A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

I want to ride my bicycle#

Wed, 16 May 2007 01:28:44 +0000

Last Friday afternoon I had the bright idea that I could get to Tatem cheaper, probably faster, and already warmed-up and wearing mostly-appropriate clothing simply by taking my bike instead of getting the train.

So I stared at a map for a while, before realising that the A10 that intersects the A406 at Great Cambridge Junction (more or less the location of Tatem Park) was - get this - the same A10 as Shoreditch High Street. That's the kind of stunning realisation that makes one want to say things like "No, straight up!" - which is ironic because, obviously, "straight up" is also therefore my route to Tatem.

Well, of course, the map is not the terrain: what looked like a straight line does actually wiggle a bit, and I completely missed a left turn thus arriving at the A406 slightly further East than I was planning. But that's OK. After spending 40 minutes or so experimenting with crossovers it started raining so I headed home again via a long and arduous route involving a stop in Queensway to fiddle with the spokes on the Firebrox, and a somewhat longer stop in in the Vic to eat dinner. Total distance around 45k.

Then this evening I did not quite the same thing again: to Tatem, 20 minutes skating warmup (which I didn't really need) and then 10 minutes fast skating before the rain started again. And back home on what was supposed to be a fairly direct route had I not got lost trying to find alternatives through Dalston and ended up retracing part of my path, for a total distance of around 40k. Even with Google maps I can't figure out how I managed that.

First (and then, second) time on a road bike in something over two years. My bottom hurts. (I don't think it's the saddle as such, as it's definitely the sitbones complaining not the fleshy bits, so probably just a question of getting used to it). Also noted

The problem, of course, is that now I keep thinking about buying a new bike. In itself this is not a problem, but that the kind of bike I want to buy (which would be very light and not very compromising, and involve bits of carbon) is not at all the kind of bike I need for this kind of journey. In fact, the most useful change I could make to my current steed is to add panniers so that my rearward view is not obstructed by the front wheels of my skates where they sit on the back of my rucksack. Hardly the stuff of dreams. In the meantime I take some solace in the knowledge that according to my bathroom scales the current steed weighs about 10.5kg and I'd apparently have to spend upwards of £600 to get lighter if Decathlon - yeah, I know, but Condor's web site is down - prices are typical.

I could spend some time setting my saddle up properly - could as soon as I repossess my Allen keys, anyway - and possibly some money on replacing the transmission so I can have gear shifting on the handlebars not on the downtube (bike predates STI, but at least has indexing). But that's quite a lot of money compared to the value of the bike ... maybe ebay is the way forward. 9-speed Campy stuff ought to be quite cheap these days given that they're going to ten across the range this year.

In other bicycle news, George Galloway has signed the Early Day Motion I wrote to him about (I don't know whether as a result of pressure from constituents or for reason of his own). I am forced to concede he's not entirely useless after all.

(If this site has been abominably slow lately, it appears to be because the ruby instance serving this blog has grown beyond the "hardware" ram size of the virtual server it runs on. I have restarted it to see if that helps: if not, "write another blog platform in CL" just moved up my priority list a bit)