, who, while he was over there, had taken part in an amatuer race with over 250 riders (7km circuit, 150km, average speed of 44km/h). I'd have agreed with him but, coming from me it would have sounded the sourest of grapes.

You see, despite my van being in van hospital at the minute, I still have the works pickup: An indestructible Toyota, as used by the taliban. I'd borrowed it off my boss, not bothering to tell him that I was going to drive it to Portsmouth that evening, then arrived and parked up to discover that the door lock does not work. Nothing on it locks, in fact, which is no bad thing when you're on a farm in the New Forest but not quite so fantastic in North End. Also, right next to my bike and kit bag, I found an old vetinary syringe, which I quickly disposed off and hoped that nobody had spotted it and drawn any conclusions.

Not that there could have been any suspiscion over my performance. It was the usual mix of hanging around midfield then getting 'boxed in' at the end. Its hard to be anything other than boxed in when you're at the back of a fifty rider bunch. This week, some bloke pulled his foot out right in front of me, which ruined my finish slightly, although I suppose a poor finish is preferable to a non-finish under a big pile of bikes.Alex was, if anything, a little too well placed and got caught out by the wind after flatting none of his possibly slightly false economy tyres, while Jordan was still recovering from a 3 day national level juniors race in Bristol at the weekend.

Even more luckily, the pick up was still where I'd left it, as loosing that would have taken a LOT of explaining. I drove back in my redneck pick up with my check shirt on and arrive to discover the news: My van's engine has been replaced BUT... the replacement engine is broken... and needs to be replaced. Its gonna be another week, folks but, on the bright side, the already astranomical cost is not going up. Always on the bright side, eh?

Days Of Blunder

2011-04-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, I used to be heavily into motorsport - watching the Brazilian Grand Prix lap-by-lap updates live on ceefax, bunking off school to watch F3000 testing at Brands Hatch, that sort of thing. At the time, everyone 'in the know' was banging on about how great NASCAR was, having neither satellite TV nor living in Louisiana, I had no way to actually watch NASCAR and judge for myself. It wasn't until early this century that I got hold of a satellite dish and got to watch some NASCAR live(ish) and as a result I found myself hugely dissapointed. It basically went like this: after endless studio pundity, we would cut to the start of the race, where the green flag would wave and 40 cars would thunder around the track 3 abreast at 300 km/h. Then, within minutes, there would be a ma-hoo-sive stack up and, as all the bits were swept up, the field would circulate slowly under caution behind the pace car. There would be an ad break, the field would trundle around some more and then, eventually, the green flag would wave and 35 cars would thunder, three abreast at 300 km/h for 2 laps before there would be another monumental stack and every one would trundle round behind the pace car for another 10 minutes. And so on. For two hundred miles. I tried, lord knows I tried, but I never found myself managing to sit through a whole race and went back to watching rallying and sports-prototype-endurance-le-mans-wotever-its-called-this-week. But despite this, some things did rub off on me. For example: the whole strategy for keeping four fairly small tyres sweet on what is a fairly hefty motor. Basically, you can run faster down at the bottom of the track, mainly because its a shorter distance. However, due to the sideforces pulling on the car, this will destroy your tyres alot quicker than running a 'slow' line higher up the track. So, if you want to pass somebody, or generally get a bit of a shufty on, you get down low and go for it and hope that you've got a decent gap on the rest of the field by the time your tyres have gone sick. This is from someone who watched a quater of a NASCAR race about five years ago, so don't take my word for it. But for some reason this came to my mind as I was racing around Portsmouth last night. 'Portsmouth', is a 'D' shaped oval track* on which they run road races. Or, more accurately, races for road bikes (with gears and brakes) on a track. To some, this feels like 'riding around the inside of a washing machine, which keeps going on to spin cycle'. To others, its the closest thing to 'proper' track racing in 80 miles. The race is run over 40 minutes, after which (apparently) we would be informed that there were 3 laps to go. This time, I had set a stopwatch running and so could judge when to suck wheels and when to move on up the bunch. Which is where the NASCAR referrence comes in: tyres don't go off after a few 'hot' laps in track racing but in order to work your way up the bunch, you have to ride 'up' on the banking and outside of the 'slipstream' of the bunch. If you're a weeny like me then you can handle about half a dozen laps of this and so it becomes like the NASCAR driver destroying his tyres. You go around the outside of the bunch, get a nice slot about 5-10 riders from the front and then Abdoujaparov your way back into the slipstream. So, after a good half hour of sitting tight, this is what I did. It nearly all went completely wrong as I found myself towing the bunch around for what turned out to be a very slow lap indeed. Then, a guy from Fareham Wheelers attacked and it was just like when the pace car pulls in and the green flag waves. I was still in prime position, within touching distance of the front, still feeling strong and still feeling confident, until we came onto the straight and the Fareham Wheeler's attack started to falter. He came back towards us and, due to my 'ideal' position in the bunch, I found myself stuck behind him as we caught him up. People were passing close on both sides, so I couldn't swerve around him without skittling half the field. It was almost exactly like those moments on the motorway when you're stuck behind an old truck going up a steap hill and no one will let you out to pass. Duly, I went from 'ideal' position to 'shite' position. And at that exact moment, the last lap bell rang. Suffice to say, I didn't win. Will from Bournemouth Arrow did (apparently, I was a long way behind at the time) which is obviously a good thing. Big up the Bournemouth massive and all that. I rolled in at the back. Again. Spitting feathers and wishing the pox upon the Fareham rider. And then there was nothing left but to thank my sponsor, my pit crew and Jesus and get on home. Tomorrow is another day. *Yeah, yeah, geometry fans, I know it can't be both 'D' shaped AND oval

How Not To Completely Suck At Getting To The Sharp End Of A Road Race

2011-03-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

So there's this band that I like called New Model Army. They have a song called 'The Charge', which has a chorus that goes: "On, on, on, cried the leaders at the back/We went galloping down the blackened hills and into the gaping trap/The bridges are burnt behind us and there are guns waiting ahead/ Into the valley of death rode the brave hundreds."

I don't know why, but this song popped into my head on the last lap of last Sunday's race around Thruxton, funnily enough as we were thundering down what I will laughably describe as 'the hill' in top gear. Getting songs in my head during races is nothing new. Usually its something like Lady Gaga or Rhianna* - less so now that I've stopped listening to Radio 1** - but you get the picture.

As concerns the song, 'brave hundreds' is apt as there were over a hundred of us in the 3rd cats race alone, including Max Steadman, who I'd last seen being loaded into an ambulance after a nasty stack at Calshot. He has since recovered well enough to ride the 4th cats race at 10am, finish that and then ride in the thirds as well to 'get some mileage'. For the rest of us, a bunch that big meant that, for the first few laps, we didn't have to do anything at all. Or those that weren't on the front at any rate. We just roared around in a big, lazy, aerodynamic bubble, sucked along by those naive fools who'd been told by crafty 'experienced' riders to ride at the front the whole race.

Having done my 'get sucked along' race last week, I was determined to try a little harder. The first part of trying a little harder involved getting close to the front. In a hundred rider bunch the likelyhood of getting caught in a crash is quite high, so, for no other reason than peace of mind, it is better to be near the front. Not on the front, obviously, but in that sweet spot a few riders behind the nose of the race. The first problem is getting there, as there tend to be quite a lot of riders in the way and getting around those riders leaves you out in the wind. This knackers you out and, once you are in your desired position, your knackeredness leaves you vulnerable to the 99 or so people behind you who are also trying to move up the bunch. Ideally, you move through gaps in the middle of the bunch, or hitch a ride on the back of someone else with the same plan, saving your legs for the big sprint. Ideally, with wide enough elbows, you can stay there or there abouts the whole race.

Or you could stuff around at the back like I did, then make a huge push to the front with two laps to go. At this point in the race, you will notice people hurling their drinks bottles aside like its the last stage of the tour on the Champs Elysee, as if those few hundred grammes of water are really going to make the teeniest tiniest difference. If you could, you would also hinge open your head, remove your brain and hurl that to the side of the track as you won't be needing it for the next five minutes. In the space of that one lap - which is, incidentaly, about the exact same distance as an 'endurance' race round Calshot - you will not see that many foolhardy moves for so little actual gain anywhere bar a school drop off at 9am. Down the hill we thunder, then hold that momentum up the 'hill', squeeze through the chicane and then... The 'excuse de jour' was "I got boxed in", shared between 3 riders riding their first season with the seniors and myself riding my... um.... seventh year. Obviously, experience doesn't count for everything. But don't take my word for it, listen to New Model Army.

*Imagine it: 'hey nana, what's my name' on a loop in my head for A WHOLE HOUR

**I now listen to a combination of Radio 4 and the latest podcast from The Bike Show and Velo Club Don Logan

How Not To Completely Suck At Road Racing

2011-03-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

Keep Racing. Get some high speed miles in over the winter. Do some cyclocross, do some track, just make sure that, as well as the road miles, you're getting to hurt your legs every now and again. Whether by accident or design, most winter racing is fast and intense over a short distance, so shouldn't knacker you out too much by the spring. I emphasise 'too much', as it will knacker you out a bit.
Get some big road miles in. Ideally, you should have been getting these in already but time is a problem. As is ice, rain, darkness, hawthorns and so forth. Anyway, as with the above point, the main thing is to keep riding. Alot.
Ride harder. And remember, top form feels alot like utter exhaustion. The trick is knowing which is which. Ideally, you should be waking up every morning feeling like you've been kicked by a horse. And, to quote Kevin Schwantz, when you see God, back off.
Get on a chaingang. Ideally with a former olympian, or possibly a current pro rider but ideally any bunch of guys and girls who are also aiming to not completely suck at road racing. Meet up at least once a week and hoon it around some circuit. With a bit of luck, when you enter your first race of the year, it will feel really slow and you will feel like you are being sucked around the circuit, apparently without having to put in any effort at all.
Choose your race well. This, obviously, depends on availability, as if there aren't a plethora of 3rd category 50km road races around pan flat motor racing circuits then you're screwed. An 'easy' race does wonders for your confidence levels, while entering a hilly, 80km 2nd cat race in the driving rain will probably have you hurling the bike into the shed afters, never to ride again. Obviously, you have to be well 'on topic' with the first three points, otherwise you will suck at an 'easy' race and hurl your bike into the shed afterwards, never to ride again.
Race. This bit is quite important, as the only way to train for racing is by racing. Unless you're Lance Armstrong and you take 10 months of the year off and then claim to be the hardest working guy in the peleton. For everybody else, racing gives you conditions that are pretty impossible to copy in any other circumstances. For example, road-wide echelons, which are hard to replicate in everyday traffic.
Race. With a bit of practice, you should be able to spot the point on the road or in the bunch where you should be. With a little more practice, and some sharp elbows, you will be able to ride there. With yet more practice, you'll be able to avoid the pile up that will happen as everybody else in the bunch tries to get there too.
Realise when you're not going to win. If its the final lap and you are in the last third of an 80 rider bunch, you are not going to win. Unfortunately, a large number of the remaining 79 riders will probably be of the opposite opinion, which can make things a little spicy.
Realise what a good result is. If you're going for a win then go for a win, just don't start your attack from the very back of an 80 rider bunch. Otherwise, if you turned up just to get some high speed miles in your legs, then don't spend the trip home beating yourself up about how you trickled in at the back of the bunch, or how it wasn't a 'proper' race cos there wasn't the usual mistral wind on the back straight to sort the men from the boys. If it bothers you that much, enter an 80km hilly 2nd cat race.
And finally... Don't let up. You trundled in at the back of a pan flat, fairly slow, 3rd cat race, having not seen the front once in the whole hour and twenty minutes. Well done you. Now get out, get training and get a proper result next time ya wheelsucking, freeloading lightweight.

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

2011-03-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

On Monday night, there was roller racing at the Jubilee Wheeler's clubhouse. I went down, quite confidant. I'd all ready had a go at Rollopaluza and was all ready to give it beans. However with Rollapaluza, the bike is attatched to summat. Here you were riding 'free', so the level to which you were able to give the aforementioned beans was proportional to your ability to stay on the rollers. The more beans you gave, the more your bike bounced.

There's a video, too, shot by one Mike Walsh. I had no idea I was being filmed, which says something about the amount I was focusing on staying on the rollers. I should also point out that, due to software issues, I haven't watched this video, so I've no idea if it loads or runs or anything. I'm the one on the left.

If it doesn't work, try here: http://s682.photobucket.com/albums/vv188/NewForestGridiron/Jubilee%20Rollers/ and thanks again to Mike for stealing his video without permission.

The Gary Group

2011-03-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

Apologies for not posting for a while, I've had hardware issues. My laptop is full of bad voodoo and is in the hands of my local computer witch doctor, having the bad juju sucked out of it. Well, I say that but it's probably actually waiting in a queue behind all the other computers that need de-voodooing. Hey, Leighton btw. Now stop reading this and get fixing.

The up shot is, or rather was, that I was laptopless for most of last week - a not unpleasent state, brought to a close by Mrs Zoom asking me 'why don't I use my old laptop?' Mere moments later, having slapped my forehead, I had blown the dust off my old laptop and was back on line. A couple of days on and I've remembered why I replaced this laptop: It feels like it came out of Bletchley Park and keeps adding randbom letters when I type but time is getting on and my fans are hounding me for an update, so here I am. The sacrifices that I make for you, dear reader, for you.

Much has happened since we last spoke. I have entered a race and not completely sucked at it. This is a good thing. This is also a thing for which I owe a large amount of thanks to the Poole Wheelers Wednesday night rides and one particular participant by the name of Gary Dighton. Gary was a much talked about 'big name signing' for our club last year, except that cycling clubs don't 'sign' people, they join of their own violition and the sport of cycling time trials doesn't really have 'big names'. It doesn't really have big anything but the point is that Gary came with quite a pedigree - ex olympian, 1990 best british all rounder* - and now was going out training with us numpties. Every Wednesday he would appear, on a steel bike wearing retro 90's gear and then proceed to destroy us all around the training route. The usual procedure is that the group (usually 15-20 of us) goes in two groups, a slow group, who just wanted to get some miles in their legs, and the fast group, who were eyeing up early season races. With Gary involved, this very quickly became 3 groups, the slow group, the 'hang the hell on to Gary's wheel' group and a group of wheezing riders, shaking their heads and shrugging to each other. This would steadily grow in number as more and more riders were shelled from the Gary group, usually leaving him alone with Steve Groome and a promising junior rider, Jordan.

Then, a week or so ago, Jordan did his first grown up road race, did very well and came back commenting on how slow the pace was. So, with this in mind I steadily increased the time I spent in the 'Gary group' and then entered my first road race of the season. This was at Portsmouth and was basically a 50km track race on a banked track but using road bikes with brakes and gears. So, perfect for me, really. It sure as hell beats getting blown around Thruxton of an afternoon(more on that in next week's post).

First races of the season usually follow form. If you haven't been training enough over the winter, then you spend the first few laps on the back, breathing out of your arse, wondering how the hell people corner at that speed. If you've been riding track all winter then you spend the first few laps wondering why everyone's going so slow, before blowing up after 10km, then loosing a wheel** in a cross wind. Finally, and most rarely of all, you find the pace ok, find the changes of pace within your limits and then finish the race in a big huff because you got yourself boxed in on the final corner like a proper numpty. As the last part of that sentance suggests, despite a debut performance way above my usual, I still could not bring myself to be happy about it.

But fear not, there will be more. I will be back and I will be better. Well, I hope I will. Cliff suggests darkly that we'll all be burnt out by mid april, but the road racing season seems to end in April so I'm not that bothered. And then, maybe I'll be able to hang on to my good form. Like the way I've been able to hang on to Gary.

*I'm not even going to attempt to explain what the BBAR is. Read this if you're that interested.
** 'Loosing a wheel'. Not literally. This is when a big gap opens up between you and the rider ahead of you, meaning that you loose the 'tow' of their slipstream. This is a bad thing.

2011-03-12T11:24:00.000-08:00

My thoughts and cares for all our Japanese brethren.

Keirin: Speed Racers on Nowness.com.

More Blogs Of Note

2011-03-04T12:34:00.000-08:00

Velo Club Don Logan. Basically 2 Scotch blokes talking about cycling. Proper cycling, this is: Racers, races, nothing at all about town planning or mirrors on lorries.

This is actually a podcast, but here's the URL for their coresponding blog:

http://www.veloclubdonlogan.co.uk/

Or, if you're really lazy you could just click on this link. Anyway, here's a link to their podcast in iTunes. Or the URL: http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/velo-club-don-logan/id394732287

I highly recommend their interview with Graeme Obree, who is one of the reasons I'm into cycling in the first place.

Enjoy :)

Reasons Why Riding Track For Months, Then Trying To Get Road Fit, Then Going Back On Track For A Bit Sucks.

2011-03-01T11:04:00.000-08:00

In the kingdom of the mediocre, the well trained man is king. And there really is no substitute for miles. Well, there are kilometers, but they're shorter so you have to do more of them.

A couple of weeks into my training marathon*, after slogging away into headwinds, sidewinds, crosswinds, after wheezing up hills, after rattling over potholes and gritting my teeth against the hail, I got back on a velodrome on Saturday. The occasion was Poole Wheelers' monthly track session that I had been guilt tripped into doing. I'd wanted to spend the day following the Rallye Sunseeker around but ended up giving half the club a lift up to Calshot. I have a van. As it turned out, the session was a good laugh and I very much enjoyed myself, not least for the novelty of being at Calshot in temperatures above freezing.

Now, as well you know, I've been winding round Calshot all winter, squeezing quite a few kms out of those 143 meters. I have joked to myself that I know it so well that I could ride it blindfold and, while I'm not daft enough to actually attempt to do that, the analogy stands. And yet, after little more than 3 weeks away, it still feels a little bit scary, that first time that you pop up onto the banking. You still wonder if that newly glued on front tub** is properly prepared. I'd sanded them down the night before*** and hoped for the best and it was only after a slow speed excersize with Jason, who was riding one of Calshots own 'pre-loved' hire bikes with a pair of prehistoric clinchers****, that I really start to trust it. As for the fast stuff, my wrists ached, my neck ached and, most of all, the underneath of my thighs ached. But it was all good clean fun and, thanks to Rob, everybody left with their riding positions 'tweaked' for the better.

Come Sunday, I woke at a similarly ungodly hour to meet 'the lads' for the Sunday morning ride and found myself suffering. So, lets just get this straight, I ride the track, then switch to the road. This hurts. Then, after a few weeks of road, I go back on Track again. This hurts. Then I get back on the road. This hurts. Obviously I was hurting after yesterday's efforts but then Craig, who'd also been riding yesterday, wasn't. Or wasn't suffering as badly as I was. I then swung the focus of my blame onto Les, who was going like a train but, no, apparently, he wasn't. He'd had a cold and 'only ridden about 3 times this week'. Just for the record, that was more than I, a perfectly healthy induvidual, had managed. There's a lesson in there somewhere, kids. I mean, its not like Gerraint Thomas has problems with this.

I embrace my inner 'meh'. I am at one with my mediocrity.

*Yeah, right.
** Tub. Tubular Tyre. As opposed to all those square and triangular tyres.
*** Tyres are coated in a releasing agent so that they come out of their mould. Like greasing a cake tin. Rubbing some fine emery paper over the new tyre removes this layer. Whether doing this has any actual benificial effect on the tyre's level of grip I don't know, but there's no way that a possibly painful discovery that it does is going to be made on my watch.
****Clinchers. Tyres other than tubulars. Also tubular in shape. Mostly.

Bikes Are Rubbish, Really, Aren't They?

2011-02-24T11:00:00.000-08:00

I was listening to The Bike Show on Resonance FM the other day (actually the pod cast, on my iPod)*. It was an end of season look back, full of soundbites of people talking about how great bikes were. Which they are. No, really, they are. But sometimes... sometimes quietly, amongst friends, you can check over your shoulder and whisper to each other that sometimes they're a bit rubbish.

This is 'rubbish' in the broad sense, obviously. I'm already on board with the whole vehicle of the future jive, the fast, clean and sustainable transport, the horse that needs no hay, riding to Bristol in a handful of hours on a bowl of porridge, two slices of toast and a banana. Its just that, for a journey like that, even the keenest cyclist would admit that there are drawbacks.

Take my daily commute, for instance. I currently work 15 miles away from where I live, which is the longest commute I've ever undertaken in my working life. I have to be there for ten past seven in the morning and the journey, by car, takes 25 minutes. Now, with diesel being the price that it is at the minute, this is far from an ideal situation, even before we factor in my tree hugging tendencys. To commute by bike would take an hour, meaning that I would have to leave my house at ten past six in the morning. Riding my bike for an hour and leaving at 6.10am, are, in themselves, achieveable. Believe me, I don't WANT to get up at half five. I don't WANT to get up at seven to go on a club run on a Sunday for that matter but this is the deal that I have been given. So, after a training week last week, to remind myself what miles are, I decided to take up the challenge. At some point midweek, I would ride to work.

Some more problems soon presented themselves: I work out of doors, so it is absolutely vital that I take full water proofs with me. I work out of doors, so it is vital that I wear plenty of layers. Together, these items are bulky and, when I am engaged in vigarous activity (like cycling) are hot. I know from previous experience that to avoid sweating myself inside out, the majority of these clothes have to be carried, rather than worn, in a back pack of the sort used by the Royal Marines. A change of vest and base layer are also advisable as, once you've cooled down after your ride, your clothes will be soaked through and you will soon get very, very cold.

After some thought, I hit on the idea of leaving the bulkiest items of clothing at the point where I would start work. Somewhere dry, obviously. Somewhere where they wouldn't get swiped. This reduced the load down considerably but left me totally exposed to the elements. Another problem of cycling 'in civvies' is damp and mud on the roads, which gives you the unpleasent choice between arriving at work with a damp, brown-stained bum, or wearing waterproofs, which will slow-steam your legs over the course of your journey. With or without waterproofs, the amount of water is the same. The only difference is whether it's concentrated around your back side or spread evenly across your lower limbs.

Why not ride a bike with mudguards, I hear you ask, and yes, yes I see your point. Unfortunatley, I don't have a bike with mudguards. I want one but, with all the money I'm spending on diesel, I won't be able to afford one anytime soon. I could also do with some lights, seeing as its very dark indeed from 6am till 7am in England in February. A nice bike with mud guards and lights. And a pannier rack, so that I can stuff all my outdoor wear into them. And nice thin wheels and tyres. A bike sort of like this one. Yes. Yes, I'd like that. That would make me like commuting. That would help me do my bit to save the planet.

As it turned out, best laid plans of mice and men and all that, on the day of my scheduled commute, it threw it down. Work was cancelled, so I got my rain cape on and did a couple of hours riding in the pouring rain. Getting the miles in, any which way. Obviously, I can't hate cycling THAT much.

*That a big enough plug for you, Jack?

Blogs Of Note

2011-02-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

Hear all about the World Cup round at Manchester from one of the competitors:

http://felixenglishcycling.blogspot.com/

He didn't get a splinter in his leg or anything but it's a good insight into the world of top level track cycling.

Here's another, specialising in 6 day racing:

http://www.veloresults.co.uk/

What's 6 day racing? Read it and find out.

And don't forget to keep checking everyweek on here :)

Five More Reasons Why Getting Road Fit After 4 Months Of Track Sucks

2011-02-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

Rain. I'd wrangled a week off work, expressly for the purposes of getting fit for road racing after four months of winding round Calshot. Now apart from Monday, when I'd been guilt tripped into working, the weather was looking bleak. On Saturday, I managed a quick hour, which was just as well as, on Sunday, it threw it down. I mean really, really threw it down, not just wet but cold as well, with occasional bouts of hail. I'd had several offers of rides on the Sunday, one starting at 8am, the other at 9. The 8am ride I missed, due to me still being aslepp. The 9am one was the Bournemouth Jubilee Wheelers 100 mile reliability trial, that I'd decided to miss on account of the fact that I have trouble doing 40 miles at the minute. As it was, with its 100 miles in the driving rain in about 5 degrees centigrade, it was probably for the best that I gave it a wide berth. According to my sources, three riders completed the full course and I find myself torn between admiring their pluck and questioning their sanity.
Rain. I know I've already mentioned rain but there was so much off it that I thought it was worth doing twice. As I said earlier, I had to work Monday and Monday was lovely. The sun was in the sky, the snowdrops were up and I didn't get home till past four, when it had started to rain again. It continued to rain all through the night and a large part of the next day, until I decided to bite the bullet, get my waterproofs on and go for a ride. This I did and found it not that bad. Or at least not quite as unpleasent as I had been expecting. Even better, about an hour in the rain softened... and then stopped! My feelings were similar to how I imagine Job must have felt after God had stopped smiting him with boils. The sun even came out and soon I had to take my rain jacket off and wrap it around my shoulders like some bedraggled version of superman.
Hills. There was a day when I thought that I was a good climber. This was in lieu of any evidence to the fact and based, I think, on comparissons with people I went on club runs with. In actual competition, my results swung from average to poor. On one notable occasion, I spent a month hammering up hills ready for the Wool Road Race in order that I get over 'the big hill' ONCE in the main group. As soon as I'd achieved this goal, I was slightly stuck as to what to do for the next few laps. Anyway, if I'm an average climber after a lot of training, then I'm appalling rider after a track league, wheezing up the shallowest of inclines and wanting to stop for a cigarette at the top.
Distance. On Wednesday, I did the 'round the harbour' loop - down through Poole, over the Studland ferry, Corfe Castle, Wareham and home. Its about 40 miles and, last summer, it was a nice little jolly on a Sunday morning. This time, I was aching by the time I got to the ferry and had to stop in wareham to scoff a packet of jelly babies and enjoy an illuminating conversation with the town nutter.
Rain. Have I mentioned rain, yet?

The Awesomest

2011-02-15T09:50:00.001-08:00

Ten Reasons Why Finishing The Track Season And Getting Ready For Road Racing Sucks Donkey Bottom (cont)

2011-02-08T11:42:00.000-08:00

The Calshot Winter League is at an end. It's out in the wind and the rain for us now, as I continue to draw up my list of things that a winter on the boards stops you from being able to handle: No 5, Headwinds; No 6, Pushing any gear bigger than 100 inches*; No 7, Taking hands off the bars at any time.

But first, the league had one final round to get out of the way, that we had all prepared for with varying degrees of intensity. Jon, who won overall, let slip last week that he gets by on two 1 hr roller sessions a week, which is pretty galling considering how much faster he goes than those of us who do train.

I did a dizzying 3 hours last week, which should've made me faster than Jon if your average coach is to be believed. It didn't, as he proved fairly categorically in the first race. Enough people had turned up to run two races for grown ups, one fast, the other slightly less fast. I went in the fast race, where the 'A' leaguers went so fast from the gun that they lapped themselves.

Come the sprint I summed my performance in the sprint this season by first trying a 'clever' tactic, then not riding fast enough, then bottling it on the last lap. I finished fourth. Out of four. At the other end of proceedings, Nigel won his last race in the UK before emigrating to Australia. It was his last race because, not long after, things all went horribly wrong.

Next up was the juniors, veterans and women's 2km scratch, which was a 2km scratch race** for juniors (under 18) veterans (over 40) and women. Fitting into none of these categories, I was stood chatting on the infield when suddenly bikes went flying everywhere at turn 2. What happened was that Andy Clode of Revo Racing had gone around the field and swung down to attack at just the moment that Max Stedman (Palmer Park) went up the banking. Their paths connected and it all got messy. Max fell on his left side which, in track racing, is the long way to fall and was initially knocked out. Andy had a more conventional crash but still managed to crack his collar bone. Amazingly, the full field - that was all in line behind Max - managed to stay upright and the race was brought to an imediate halt while the casualtys were dealt with.

I'd first spotted Max about 6 years ago, aged 8 or 9 and riding round Portsmouth as we were warming up for a 3rd cats race with a big grin on his face. Now he's pushing 14, still not much over five foot high and beating most of the seniors like an even teenier versions of Azizulhasni Awang. Its always good to see a young rider with that much talent and dedication and it's always terrible to see a rider like that injured. Therefore, I was very pleased to learn the next day that he was fine. Relatively speaking. A bit bruised, slightly less skin than before but nothing broken. He'd had brain scan (add quip here) and spent a night in hospital under observation but was released with a clean bill of health the next day. So remember, kids, if you want a Monday off school, take up track racing, then crash.

Andy, meanwhile, having looked by far the healthier of the two riders at the time, ended up with a cracked collar bone, while his daughter, who was also racing, had to cadge a lift home with all their gear. Presumably their car's still in the car park.

By the time all the injured parties had been seen to, there wasn't enough time left to finish the meeting and so there was a quick prize giving. I got second place overall in the 'b' league, along with a lecture on how I should be racing in the 'a' league and a suggestion that I got a haircut and we all went our seperate ways.

Nigel left for sunnier climes. 'Take a little of that with you' I said before he left and pointed at the grey sky and the damp gale blowing in off the Solent.

For the rest of us it's back on the roads for spring. Theres another three things left on my list. I wonder what they'll be.

* Gear inches: Something to do with the ratio of gear that you are turning in reference to its equivilance to the wheel of a penny farthing. I think. Typically, the Europeans have a much more rational method of establishing a gear size but I don't know how that works. Something to do with pi.

** Scratch race: A race, basically. No handicapping, no points for sprints, etc. I have no idea what 'scratch' has to do with anything.

Ever Wondered What It Looks Like To Ride A Madison?

2011-02-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

I think the 'cameraman' is Cameron Mayer, my 7th favourite Australian*

*After various members of The Birthday Party & Bad Seeds

Highway 61 Revisited

2011-02-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

About this time last year, I did a post called '10 reasons why track racing rules'. I was thinking of following it up, this year, with '10 reasons why track racing sucks' although it would be more a case of 10 reasons why stopping track racing and trying to get road fit sucks majorly.

I was out on the Poole Wheelers Wednesday night ride on Wednesday, riding with a former clubmate of Graeme Obree amongst others. I selected myself into the 'nutters' group (as we were named by the 'social' group) and soon found it a little bit too nutty, being shelled out the back as soon as we hit the crosswind. Not long after, I found myself back in a group consisting of all but two of the 'nutters' group, each of whom had also been shelled. We wound round together and I was doing great until we hit the hill. This is problem no 1 of spending your whole winter zapping around a 143m oval - you can't get over a molehill. On the second climb, I blew so badly that I pretty much had to stop, then went straight home in shame. Problem no 2 is that you cack yourself riding on gravel, or any sort of less than perfect surface. Problem no 3 is that you can't do corners unless they're banked and problem no 4 is that you run out of puff after about 5 miles. I'm working on the other six.

Anyway, after last week's moderate kicking, I'd been getting some much needed miles in. I'm placed second in the 'b' league but, from the last week's point of view, my position was not so safe that I could kick back and enjoy an easy ride for the remainder of the season. Come Sunday, I was marking Paul Steadman and was very worried as one of the British Cycling talent team turned up. One of the Amys. About half of them are called Amy, as far as I can tell. A quick glance at the points table and a long period of mental arithmetic (maths is not my thing) established that two clean sweeps from her would have my second place off me right at the death. This was not entirely unfeasible and my best hope seemed to be advising Alex (placed 1st in the league) in a bid to keep her points tally down.
So I laid on loads of usefull tips, like about not pumping your tyres up to 130psi so that they explode and set a car alarm off in the carpark and using wheels that actually turn. However, Amy dropped out of proceedings half way through the meeting, I know not why, and I was home free.

Second overall was now mine, but not before I'd managed a win in the points race, going for the sprint at 15 laps to go and finding myself half a lap up on the bunch. I held that position for the remaining 2km and won. Nice.

The final week is next week and now I genuinely can kick back and relax. Should I want to, obviously. Maybe I won't - I need road mileage and the weather is notably less rubbish.

See you up the road.

(all photos Alex's Mum. Seems everyone can take photos at Calshot but me...)

Reflections On Hitting The Deck

2011-01-25T10:53:00.000-08:00

Skin grows back. It does. It hasn't yet but it's only been a week since my slam and I now no longer stick to my clothing, nor shriek like a little girl when ever the dog jumps on me. Luckily, I had a well stocked first aid kit, plus a nurse for a wife and spent the first half of last week swathed in melolin patches. Annoyingly, i was unable to find any of that gauze bandage that gets put on Tour de France riders when they deck it. I'll have to nip into a chemists on my next trip across the channel ("Pardonez-moi, madame. Est-ce que vous avez des bandage pour les coureur cyclistes blesse?")
Chicks dig scars. They do. No, really. Or at least by 'dig' I mean the 'chicks' pay you a lot more attention. Which is a good thing, obviously. If there are any women reading this who have not worked this out for themselves yet, please refrain from doing this, you'll only encourage us. Guys genuinely are that shallow.
Not riding your bike for a fortnight will make you ride slower. Well this latest post is full of revelations, isn't it? As I mentioned, the week before last I was busy feeding a load of goats and didn't get to train. Last week, I held off training cos I was feeling a bit battered about and, on the Wednesday night group ride it was a bit on the chilly side. I'd already managed to get a toyota pick up sideways on ice on the road to Brockenhurst and to go out riding on a treacherous night just 3 days after hammering my elbow seemed just plain daft. Saturday was a nice day for a ride but it was Mrs Zooms birthday and we spent the day living it up in Salisbury. By the time I got to Calshot on Sunday, I hadn't ridden since the last week and from the very moment that I got on track I knew I was in trouble. Luckily for me, not many people turned up. Two of them were faster than me, two slower, so I passed a rather boring afternoon doing what amounted to a series of pursuit races. The winner of these races, Jon, had been riding the national madison championships the week before, against the likes of Peter Kennaugh and Ed Clancy and had apparently found that quite hard work. Hard work, that is, but not entirely out of his league, which gives encoragement to the rest of us, that are almost in his league. Or would be if we trained at all.
I wouldn't want to be my elbows. This is not the first big hit that my right elbow has taken and I'd be surprised if it was my last. And there's a long summer of pushing big, heavy, buzzing lawn mowers around to look forward to. Speaking of that, here's a song I heard on the radio that seems very apt. Take it away Ivor Cutler:

It's Allright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding

2011-01-17T09:55:00.000-08:00

The last installment of Gordo's World of Zoom found our hero stuck in some bungalow in the New Forest with a menagerie of animals to look after and only able to communicate with the outside world via a paeleolithic computer that seemed very reluctant to type the letter 't'.

All in all, the whole experience seemed something of a con: the deal was a week in the country, but the catch was that I had to still work an 8 hour day in the middle of it, so I never actually got to see the house in daylight. This had its highlights, such as blundering into the duck pond, or trying to find a feed bucket in a pitch black stable with two very hungry horses in it. Worst of all, there were a total of twelve haynets to fill every day, which took ages. Dusty, prickly ages at that and, after a couple of days, it began to feel like I was doing some sort of community sentance.

Now I know some people love horses. Not to mention pigs, cows, alpacas, ducks, chickens, goats and a turkey. Oh and cats. And dogs. I have no issue with horses or horse owners. They have their thing and they enjoy it and good on them. Its just that I am not a person that enjoys the stuff that goes with horses, or rather I don't enjoy horses enough to see the whole jive that goes with keeping them as anything other than a pain in the arse. Its a bit like the way that I ride a bike cos I think its fun, while someone else may ride it cos they want to loose weight, or they've lost their licence and for them the act of riding a bicycle is not the joyous experience that it is for me.

Or the joyous experience that it is most of the time. When I turned up at Calshot this Sunday, I was in no way expecting a repeat of last week's performance. I'd not ridden all week and some people had turned up who were better than me, which rarely helps. However I wasn't expecting the experience to be quite as bad as it was. In the first race, the A leaguers took off and everybody chased them, some more succesfully than others. I threw in the towel and waited for the sprint heats.

Not that the sprint is usually my thing. I've been consistently poor in it so far this season and this time was no exception. Alex had gone and I was chasing after him. Some guy was chasing me. Someone who doesn't have a huge amount of experience of racing at Calshot. I could tell that, as he tried to go up the inside - a big no no at Calshot - and then went wide on the exit of the corner. Unfortunately, he couldn't as I was already there. After that, it all went a bit like this. More specifically, it was a bit like that bit in a horror movie where it all goes quiet (I had assumed I had dropped the guy) and then the monster leaps out. I hit the boards doing over 40 km/h and I swear to you that my exact thoughts were 'well this doesn't hurt as much as tarmac'. It didn't, although it kinda does now:

So after a lot of sliding, I came to a halt on the infield and imediately stood up, thinking of the time I'd seen Iljo Keisse do pretty much the exact same and then go on to win a madison. However pretty much everybody else there told me not to and I was patched back up by Tim and Anthony and, as soon as the hanger had stopped spinning, got back out there and got a third in the points race. Obviously if I hadn't been in shock I'd have won.

Still, I've been racing at the 'shot for about 5 years and this is my first proper stack, which is pretty good odds which ever way you look at it. And I had crashed in a way that did not require a hospital visit, which was particularly a good thing cos, as soon as I'd got back to the farm, I had to get my wellingtons on and feed the horses. And the chickens. And the goats...

Down On The Farm

2011-01-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

So how was your weekend? That's great! Here's how mine went:

I got home early on Friday, which was just as well as I had to pack 3 seperate bags full of clothing and stuff for 3 seperate activities. For the first, I left early that evening, heading on up to my folks in Somerset, from where I headed on the next morning with my Dad to help out marshalling at the Exeter trial. This, as the name suggests, is a trial for cars and motorbikes starting at Sparkford near Yeovil and ending at Torquay. Between these two points, there are a series of off-road hills that have to be climbed without stopping, rollingback or putting your feet on the ground.

My job involved standing i what was effectively a river for 6hours directing cars up one muddy track or another. It wasn't so bad, in fact I rather enjoyed it and, though I was standing in the effects of the overnight heavy rain, unlike the competitors, I hadn't been out in it all night.

Dueto the extreme conditions, the event took it's sweet time to finish. We weren't on the road till past 6pm andI asn't back at mine till past 9, where upon I went straight to bed, sleeping 9 glorious hours till something past 7th next morning. After a quick breakfast, I slung bags no 2 and 3, plus my bike, rollers etc into the van and headed for a magical mystery tour around the new forest.

Destination no 1 was my boss' place, whch I am looking after for a few days while he's on holiday. 'Looking after' mostly means looking after the menagerie,which consists of dogs, chickens, goats, donkeys, horses, alpacas, a turkey and three cows. This had to be done twice a day, before and after work of, in this case, before and after going to Calshot. The whole process takes half an hour to forty minutes - more f the farmer from round the corner arrives with a bale of silage for the cows and needs letting into the field, which requires wading ankle deep through slurry, meaning that the only pair of trousers that I'd packed had got all shitty within barely an hour of me getting there.

Manky trousers and all, I got back into the van and headed on for destination no 2, Calshot, where the winter league was back on and, without blowing my own trumpet too loudly, I blew everyone away. I was only held back from scoring a clean sweep by Greg, who got me in the sprint. Now, I know what you're thinking: If I'm winning the sprint then the oposition must be slack to say the least. I beg to differ - Greg is a very able rider. But even though the turnout was low, even by Calshot standards, league points are league points and I'll take them any way that they come. Especially considering that, what with all the feeding of cows, chickens ect, I won't be getting a chance to ride my bike between here and next week.

Anyway, the chickens need shutting up so I must be off. Anyone who calls the rustic life carefree and idylic is talking outta their arse.

Comfortably Numb

2011-01-06T10:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I had my first bath in over a week. I can honestly say that I haven't had a bath that good since that time I got back from Glastonbury. And the last time I felt that spaced out, I was lying on a bean bag and listening to Goan trance. At Glastonbury.

So we got our boiler fixed, after just over a week of life without hot water. Or, when I say 'without hot water', I mean without hot water that comes out of a tap. We had hot water in the old fashioned sense, where we had to get it by putting a pan of it on the hot plate and waiting till it was hot. This would then be taken (carefully) upstairs and poured into the sink. Then you would strip naked and wash yourself with a flannel in what is called either a whore's bath or a pommie's bath, depending on your prefared predjudice.

As you might imagine, the most unpleasent point in this plan was the 'stripping naked' part, which is not hugely fun in a house with no central heating in the middle of winter. The ambient temperature in the house was 12-15 degrees, with all the heating coming from a single wood fire, two humans, two dogs and two cats and evenings seemed to consist of all six of us in front of the fire, piled on the sofa, wrapped in the same duvet and watching 'Stargazing Live' on the telly. Occasionally, one of us would break cover to make a pot of tea or prepare a carb-heavy meal. Or indeed wash ourselves, as, for some twisted evolutionary throwback of a reason, our bodies still seem to produce enough sweat to make multiple layers of man made fibre reek like the back end of a skunk. Despite the fact that you have not moved from your warm spot in hours. Despite the fact that your skin is light-blue with cold.

Now, if you were to look at the whole experience from an aesthetic sort of perspective - as if it were a catholic retreat or something - then I think that we stood up rather well. I should point out that both my parents grew up in Belfast in the 50s and 60s, while Mrs Zoom spent the week visiting old women who were full of tales of back when they were only allowed one lump of coal per week cos there was a war on, you know. And so, in the great British tradition of Keeping Calm And Carrying On, we did that. Mrs Zoom managed to get out and visit her old dears (it's her job, btw) while I managed to get a few decent road rides in and even a couple of day's work.

Ultimately, it seemed like a living history experiment and drew some interesting conclusions: Firstly, progress is great to an extent. Our house was built in the 20's and had small rooms with a fire grate in each, which have since been knocked through into bigger rooms. These are great IF you have central heating but, if it goes phut in the middle of winter then a single fire is NOT adequate to heat the area. You could call having a bigger room progress but I beg to differ. Lighting fires to keep yourselves warm has been a human trait for about half a million years, and sticking that fire inside a windproof shelter has been for about the same, so having a house that exceeds your ability to heat it is just dumb whichever century you live in.

And secondly, wool is fantastic. It really is a wonder material: fits close, keeps you SOOOOOOO warm, doesn't catch fire, is anti-bacterial so doesn't stink like a badger's arse(unlike an certain brand of otherwise excellent scandanavian-made base layer or indeed any man made fibre).

Ah, wool. Specificaly, my thick knitted wool jersey, that I have been practicaly living in these past seven days. Come to think of it, I bought that at Glastonbury. There wasn't any hot water there, either.

Gordo's World Of Excuses

2011-01-04T08:53:00.000-08:00

Ok... here's the thing. My boiler died on boxing day (26th Dec). It MIGHT be fixed tomorrow and THEN I will have heating and hot water. Which is a GOOD thing. We're surviving, after a fashion. We have a log fire, which has been running pretty much non stop for the last week and a bit but my computer is in a part of the room that is out of it's range. Therefore, the thought of sitting down for the length of time it takes to write a post does not fill me with joy.

If it is fixed tomorrow then I'll get on and post... soon. If it isn't...

In the meantime, for those of you sitting in temperatures where you're able to sit still for more than 20 minutes without your fingers going blue, here's the Children In Need 24 hr trackathon again:

Calshot megamix by zoom gordo

Maybe I should add a disco beat and say that it's a remix? (90's musical joke, move along please).

p.s. Mrs Zoom has just walked past, spotted me on Gordo's World Of Zoom and said 'well about time, too'. She really is my biggest fan.

2010-12-24T12:24:00.001-08:00

If It Ain't Fixed It Aint Worth Breaking

2010-12-21T09:11:00.000-08:00

The whole reason that I got into fixed wheel bikes was cos of a trip to Belgium. Sort of. This was in 2004, when riding fixed was neither a massively huge thing in Britain nor Belgium. And the clever bit is that it wasn't even fixed wheel bikes that caught my eye but hub gears.

Now, for anyone not yet up to speed, I'll explain: bikes are a big thing in Belgium, not as a fad or a fashion accessory, not as a way for masochistic skinny guys with poor social skills to seek fulfilment from their lives but as a cheap form of transport. Everybody rides, from school kids to students to soccer moms to housewives to business persons to pensioners and everybody rides knackered old 3-speed Puchs.

(A knackered Puch. Belgian style. Pic stolen from http://www.thebikeman.co.uk/, who appear to have a ton of them for sale, should you be interested).

The knackered old Puch is popular for two main reasons, the first being cost, as bicycle ownership in Belgium can be quite fluid and anyone spending out on a classy bike will likely find their classy bike in the possesion of somebody else before very long. Or at least this was true in Gent, where we were staying. I imagine that out in the leafy suburbs people ride slightly classier bikes, and ride them from one secure lock up to another. There has to be some fresh blood somewhere in the system as otherwise there creates a paradox based around the fluid ownership of a several thousand knackered old Puch 3 speeds. At some point in history, all these bikes had to be factory fresh. At some point they will eventually all crumble to nothing. And, while I suspect that both points are several decades either side of the time of writing, THEY MUST EXIST. To say otherwise - that these bicycles have existed and will exist for time in memorial - suggests a violation of physical law which is unlikely, even in Belgium.

The second reason that the Puch is popular, and the more important one here, is that they are practical. Take another look at the photo and check out the slim but not skinny 'road' tyres, the 27" wheels, the comfortable but not 'sit up and beg' position, the 3 gears, the brakes (in the sense that they are fitted, rather then that they work), the luggage rack and the mudguards. At the time, in Britain, downhill MTB was the big trendy thing and 'the kids' were wobbling around on what was essentially half a tractor and thinking themselves uber-hip. Nowadays, the hep cats are all wobbling around on colour coordinated former track bikes who's original cheap, utilitarian chic has been totally blown into the weeds by their very trendyness. Oh, the irony.

Belgians don't do irony but they do do utility and - assuming that it doesn't fall apart on you - the knackered Puch 3 speed has that in spades. It has a luggage rack, perfect for transporting everything from that week's shopping to your girlfriend, sat side saddle and towing a wheeled suitcase. It has mudguards, so that you can ride to work, or the pub, in normal clothes without getting the dreaded brown arse stripe and, due to it's totally enclosed transmission, you don't even have to roll your right trouser leg up. This is thanks to the bike's use of a hub gear (see, we got there in the end, didn't we?), which is enclosed in the hub of the rear wheel - hence the name - and requires virtually zero maintainence.

So... sat in a Belgian cafe, we could see literally hundreds of examples of the greatest bike ever made passing us every minute. Already a roadie then, I decided that my ideal commuting bike would have to be one of these and now, six years on, that dream has yet to be fulfilled. Hub gears never really caught on in the UK despite the fact that we invented them and cheap bikes still have to conform to the domestic market: a derailleur, grip shifts, three cogs on the front, overweight and largely pointless suspension at both ends, knobbly tyres. The domestic market still has to wake up to the fact that mountain biking stopped being cool 15 years ago and consumers still have to realise that the above mentioned accesories will actually make your commute considerably less pleasant.

So, after my return from Belgium, after a fruitless search for an affordable hub-geared bike ('affordable' at this point in my life meant 'under £5'), I took apart the knackered old Claude Butler I was commuting on and did the now classic 'fixie conversion'. One gear, no fear and so utterly simple that, even if the brakes give out on you - which they did alot - you can bring the thing to a halt. Two cranks, two cogs, two wheels.

Some while later, I rode this bike to my new job at the emporium of trendy bicycles that was Hotwheels, where everybody at the time was majorly into downhill MTB. But they, or at least one of their brands, Charge Bikes, had their eye on the ball and very much rode the fixed gear wave as it broke across this country with their Charge Plug. I still have mine, from the very first batch of Charge Plugs to arrive on these shores. It is at heart, a cheap, utilitarian form of transport. Basically what a bicycle is supposed to be.

You can keep the 'scene', you can keep the 'cool', you can keep the colour co ordinated anodised components, just give me something that'll get me and all my stuff to work and back with the minimum of fuss.

Or, failing that, get me an old Puch 3 speed.

Calshot Trackathon Megamix

2010-12-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

So I did a thing.

Inspired by a mixture of The Bike Show on Resonance FM and BBC Radio 4, I took a friend's* dictaphone along to the Children In Need Trackathon and managed to annoy the hell out of all my clubmates by waving it in their faces at all available intervals.

This is the result, all 20 minutes of it. Listen close and you might be able to spot the bit I had to re-do afterwards, with my dog yelping in the background, when I was pretending to be at the track.

Latest tracks by zoom gordo

*Chris Brown, Wimborne town crier and local character. I'd say that I owe you but you probably already know that.

Cabin Fever

2010-12-13T11:48:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, I was fairly obsessed with arctic adventures. I read 'South' by Ernest Shackleton when I was 12 and, although I never read 'Farthest North' by Fritjof Nansen, I did read 'Winter Holiday', one of the Swallows and Amazons series, which made reference to it and that's good enough in my book. Thus, despite never having myself been further North than the Outer Hebrides, I tend to joke about being frozen in pack ice at certain moments. Such as the time myself and Mrs Zoom found ourselves on the Elephant and Castle round about in London, joking about making the turn off for Brixton some time in the early spring*.
Now this is all especially hilarious if you genuinely are frozen in pack ice, as I've been for the last few weeks: on Saturday, in a brief thaw in the weather, I actually emerged blinking from my garage and managed a whole 20 miles on my road bike without falling off on the ice even once. Otherwise, it's all been strictly indoor riding, either in Calshot velodrome or on the turbo trainer or the rollers in my garage. Restricting your riding to the indoors** does tend to make you a little stir-crazy. Cabin Fever, I think it's called. It's not like sitting on a turbo trainer is particularly exciting to start with but doing it every other night tends to lead to certain desperate attempts to keep your self amused. Such as doing 'big fish, little fish, cardboard box' along to the hard trance you're piping through your generic MP3 player or seeing how many drinks bottles you can sucker to your face
And that's just the warm up and warm down. When it comes to the proper hard work, the theory of relativity kicks in. Possibly. I'm not much of a physicist but according to my understanding, time's passage is relative to the observer so the minute that you spend spinning like a nutter seems to take about three times as long as the minute you spend at 'easy spin'. Similarly, when doing a 15 second burst from zero rpm to as much as you can handle, the subsquent 45 seconds spent resting seems to go by an awful lot faster than the 15 seconds at maximum. Obviously when I say 'resting' I mean lying collapsed over the handlebars wheezing like an asmatic donkey. The 'work' part of the excersize is spent cross eyed with excertion, shouting PAIN IS MY BITCH and then collapsing over the handlebars, wheezing like an asmatic donkey. The point of all of this is to recruit fast twitch muscle fibres. Or something. Recruiting them so that they can throw themselves at the metaphorical enemy, dying upon the metaphorical barbed wire in a noble but ultimately pointless effort.

As, you see, the annoying thing about all of this is that, though I thrash my self nightly in my garage (metaphorically speaking), so does everybody else. Well, not everybody. Ryan 'the Westonator' gave this Sunday's race a miss, being hungover after his works christmas shindig, but the rest of my rivals in the Calshot 'B' League all looked like they'd been trying too. One, Amy Jacobs of VC Jubilee, gave most of us a fairly sound thrashing, taking off in the opening race and trying to get a lap up. We dragged her back and, normally after an effort like that, the rider has shot their metaphorical wad but oh no, she had another kick left in her and delivered it to each of our sorry arses on the final lap. I got third, which was my only score in the whole event. As she made her first escape I'd briefly congratulated myself on how I was handling the pace. This lasted for a total of 5 laps and from then on, and until the end of the meeting, it hurt like hell.

On which note, I have an appointment with an hour of pain in the garage. I say it like its a bad thing but its really the only way to keep warm till winter ends.

*The reference being to Nansen's attempt to reach the north pole by drifting over it in the pack ice. Read this, it makes it all clear.

**F1 World Champ Nelson Piquet once described the Monaco Grand Prix as 'like riding a bicycle around your living room'. I think I know what he means.

gordo's world of zoom

Going Downhill Fast

Carnage At Calshot

Nowt To Do With Bikes But...

If You're In A Hole, Keep Digging.

Kneed For The Bike

Rotterdam 6

Behind The Wheel

The Greening Machine

Oh, Cinnamon, Where You Gonna Run To?

The Institutional Cyclist’s Christmas Lecture

Scream If You Wanna Go Fatter

Mod In Heaven

A Forest

Zurich Six-Day On Board

Turns Out Riding A Bike's Not That Dangerous After All

Getting In With The Right Crowd

Keirin School

Brick By Brick

London Derriere

Foxy Lady

Don't Just Take My Word For It...

Lanterne Rouge

Jimmy Savile

The Glamorous World Of Cycling Media

An Oldie... But Worth Watching Again

War Horse

More Tenuous Links To Cycling

You Wait Ages For A Post And Then Three Come Along At Once

For Sale

Crash, Bang, Wallop

The Art Of Falling Apart

Life Just Keeps Getting Better

Blood, Sweat, Gravy And Egg pt3

Blood, Sweat, Gravy And Egg pt2

Blood, Sweat, Gravy And Egg

Devon Knows I'm Miserable Now

Spotted At Beaulieu... And Eddie Beck

The Cycling Tour Part Two

The Cycling Tour

Maths And Velodromes

Twinnings Pro Am Tour

Daniel Lloyd On The London-Surrey Classic

Simon Richardson

With Binoculars, On Top Of Box Hill (The London Surrey Classic)

Jens Voigt Soundboard.

Acting Your Age, Not Your Shoe Size

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Get It While You Can

A Town Called Panic - The Cycle Race

Tour de France Stage 6 Dinan to Lisieux (Part 2)

Tour de France Stage 6 Dinan to Liseaux

Tour de France Stage… Do You Know, I Have No Freaking Idea, Although I Think Its Wednesday.

Tour De France Stage 4 Lorient to Mur de Bretagne

Tour De France Stage 3 Somewhere in France to Redon

If You Can Fill The Unforgiving Minute With 60 Seconds Of Distance Run...

How To Build A Velodrome

Now That's What I Call An Opening (Slades Farm Track)

Rouleur Host Rob Jefferies Auction

Calshot

Pushing on a Pashley

Rob Jefferies Velo Youth Fund

Ride For Rob

Rob Jefferies

Anarchy In The Uk

Deconstruction Of An Excuse

Derny

In Reading, No One Can Hear You Scream

In Portsmouth, No One Can Hear You Scream

More From The Paris Roubaix

Silver Linings

Days Of Blunder

How Not To Completely Suck At Getting To The Sharp End Of A Road Race

How Not To Completely Suck At Road Racing

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

The Gary Group

More Blogs Of Note

Reasons Why Riding Track For Months, Then Trying To Get Road Fit, Then Going Back On Track For A Bit Sucks.

Bikes Are Rubbish, Really, Aren't They?

Blogs Of Note