A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

A Lille bit more#

Sat, 05 May 2007 23:01:20 +0000

Somewhat belated race report from last weekend's marathon at Lille, borrowed from an email exchange with teammates

Pre race

The Race

Post-race

Round and around#

Mon, 07 May 2007 23:47:52 +0000

Discussing crossovers -

Duh. Why didn't I think of that?

My second day on the track (at Birmingham) was somewhat less successful than the first.

In the first race (3k) I got a good start, slipped up and down the pack more or less at random, then with one lap to go and seeing that people were tired, went off round the outside: I was out at the front and increasing the gap when I set my foot down wrong on the banked turn and slid. Ouch. Got up again but only after everyone had passed, came in last-but-one

The second race (1000m) saw a fairly indifferent start and a lot of merging in the line. Went round and around somewhere in the middle of the pack for a while, until someone decided that they were going to join the line in the spot I was in, and managed to take me out in the process. Skating as a contact sport, not my favourite. Less than entirely clear what happened then, but it culminated with me landing on my back (I have a lovely sore spot where one of the safety pins holding my race number on has dug in) and knocking the back of my head against the ground. My helmet failed in the manner it was designed to fail: I can see the crushed polystyrene. Whether it Saved My Life(tm) - who the hell knows?

In fairness to the other guy, there had been a gap in front of me as we came out of the corner, because I was slower around the bend than the chap in front of me. It's just that it was not there any more my the time he decided to occupy it, because I had closed it in the meantime. There must be some trick to pack skating that I haven't found yet, because everybody else seems to cope.

Here's some related stuff from Eddy (scroll down, the useful bits are right at the end)

Early Days ...#

Thu, 10 May 2007 14:39:16 +0000

FOR THE ATTENTION OF:

George Galloway MP Bethnal Green and Bow

Thursday 10 May 2007 Daniel Barlow

Dear George Galloway,

I am writing to urge you to sign the Early Day Motion 1433 submitted by Menzies Campbell that "the alterations in the provisions of the Highway Code proposed to be made by the Secretary of State for Transport, dated 28th March 2007, a copy of which was laid before this House on 28th March, be not made."

The revision of the Highway Code currently before Parliament contains provisions which will make cycling much less safe on our road network. The DfT received over 11000 responses to their consultation last year, from cyclists describing these problems, but their revised wording actually makes the problem worse not better. Roger Geffen, campaigns manager for the Cyclists' Touring Club, has claimed that "If the new document goes through unamended it will be the single most anticycling thing that this government has done since it's been in power". John Franklin, author of the Government-approved Cyclecraft manual, adds that "One of the golden rules of cycling is never to go up the inside of lorries. The new code effectively tells you to do this."

Cycling is an important part of the solution to urban congestion, as well as being carbon-neutral and tending to promote healthy activity thus reducing the burden on the NHS. We can ill-afford measures like this that will discourage it and make it more dangerous.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Barlow

SWF race at Tatem#

Thu, 10 May 2007 20:00:00 +0000

This entry written some time after the event based on hazy recollections and stuff written on the LSST forum ...

It was not especially successful. Not until I arrived at the train station did I find out the service to Silver Street wasn't running that day, so leapt on my bike and got a really good warmup getting to the track. Then stacked on the first race (500m) for no reason that I can determine (bad body position on the turn crossing over - I think - weight too far forward turned into weight distributed horizontally along the tarmac). Spent most of the 1000m tailing the back of the pack: tried to attack about halfway around, but didn't have the speed to overtake around the outside of the bend and ended up slotting back in more or less where I'd started. In the 3000m started at the back again, got bored of that after a while and started to mess about a bit, but was still feeling weak and I knew when I went off on lap n-3 I was not going to be able to hold a lead for 750m. Which may be a realistic assessment or self-fulfilling prophecy, cos it turned out that indeed I couldn't.

Tagging this one as "skate" not "bike" so I won't go into detail about my trip home. Note, though: if you head down the A10 from Great Cambridge Junction, after about 1.5km you get to a junction where you take the left-hand lane to go left, and the right-hand lane to go right. There is a big sign to help you with this decision: it shows a left-turn symbol in the left lane and a right-turn symbol in the right lane. It doesn't, however, tell you where you might end up should you take one path or the other, and I feel this is something of a failing because if you guess wrong and turn right you may never see another sign saying "A10" ever again.

Stupid phone#

Fri, 11 May 2007 15:07:42 +0000

My phone has 28MB of memory free, it says (and more on the memory stick) but refuses to receive more text messages until I've deleted some.

What kind of festering idiot designs a phone that can't use all its memory? It's not rocket science. It's barely even computer science.

Theres a stargreen, waiting in the sky#

Fri, 11 May 2007 23:23:22 +0000

Technically, tomorrow is the first day of my new job.

Practically, the whole work-from-home schtick tends to blur the live/work distinction - I spent most of Friday and today doing approximately the same thing as I expect to spend tomorrow doing. I know us northern Europeans consider this a Bad Thing, but cultures and other times have had no trouble with the concept that work and pleasure are miscible. So, we'll see how it goes (and having implemented most of the interface to a new credit card payment gateway over the weekend does make me feel less guilty about the prospect of skiving off early to go to Tatem[1])

fn1. this rests on the assumption that my general soreness has decreased enough overnight to make Tatem tomorrow a sensible thing

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)

Campagnuisance#

Sun, 27 May 2007 13:00:32 +0000

After far too long reading usenet and browsing online stores, I decided about a week ago to upgrade my bike to ten-speed sprockets with shifting on the handlebars (Campagnolo Ergo). I went with Campag over Shimano because they seem a little less likely to break backward-compatibility at any opportunity, the levers are apparently rebuildable if they break, and probably also just because I like being different and everybody else has Shimano. That's why I'm a Linux user, after all.

So I ordered new levers (Mirage), a new cassette (Mirage), a new rear mech (Xenon, because there's not really a lot of difference), and a new chain (actually a 10 speed Shimano HG chain, cos they're cheaper). Oh, and bar tape. Because I'm cheap I'm not changing the front mech, but because the cassette has different ratios I am buying a Shimano 50T ring to replace the 53T Biopace big ring. Maybe having circular chainrings (instead of egg-shaped ones) will help the shifting on the front a bit anyway.

Now all the stuff has arrived (except for the chainring, but I can wait for that) on my first attempt to put it together I find that Campag cassettes aren't compatible with Shimano freehubs and vice versa. Gnngh. But then, the young man in Bikefix seemed to think the bearings in the rear were on their way out anyway. So, I guess I was thinking about lighter wheels...

⟪Apr 2007 Jun 2007⟫