your daily bicycle log

I've kind of disappeared into a netherworld. Massive work problems. Illness over Christmas. Repeated inclement weather at the weekends. And a temporary reversion to my previous existence as a matchgoing football supporter. I've scarcely ridden this year. I feel bad about it, but with ice/wind/snow/heavy rain forecast this weekend, it's not going to change any time soon.

I've got an eight week old baby, dunno wtf your excuses are.

my new story is that these sniffles are really keeping me from reaching my full potential

My new story is that I have great potential as a 200 pound tub of goo but that's still 28 lbs away so maybe I'll get riding again.

Being a new dad was like my fave thing ever and ages 1-3 are quick so my advice would be to forget bikes if necessary for however long the technology isn't going away.

Ok I think I'm coming across wrong but I hope everyone gets to where they wanna/need to be. *sips wine, eats chips ahoy cookie*

I was at the velodrome (the one used in the Olympics) tonight for a training session (accredited riders only). For the warm up activity we formed two lines and at the end of each lap the front two would drive up to the top of the banking, let the bunch come past, and then drop down and slot onto the back. My pair got to front for the second time and as we finished our lap I was the man on the outside, so I was behind the guy on my left as we drove up to the top. You have push quite hard to get up there, but he suddenly eased off. With no brakes and quite a lot of momentum I rapidly realised I was going to hit him - I desperately tried to go outside him but I would have got squeezed right into the barrier. I hit him then went tumlbing headfirst down the steep banking right into the bunch taking out and injuring several other riders in the process. Ouch. My neck is sore and I'm bashed up all down my right hand side, but other than that I'm OK. Some of the others couldn't continue though. Not great, considering we were about ten minutes into a two-hour session.

sorry to hear that. track does seem cool but scary.

the new velodrome in boulder/erie is in the process of opening but i doubt i'll ever get to use it. i now have a track an hour south and an hour north, and little realistic chance to make either work.

Ouch.

^ quite

I was always taught to fall to the right (uptrack) if it ever comes to that. Shorter distance to fall and gravity is helping you slow down. That track looks plenty wide enough to ride four-abreast without anybody getting squeezed into the barrier. It sucks he squeezed you out like that. Sounds painful.

I had my first track workout in a year (since my heart attack) on monday and it was amazing to be back out there.

Oddly, all my injuries (bruises and 'road' rash) are on my right hand side, but I can't work out how I could have fallen that way

made plans to do a 60 mile ride to work this morning. miscalculated my wakeup time and had to rush to get to the start point. or would have, if i hadn't woken up to a flat tire. mood was dark as i changed the tire, knowing i'd miss the ride. then cursed myself for lackadaisical maintenance as i noticed how dirty my hands were getting doing the change.

then i rode out to the ocean where everything was gray and overcast - not much wind though - before climbing a hill in the middle of the city where i saw three people setting out a blanket to have a breakfast picnic. normally a spectacular view of san francisco but today they'll be staring at the fog and imagining.

so, good start to the day.

http://kirasan.kenne-ich.net/pic/red_lantern.jpg

My Fiancee and I made the Rapha Tour of California blog. Lol.

http://pages.rapha.cc/photography/through-the-lens

I'm the fat mantis in the red/black striped Rapha (natch) gillet gawking at the dude in the speedo. My Fiancee is next to me in the equally fashion-forward Attaquer 90's funk kit.

Nice view.

This is what we're doing tomorrow: http://www.mapmywalk.com/routes/view/743461021

Two of us are then doing the extra 13 miles to get us to Dawlish...

Nice. I will be trapped in a car moving at about 25mph for several hours while occasionally speaking into a walkie-talkie in my role for the club's road race.

First 40 miles was awesome; great weather, great company, good pace. Then we got to Bridgewater, which is a foul dump of a place populated by serial killers emeritus and failed minor drug dealers. Here we picked up the canal path to Taunton, only before we'd done a mile of it I misjudged a low Victorian canal bridge, and the interface of gravel and grass. Despite my 30mm tyres, over I went, and crunched my entire bodyweight onto my right forearm. Not broken, but nastily swollen, bruised and gauged. I managed 12 or so more miles of towpath, grimacing all the way, and then bailed at Taunton to get the train back to Exeter.

i would love to be able to ride somewhere where i could hitch a train ride home

sorry about yr arm :-/

Ouch. Don't do that :/

55 miles yesterday, featuring swooping coast road high above waves crashing onto rocks. Then got a text from A Certain Someone (contents: "Hi!") that had me gunning the last quarter of the ride. Good day.

I feel like I fall off / get hit by cars way more often than anybody else. What am I doing wrong?

:(

I asked my orthopedist why I break bones all the time, when others get up and continue on - "do I have weak bones, doc?" A: "you do risky things and fall a lot."

(I think I have weak bones.)

scick mouthy - would you say your main incidents are on rural or town roads? i think you do a fair bit of cycling on uk rural roads? these seem to me to have become a *lot* more dangerous in the past twenty years.

GTIs, fast boy-racer style driving (but not at all confined to boy racers) narrow twisting lanes etc.

also interfaces of gravel and grass are just designed to mess up all that balance and weight stuff...

I've just invested in a Virb (Garmin bike camera thing). Used it for the first time today on a ride with a mate from my cycle club. I thought I had footage of a thrilling sprint victory against him where I came off his wheel at the latest possible moment before the village sign. I also thought I had footage of some total prick in a convertible trying to run the two of us off the road (footage which I intended to take to the police once I had muted the expletive I chucked in his direction). But when I got home I discovered that I had somehow failed to record half of the ride so all of this is lost forever. I've been trying to use the editing software and it keeps crashing my laptop, but I've finally got together a clip of the 'highlights' of the opening 2.5 miles. It's...not particularly dramatic. But if you like seeing London buses, then this is the footage for you:
https://youtu.be/VgUPuD1j8jo

It's a little disorientating to watch when you get to junctions and the view point doesn't change - was instinctively expecting a glance to the right, even though I know that it's a fixed camera. I find myself looking to the right at junctions when I'm sat in someone else's car, or a bus.

I'm not sure my rides would be exciting enough to justify a Virb.

As an aside, is the altimeter on anyone else's Garmin wildly inaccurate? My 510 is often 20-30% above the corrected Strava data, and differs from other Garmins on the same ride.

mine has always been consistent. Are you calibrating it at ride start and setting auto calibration points?

My clubmate also has a Virb and has uploaded to youtube that incident with the convertible. He went to the police station immediately afterwards, but they didn't seem too bothered. They said they wanted footage with two minutes before and after (to check if there was any wider context to it), so this is it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kdVv5HDsQs
It starts with us climbing out of a village into the forest - you can see at 0:49-0:53 the speed that other cars were passing us and the space they were giving us when there was no oncoming traffic. At 1:04 I sprint off (I'm the rider in the orange and black Molteni top) (well, obviously the only other rider in shot) for the '40' sign at the top of the hill (which we often race to). At around 1:20 you can see that I'm riding VERY far to the left, practically in the gutter. At about 1:35 my mate catches up with me and we ride two abreast for 20 seconds - during most of this time there was no oncoming traffic so it would have been easy to pass - when there is an oncoming car, my mate drops in behind me again. About 5 seconds later the convertible comes past - much faster than anything else that had overtaken us and very close. Bear in mind that I'm riding actually on the white line at the side of the road - my mate was probably a foot futher out than that and says the car missed him by an inch. After this I disappear up the road in an adrenaline-fueled pursuit, but we never caught up with it.
The thing is, there was a third rider with us who we had dropped at the bottom of the hill and was at least a minute behind and riding on his own. When he eventually caught up with us he said exactly the same thing - that the convertible had passed him as close as humanly possible - so this was definitely a deliberate thing, not a one-off mistake.

Still bad at riding in pacelines I guess. Kept surging and dropping people yesterday. Not a humblebrag, I assure you, I'm in shit shape.

Finished work last Friday, now it's my summer break. Did 16 gentle miles on Saturday, then 81 on Sunday (train up to Cambridge and riding back on a circuitous route), 70 on Monday (out to Colchester and train back), 18 miles on Tuesday (to a bike shop and back), nothing yesterday (dad duties) and 100 miles today (down to Eastbourne with over 2000 metres of climbing and quite a bit of sunburn).

Jealous.

actually went mountain biking today -- had sort of forgotten that there's a really decent network immediately behind the hospital

Another big one today: down to the Sussex coast again, this time Hastings. 85 miles in total. Reckon I'm ready for the Ride London evennt on Sunday now.

Here's a video clip of my climb of 'The Wall' on my way down to Eastbourne last week: https://youtu.be/tWMCsee0GdA

that looks agonizing, the climbs around here are long, but mostly so easy, 5-6%

that's the garmin camera? very cool, i've never seen a vid from one of those.

that looks agonizing, the climbs around here are long, but mostly so easy, 5-6%

I think the climb in the video is quite typical of much of England - you don't get many long climbs (the longest I've ever known is about three miles long and that's very unusual) but they're often between 10% and 20%. Also you don't often get switchbacks, normally the road goes more or less straight up (but is also usually slightly winding and very narrow and poorly surfaced, so you never get the full benefit of the descent because you have to keep jamming on your brakes because you have no idea if there's a car just round the corner about to take you out). Several of the rides I've done in the last week have gone through The Weald in Sussex where you never get higher than about 200 metres, but you're just going up and down and up and down the whole time - really sapping. I'm guessing Colorado is more like a nice big road that just goes up gently up for ten miles or more and then when you get to go down you can really open up?

that's the garmin camera? very cool, i've never seen a vid from one of those

To be honest, the image quality isn't great in youtube because I've had to lower the resolution and frames per second to get a manageable file size. It looks better with the original files. As much as I like them, I can well imagine that the rest of the world has (at best) very limited interest in watching videos of me riding where you can't even see me or the bike. It would be great to use it in a race, but British Cycling have banned the use of cameras in races. I think officially it's because they have some rule that prohibits anything non-essential being on the bike (in case it falls off / causes additional problems in a crash), such as a saddle bag or pump or mudguard. Unofficially I think it's because they're worried about people trying to prove who caused a crash and getting litigious. However, I'll be doing the 100-mile Ride London thing this weekend with about 20,000 other people, so that should generate some good footage.

foothill canyon roads can be narrow, but they typically wind up through the drainage without departing the watercourse too far.

the ride you constantly see on my strava feed is this:
https://youtu.be/wyFsRPM3Qfc

in contrast this is lookout mtn above golden, a bit atypical as it does not climb the drainage, it switches back across the face of the mtn.
https://youtu.be/CCabnIacf-8

the roads you have look very like to stuff i grew up on in new england/upstate ny, goat paths straight up and over.

have fun on your century

The second one looks more fun.

More video from my ride to Eastbourne:
https://youtu.be/3sJd2_K4L5A
and
https://youtu.be/u1Fs3TVDWQ8

the second one is more fun to climb, but the first one is a 50+mph tuckable descent (otoh it's called "deer creek" for a reason, which has caused me one very high speed evasive deceleration/near hits)

fully rear-ended today by an idiot who "didn't see me" despite the fact 1 it was broad daylight, 2 I was in the primary position and 3 we had been stopped at light for a few minutes. was clipping in to go when I was whacked at, I dunno, probably about 10/15 mph? thankfully am OK and could have been a lot worse. hand's all bruised and my arse road-rashed, my back wheel was fully buckled and left shifter a bit done in.

didn't even ask if I was OK or say sorry either just that he "didn't see me". um you mean "you weren't looking"

ridiculous

Ignorant asshole.

Me going too early in a clubrun sprint: https://youtu.be/hZLAyvzQbNE

and doing through and off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoArGaAho9g

"Okay, it's fine if I get to the birthday party a bit late, I can't go any longer without switching to new tires/tubes and replacing the brake pads." So as I've already dressed for the party and I'm sweating just retrieving my tools from their inconveniently placed shelf, I take my shirt off and get started.

Results:
- catcalled
- brake pads were fine, just needed to use the barrel adjusters, which is a new concept to me every time.
- rudely late to the party
- rear tube makes a high-pitched whistling sound as the air escapes it as soon as it enters

I took a car to the party.

I've hit peak fitness right at the end of the season. Did a race yesterday, came about 20th out of 42, average speed 24.1mph - first time I've managed to stay in the bunch all the way to the very end on that circuit. Just got back from a 56-mile ride at 19mph this morning - not exactly a recovery ride. I rarely feel as good as this, got to make the most of it.

Nothing as impressive performance-wise as that, but yesterday I went out at 20 past 8 and Exeter was thick with fog; almost scarily so, as it condensed on my glasses and obscured my vision even more. Luckily the route I was on was mostly cyclepath for the first 8 or 9 miles. Then I climbed out of a village along the river, and at maybe 200 feet above sea level the fog cleared suddenly - like, in the space of 20 feet I just rode out of it and into clear blue skies and bright sunshine. I gave a little 'whoop' because I had barely any idea what the weather was like outside the fog, and it was lush. Very strange.

Was there still fog below you?

Oh yeah, and lots of it; really thick. It had mostly dissipated by the time I got home about an hour and a bit later.

You quite often see a thick snake of fog/mist rolling down the Exe river on autumn mornings, which I imagine is what this was, I just never got to a vantage point to see it it went all the way, and it seemed to clump over Exeter more than usual.

Picked up Nora's trailer on Saturday - a Chariot Cheetah 1 - and we did 13 miles with her in it in the afternoon. Gorgeous sunshine, and the whole family (well, apart from the cats) out together. Lovely.

Really impressed with the Chariot too - and I'd hope so, for £500 (although I got to cyclescheme it) - light, sturdy, really well designed, packs down small, flexible, and Nora seemed to love it.

Those are great afaict, congrats and have lots of safe fun.