A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

Recycling writing#

Sat, 06 May 2006 00:55:10 +0000

The LFNS has a new weekly email newsletter, the Week on Wheels. I won't be cut and pasting it here every week (you may be relieved to know), so if you like what you read today, go and sign up for your own copy on the web site 

This Week, on Wheels, we talk about 
  •  LFNS and Stroll news

  •  Forthcoming: Sunday Stroll to Alexandra Palace, 21 May (one way!)

  •  the Le Mans 24 hour relay race, and the man doing it all by himself

  •  our new sound system (nearly ready)

  •  how to get into marshalling

  •  mappa vendredi
... and more.

== LFNS ==
LAST WEEK, "Snakes and Ladders".  
- "Good skate. Much fun. I'm going to go hibernate for a few weeks now."
- "Great skate,great music and nice route!"
- "Exellent skate, good pace, and fantastic marshalling"
- "WHOOOOP WHOOOOP WHOOOOOP  I did the whole skate. I did 
   the whole skate." [message continues in similar vein]
- "Kensington church street is now my new favourite road! 
   grins like a loon "
More in this vein at
   http://www.serpentineroad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16862&start=70
Our photos at
                             http://www.lfns.co.uk/route.php/20060505

THIS WEEK, the London Friday Night Skate heads to Clapham, via
Vauxhall and Stockwell, and back past Battersea Park.  Nice straight
bit on the Clapham Road, and a fun downhill (but look out for the bits
of concrete stuck to the road surface) back towards Battersea.  Half
time is by Clapham North tube station.
Tonight, Wellington Arch, 8pm start as usual.  Look for the large
group of people in skates and hi-viz vests - though it's not easy to
confuse hundreds of skaters assembling for a street skate with a
couple of cycle commuters and a jogger, so you should be safe.
Circular route, twelve and a half miles, expect to be back for around
10pm in time for a drink before closing.
                             http://www.lfns.co.uk/route.php/20060512
            http://www.serpentineroad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17129

== Sunday Stroll ==
The Sunday Stroll is slightly over 9 miles this week, heading
towards the City for some of London's most-loved sights.  We'll be
passing over Waterloo Bridge, through Covent Garden and Lincoln's Inn
Fields, then to St Paul's and The Gherkin.
2pm start, from the eastern end of Serpentine Road (by the kiosk).
Half time is at Fencourt (nearest stations Monument and Fenchurch St).
                            http://www.lfns.co.uk/route.php/20060514

You need to be able to stop, turn, control your speed on an incline,
and keep up for nine miles.  If it's your first Stroll and you're not
sure whether you'll manage it, why not turn up early and pop along to
the nice people at Skate Patrol first?  They're in the Park from 1pm  
each Sunday giving free training to beginners (how to stop and turn),
and although they can't teach you all the skills you'll need to manage
a street skate they're accomplished skaters who can certainly offer 
you some advice.
(And if you have friends who you'd like to drag with you on street
skates, but you're worried that "drag" might be all too literal at the
moment, send them along to Skate Patrol too)
                                       http://www.skatepatrol.co.uk/ 

== Alexandra Palace Stroll, NEXT WEEKEND ==
Another reminder, just so we don't see anyone disappointed a week on
Sunday: on May 21st (not this weekend, next weekend) we'll be doing
the first one-way skate of the season.  The route takes in Camden,
Highbury Corner and Highbury Fields, Arsenal Stadium, Finsbury Park,
Crouch Hill and Crouch End, and finishes up at the People's Palace,
with a great view over London.
The total distance is about 12 miles, but we'll be taking it at the
usual steady Sunday Stroll pace (so expect to arrive about 5 or
5:30pm).  And we won't be coming back, so you will need to make some
kind of travel arrangements of your own to get home.

== 24 Heures du Mans ==
Fancy a weekend camping in France?  A weekend camping in France on the
site of the famous Le Mans Bugatti circuit?  A weekend camping in
France on the site of the famous Le Mans Bugatti circuit with over
5000 skaters who will be taking it in turns to skate laps around the
track for twenty four hours?
The annual Le Mans "24 Rollers" event has become a bit of an
institution for London skaters.  Teams contain up to ten people,
usually arranged into three or four shifts so that each skater can
spend a few hours on the track alternating with two or three others,
then some time off for eating, sleeping or partying.  Depending on
your team, there may be more or less of the last - for some the party
doesn't really stop even when they're out on the track.  Expect lap
times somewhere between 7 and 20 minutes ...
Interested?  There may still be places left on some teams, and most
are looking for support/pit crew (people who don't race, but help out
with cooking/lap timing/massage/general organisation, or just making
sure the drink doesn't run out)
                                              http://www.24rollers.com/
                 http://www.serpentineroad.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=22
This year there'll be nine full teams from London (actually, one of
them's from Camberley, but they visit London a lot) and one man doing
it on his own.  One man, skating, for twenty four hours continuously
(an hour off for eating and bathroom breaks, he says).  That man is
Hans Brown.  He expects to "lose about 5kg over the 24hr period,
probably damage parts of my anatomy I have not yet discovered, and
cover about 500km".  And he's raising money for charity in the
process: Breakthrough Breast Cancer is committed to fighting breast
cancer through research and education, and has established the UK's
first dedicated breast cancer research centre.  You can donate to this
cause online
                             https://www.bmycharity.com/V2/lemans24solo
Be nice to him, he's a marshal ...

== Sound on Skates ==
We've had comments about the lack of music on some skates lately -
yes, we know how much more fun it is with a soundtrack.  And thanks to
the LondonSkate for helping us out from time to time with the loan of
theirs.
We are working to get a new sound system online and out there, and the
plans are coming together - we've paid for practically all of it, for
a start.  I've seen some of the parts arrive already and they're
SHINY.  It promises to be very very loud.
Look out for pictures in the very near future, and the beast itself on
the road not long after.

== Marshaling the marshals ==
As the skate grows in the summer and stretches out, we need more
marshals to keep it safe and separated from the other road users.  If
you've secretly hankered to wear the honoured hi-viz (and to get a
clear path up the right hand side of the skate when you want to get to
the front), come and talk to the marshals before or after the skate to
find out what's involved.
You don't need to be super-fast: if you're comfortable with the pace
at the front of an LFNS, that's what we're looking for.  A degree of
common sense is more important.  It's a great way to get fitter, to
develop more traffic awareness, to give something back to skating, and
to better get to know the rest of us bunch of slightly mad committed
skaters.
(And you don't have to turn up every week, and if you can't do
Fridays, why not Sundays?)
If you're not interested in marshalling but you have talents or
contacts in other areas (First Aid, press, publicity, IT, or
experience dealing with charities/local government/etc) and would like
to help out, please get in touch using our feedback form
                          http://www.lfns.co.uk/feedback.php#contactus

== Route/Course Analysis ==
Each week we design and check a new route, and feed all the details
into the route planning system that (with a little help from Google)
generates the maps you see on our web site.  As marshals we think
they're great - mostly because we can zoom right in to see the road
names, and when you're trying to learn the route that's a lot easier
than half an hour with an "artist's impression" and an A-Z.  It's
really important to know exactly where you're going when there's a
couple of hundred skaters catching up behind you at 15mph ...
But you don't need them for that (unless you get badly lost, you can
follow the lead marshal anyway), so as part of our ongoing web site
review, we'd like to ask - do you like the maps?  what do you use them
for, what would you like to use them for, and how can we make them
more useful?  Again, comments via the web site
                          http://www.lfns.co.uk/feedback.php#contactus

== Wrapping up ==
That's your lot for this week.  Next week look out for 
- more details of the Alexandra Palace Stroll
- the Goodwood Marathon (more skating on motor circuits)
- an insight into how we design our routes
- and the Lurker's Guide to serpentineroad.com - not as scary as it looks
In the meantime, see you on the streets or in the parks.  And don't
forget we post pictures on the site after each skate (when our
photographer remembers to bring his memory card) - check back to see
if we've snapped you or your friends.  Or if you've taken photos or
video of the skate yourself, let us know and we'll post it for the
world.
Comments?  Questions?  Don't reply to this mail: it'll bounce.  Use
the feedback form on our site.  To unsubscribe, use the link in the
the mail footer (look down - further down - yes, there)
                          http://www.lfns.co.uk/feedback.php#contactus
We've just started Week On Wheels and already the audience is growing
fast.  But we'd like it to grow faster.  If you have friends who are
interested in skating, why not forward them this mail (no spamming,
please, we're British) and let them know how to subscribe and get
their own copy.

Human been#

Fri, 12 May 2006 13:00:00 +0000

Let me see if I can recall all or any of the skating I've done since I last blogged

And I'm still wearing speed skates on the LondonSkate, which seems silly, but I'm comfortable in them so why not?

In all that time the biggest news for me personally is probably that the Le Mans teams have now been selected without the use of time trials, on the basis of previous marathon performance and who the Committee thinks is fast at the moment, and I'm in the first team :-)

I think maybe I need to decide a more realistic (challenging) goal for this one than the "9 minute lap average" I set myself after last season, though. Like maybe "8 minute average", for example. I don't know. (a) Various back-of-the-scratch-buffer calculations based on scaling my performance last year by the ratio of last year's marathon times to this year's expected marathon time (which I am assuming to be 1 hour 17) might indicate I'm on for an 8:20. But Le Mans is simply not marathon pace and there's all kinds of other variables that I'm not considering. Alternatively (b) given 3:09 for a mile lap at Hillingdon, multiply that by 2.6 to get a 8:11 for the same distance as Le Mans - but not the same climb, not the same drafting opportunities, and probably not the same intensity. I will be disappointed if I can't get some laps sub-8 at least, but we'll have to see how the average turns out. I'm attacking every uphill I see right now, though

Goodwood#

Mon, 15 May 2006 13:00:00 +0000

What I should be doing (1): getting some sleep. What I should be doing (2): writng a report of my race in Lille this week. As I'm not about to do (2) right now, I leave you with this message from the Goodwood Marathon organisers before getting on with (1) -
Registration is now open for Goodwood Roller Marathon on 30 July 2006

Visit http://www.goodwoodmarathon.co.uk/ to register online and for all the latest information. Thank you so much for waiting patiently while we come up to speed organising this event.

Goodwood Roller Marathon has always been run for charity and this year is be no different. Supporting The NCYPE (The National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy) we encourage everyone to get sponsored for this event, especially if you have never done a marathon before.

The key thing this year is advanced registration which should hopefully keep costs down both for us as well as you. You can register online as well as by post, the sooner you register and pay the cheaper it is. This year we have microchip timing of the laps as well as a medal for you to take home and keep. More details on the website.

Historically we have had lots of people sign up that are not online. If you know of any people/groups such as this then please print out the registration and sponsorship forms from the website and pass them on. There will be a poster available soon for you to print out as well.

This year Goodwood Roller Marathon is being organised by the Camberley Skaters. This is our first big organised event so all feedback/suggestions appreciated. We hope we can make it the best yet catering for everyone from speed skaters to charity skaters and raise lots of money for The NCYPE along the way.

Just a Lille bit#

Wed, 17 May 2006 12:46:07 +0000

BARLOW Daniel
Open roller fic homme - 14/05/06 - LILLE (59)

Arrivé(e) 18 eme sur 161 avec un temps de 00:57:35
Soit 12 eme sur 62 dans la catégorie SEM
Dossard no 343

Informations diverses :
Club : London skaters speed team
Vitesse moyenne : 34,38495
see here

The chief attraction of Lille is that if you have (or know someone with) a car, it's one of the cheaper foreign races to enter. E20 for the registration, £50 for the Eurotunnel (per car), and E40 for a twin room at the Etap. And it's a short drive from Calais: you can get there on the Saturday and come back on the Sunday.

Lille is one of the French Inline Cup races, and as seems typical for these things, they only let you do the proper marathon if you're Elite. The rest of us mortals get some other strange length like 30k, 12k, 22k, or whatever the local organisers feel like - the Paris/Eurodisney race was notable for having changed the Open distance from 42 to 22 via 12. And they wonder why LSST tends to go for the German races more often. Anyway, in Lille, the Open race was billed as 30km, or ten laps of the course. (This is, by the way, the kind of thing it's wise to find out in advance: it wasn't until we were lined up at the start that we finally got confirmation it was 10 not 11). The course was on city centre streets, with surfaces to rival London's (a polite way of saying they mostly weren't all that great: potholes, dodgy tarmac repairs and a certain amount of raised ironwork to make it interesting) and was basically a series of straight roads connected by right-angle turns - one right turn and five lefts.

When I got to the start I was on the second row: by the time the usual pushing and shoving had finished I was on the fourth row and had my right skate walled in by those of three other competitors. The start was unsurprisingly late: having all been ready since 11:25 or so, they kept us waiting on the line until about 11:40. It was also surprisingly clean, in the circumstances: it took a few seconds for the people in front of me to get moving, but being more or less on the left-hand edge of the grid, I could push leftwards and start up the gap where nobody ever seems to want to be. (Side note: judging by the number of people who overtook me at this time, my starts are still slower than they need to be)

More or less by the end of the first straight the pack had become on average two lines side-by-side, though it wasn't yet possible to tell who was in which as they were continuously merging and splitting. The big surprise came at the first (left hand) turn, where the entire group slowed right down almost to walking pace to go round the corner, then accelerated once back on the straight. This became something of a recurring theme on the bends, in fact: although none of the subsequent corners were quite that slow, it wasn't until about the fourth lap that most of the skaters actually started crossing over to accelerate through the lefthanders, and I didn't see anyone at all crossover right.

After the first lap, it more or less settled down into one line, and the following seven laps were just like the second. I ended up towards the back of the pack, because I was being slack at defending my position (actually, mostly because the people in front of me were being slack about defending their positions, but in a best-defence-is-a-good-offence style I should definitely have been a bit more proactive) which probably meant I suffered more from the concertinaing around every corner, but I reasoned that I was comfortable with the speed and knew I had some in reserve, I could afford to burn some energy if it meant avoiding the full-contact skating probably going on up ahead. And there was no point in trying too hard to catch people on the short straights when I knew they'd usually slow right down on the next corner again anyway. There weas even one serial offender t-stopping in the line. (In fairness, some of the turns were up the inside of a slower line and there wasn't a vast amount of room. But even so, if I were that ultracautious marshalling a streetskate I'd never get to the front ... )

Lap ten started just like any other. After the penultimate turn it got a little bit undisciplined again, which seemed as good a time to take off as any: from near the back I came past about a third of the pack, round the bend and and finished somewhere int he second half of the group, for 18th place. I even hawked, although not terribly stylishly. Afterwards I found out that there'd been a three-man breakaway at some point, which I'd missed due to hanging around at the back - they'd crossed the line about three minutes previously. I'd love to find out when that was.

I talked to Hans afterwards. He was in the Elite race and says that there was an attack on every corner there. Compare and contrast ...

PS: if you, like me, multiplied the average speed by the time I spent skating and arrived at a figure greater than 30km, well, so did I. I'm told that the total length was actually about 32-33km.

Back at tatem#

Tue, 23 May 2006 13:00:00 +0000

A not terribly satisfactory session at Tatem tonight. Got there late so not much warmup, then 4x3k intervals, at considerable protest from my back. Now refusing to skate again until Hannover

Blenheim Inline Mudbath#

Fri, 26 May 2006 13:00:00 +0000

I'd better write this up before I forget completely. Executive summary: muddy and very very slippery, rubbish warmup (my back hurt for two days afterwards), some ups and downs that were great fun, and (depending on how you count) either a roughly fourth place finish, or a DNF. Read on for details.

Blenheim Palace is near Woodstock (to the north of Oxford), and was originally promised to the first Duke of Marlborough by the grateful taxpayer for beating the French in 1704. (In fact, as it turned out the good Queen Anne failed to come through with all of the money and the Duke had to pay for quite a lot of it himself)

More relevantly for our purposes, there's a reasonably smooth path all the way around the grounds of Marlborough Country, on which the London Triathlon people were running the bike leg of the Blenheim Triathlon last weekend. And we (LSST) managed to squeeze in a half-marathon on skates on the same track, before they started.

Depending on where you, gentle reader, are located, you may or may not be aware that it's been raining a lot lately in the south of England. All things considered we were quite lucky that the sky was dry on Saturday morning - although less lucky that the track, or some parts of it, was not. And was convered in mud, leafmould, twigs, and so on. I used to live in the country - it was just like that. So there was an awful lot of sliding around, and on one uphill even the lead pack were actually ascending at slower than walking pace. Very silly.

My race: it was cold, and i didn't warm up sensibly, so I pretty much missed the train at the start (and got myself backache in the process). After a few minutes of people passing me, I formed a line with fellow LSST people Mike and Garan, and we stuck together for most of the race. Somewhere about two thirds of the way through the last lap (I admit, i thought I was nearer the end) knowing that Mike could almost certainly outsprint me over a short stretch but that (judging from the uphills) I could probably keep him at bay on a longer sustained effort, I took off, and eventually, when I found the finish line, finished ahead of him and Garan.

So, where did I finish? Sadly, when the official (provisional) results were published, it looks like my chip didn't register on my first lap - it said I raced two laps only, in 00:32:02 and 00:15:30. So, DNF. Which rather puts a damper on the event for me. I've queried this with the organisers, but not heard anything back yet. In the meantime, Garan took fourth place, and Mike (who took a wrong turn near the end) fifth. So there must have been a lot of people ahead of us who dropped out at some point - or who also had problems with the timing system.

Lessons for next time (Hannover-Celle, this Sunday): (1) warm up is much more important when it's cold out; (2) find out where the finish is before before breaking for it. Oh, and (3) in addition to the stated purpose of leg shaving (road rash), if you're going to do races where you get caked in mud to waist height, it's much easier to brush it off afterwards if the legs are smooth ;-) But hopefully mud will not be a problem this weekend.

In happier news, email from Daniel Junker says he'll have new boots for me on or around June 6th.

Over Hanover#

Tue, 30 May 2006 13:00:00 +0000

Hannover-Celle marathon is a point-to-point race between point A somewhere on the outskirts of Hannover, and point B, which is somewhere in Celle. I didn't see much of the latter place (I was concentrating) but I got the impression it wasn't really big enough to have outskirts as such.

The German for "weather" is "wetter", but after seeing somewhat mixed forecasts, I'm happy to report that atmospheric conditions in Hannover yesterday were in fact "drier". Bit slippy in one section which ran under trees, and a fierce wind which was with us for the first half - skating at 38km/h didn't even feel like work - and against us for the second - suddenly, we were skating at 28km/h and it felt a lot like work.

I got on what I think was probably the front pack at the start, which was too fast. I lasted about, oh, ten minutes before the guy in front of me dropped off, and despite pullinq out around him to chase them for a while, didn't really have spare energy to close the gap decisively. After a while I found myself in a line of three and we alternated leads for a few k before the second pack caught us, so I jumped onto that and was able to relax for a while.

I stayed with that pack for the rest of the race, doing probably more than was sensible on the front - I don't think anyone behind about tenth place ever took a pull - before a pretty short but quite satisfying sprint at the end. And then just had to wait for my vision to clear.

Finished in 29th place with 1:17:06, which is technically a PB, but Lille was actually faster. It's more or less what I was expecting after Berlin and Lille, so though it's good to have that confirmed, it's not a cause for massive celebration.

That said, the other way of looking at it is that I finished less than ten minutes behind the winner, and that I'm quite happy about.

Next marathon target 1:15 - I know I was racing at that speed in Lille, so it's attainable. Next stop Preston (though it's unlikely to be where I break 1:15), and then no more racing for three weeks until Le Mans. Time to start getting some hills into my training.

⟪Apr 2006 Jun 2006⟫