your daily bicycle log

Aw caek! That is sucky. What happened?

locked to itself outside my flat while i was out of the country for two weeks. worth about £10 so not the end of the world. friend is lending me his until i leave for munich in september.

Okay that is pretty much an engraved invitation. Locked to nothing, day and night for TWO WEEKS?

there's nothing convenient to look it too every night and it's too much of a pain to regularly carry it up onto the balcony. should have put it there for the trip, but whatevs. seriously, it was a terrible bike.

most bikes are not locked to anything in this town. i have now lost two in ten years. only one of those was worth anything.

what town?

oxford. university town without hills. cycling sole mode of transportation for most people living within 1/2 mile of the city centre. lots of students so the bikes are mostly worthless. theft endemic but no one cares.

bike etiquette: coworker is waiting for me to finish so he can bike home with me, but i'd rather just bike by myself. :/ do i tell him that or just suck it up and not hurt his feelings?

probably just suck it up and not hurt his feelings this time

Wrt rashes, I find that sudocream, nappy rash cream, is very effective, I always pack some fore long hiking or biking adventures. You can use a cortizone cream as well but they say that leaves you more open to yeast infections.

25 miles in 1 hr 15 mins exactly this morning (dead on 20mph). I'm staggered that I could manage that on a training ride (especially with about ten miles on London streets) - these aero bars seem to have made a HUGE difference. Really looking forward to racing with them.

I understand Sudocrem "gets everywhere", though I haven't tried it myself.

Nice work Jamie! Are you def allowed to race with them in the races you race?

Nothing extreme, just used bike for transpo around Bklyn this weekend. The road surface on Nostrand sucks, but for some reason it seemed way shorter than going over to Wythe even though I still had to cut west at the end to get home.

Hooray! I can't believe I did without a bike for 6 months.

Oh fucking fuck, Lee actually BECOMES Nostrand? If I'd realized that a couple of years ago, it would have saved me SO many aborted trips home and much wandering around the hasidic ghetto.

lee st is the most interesting of the south williamsburg hasidic shopping districts

Very much so. I feel like Lee is a microcosm of what the LES once was. On a sunny Sunday, you can prob get a good feel for, say, Essex St in 1910.

Nice work Jamie! Are you def allowed to race with them in the races you race?

I hope so, or that was a hundred quid down the drain. You can't use them in road races (i.e. massed start) obviously, because that's too dangerous, but in time trials more people use them than not. I haven't actually checked the regulations to see if mine conform, but I expect they do as I don't know why a manufacturer would bother making something which doesn't conform - who would that be marketed at?

Oh fucking fuck, Lee actually BECOMES Nostrand? If I'd realized that a couple of years ago, it would have saved me SO many aborted trips home and much wandering around the hasidic ghetto

I spent quite a while wondering who Lee was and what the fuck this post meant.

so today i drove halfway to work and rode in. on the way home, i rode from golden back to morrison where i was parked, but via lookout mtn. on a 28 lbs bike with 20 lbs of gear, it was slow but fun. did not eat enough during day, so i was pretty sickly at the top. i went to the gift shoppe at buffalo bills grave and bought a giant junk food choco muffin, which helped get me back to the car.

heres the view from my client's office to the top of lookout. the top is the peak to the left of the "M", not the one above it.

http://i486.photobucket.com/albums/rr222/Chass3ur/Golden001.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kasachidur/sets/72157621421711404/

no idea if this will work, but here are some snaps. most were taken while rolling, so not the best, and ive not fiddled with the exposures...

doing a little tour of kefalonia next week. enjoyed reading this to get an idea of what i'm in for.

http://users.belgacom.net/bike-xp/kefalonia2002/en/index.html

that's a great looking tour. had to laugh:

{the bike shop owner in greece is} impressed by our T-shirts, which we had especially printed for this trip – just as we did last year.

is that so cheesy its actually excellent, printing yr own t shirts to commemorate yr trip?

I wish my ride home last night had been longer, it was so nice. Will go out by bike again tonight, but further away this time.

did this short 8 mi. ride today (+ 2 mi. daily commute) http://www.mapmyride.com/route/us/md/baltimore/593124761765294664 is it common to get asked for your bike by other people or is that just b-more? i had a kid half my age say "wanna trade bikes? huh?" and guy 10 yrs or so older than me go "can i hold your bike for a minute? i promise to give it right back"

planning to hit this trail up again soon
http://www.beslter.org/images/projects/stream/frame4-page_3f_03_04.jpg
i've ridden it as far as it can go south and just past the halfway point going northwest

the bike trade thing happened to me a lot in chi but i always was like lol no u fucking kidding? and then we would usually both lol

biked to work again today but i didn't feel as strong as i did a few days ago, and my left knee was a little twingy. shouldn't this be getting easier, not harder? :/

Are you doing any cross training/other strengthening exercises? You may be overdeveloping one set of muscles.

strength could be nutrition, hydration, health related.

twinge could be seat height. look at online fit guides for seat height and make sure you're properly set up.

yeah, my seat is def too low, i was thinking about that this morning.

you know, it was pretty windy this morning, that's probably the main reason why it felt like i was grinding harder than usual.

wind is the mind killer, imo, just pretend that its a really long hill, gear down and try to ignore the fact that it never, ever ends

and def get your seat height adjusted. 98% of cyclists could yank their seats up a bit and put a lot more air in their tires. friend of mine here at school told me that when he was an undergrad, the campus cycling club would go on guerilla filling missions, and air up all the sagging tires on the racks at school

srsly if you ride your bike everyday and don't own a pump...

also lots of unoiled chains out there. i don't know how they put up with that loud ass squeaking n grinding

Jordan, it is probably the wind - these days I basically know that if I have a bad day, or a good day, it's 95% likely to be the wind direction.

However, if you've only just started cycling more regularly, it could just be good ol' fatigue. Take a day or two off, or make an effort to go at 3/4 pace, and see if that helps.

Yesterday, I got to be a knight in shining armour when I saw a woman pushing her punctured Trek roadie along the pavement. I stopped to offer her my spare tube, and then thought I should check if she knew how to change a wheel...

So I ended up doing it for her - poor lass had been walking two or three miles in the rain, from Hyde Park down High Street Ken and was almost at Hammersmith Broadway, and not a single person had stopped to check if she was okay.

That is very noble of you, but if I saw someone pushing a bike in the rain I would not immediately think "oh my god what a tragic situation I must offer help at once!". Perhaps I'm a bastard.

actually it's well-known cycling etiquette to ask a rider on the side of the road if they are ok or need any help. good karma too.

yeah, if i've got my stuff on me (which i usually do lol messenger bag), i ask if they need help. i've probably given out 3-4 tubes since moving here!

yeah, i stopped to tie my shoe yesterday and within 5 seconds a woman stopped to ask if needed any tools.

ok, ok, i'm a bastard.

since i usually go pretty light, if im outbound i ask "need a phone?," inbound i ask "got what u need?"

so yesterday i rode home via red rocks. not a great idea, as there was a death cab concert, and i was riding through slow moving parking lot, albeit amidst great scenery. but wow lumbering death cab fans, u look older even than me.

I'm doing the London-Cambridge charity ride next Sunday. I did it last year, but this year I've got a much faster bike and I'm much fitter. A clubmate I've ridden with a couple of times has asked me if I want to join him on a London-Cambridge-London ride. This would be more than 120 miles, which I think is borderline insane. I'm mulling it over: I've never ridden more than 80 miles and I've only ridden over 60 miles 3 times in the last year.

My mate did London-Brighton-London a few weeks ago on his own, and he was fine and is probably less fit than you!

You're easily fit enough; the issues will be making sure you eat and drink properly, and you can deal with extremity discomfort if/when it happens.

I can't see myself managing it, but the route back should never be more than about 8 miles from a station on the Cambridge-Harlow-Liverpool St. route, so I could try it, safe in the knowledge I could give up at any moment and get a train home.

wtf i must be so slow that i never see guys in deer creek anymore. its all racer chix everywhere in the canyon.

my last two days of riding in the hills have been stellar, im finally turning the pedals over. im not any faster really, but my cadence is way up and no problems with keeping my breathing.

thx guys, my biking to work/around has been going much better. i raised my seat up ~2" over the weekend and it helped immeasurably, i almost feel like i got a new bike.

20 miles in 70 minutes yesterday, still working on getting back into shape

just realized how wiped out i am today! i feel like a blob of jelly ...

Did an all day 50 miler as a shakedown for the canal trip at the end of the week. So glad we did we shook out a lot of bugs.

so i was off the bike for a long time. one thing i hate about "starting over" when building up endurance is how long my muscles take to recover midride.

for example in a mountainous area, i crest one peak... it sucks, but i did it... then descend and as soon as i hit the base of the next climb, my legs are sluggish and dead.

when i was in super good shape prior to this bike sabbatical, i remembered being able to attack multiple climbs with less fatigue after long descents. but now, i can remember this sluggish feeling.

any tips on this issue in particular? is it lactic acid? help pls!

keep going hard on the downhill, no coasting? i dunno, even when im ok fit i get that dead leg feeling at the start of climbs after descents.

haha, the beater i thought was stolen upthread? i found it parked outside my work. i have no memory of that. tires are flat but otherwise fine.

took the nu bike for a spin round melbourne, 40km or so, did it eeeeeeasy. so much lighter than the old one!