Onvelo

48 riders braved the 58 mile course on June 26 2011 to raise money for the UK Sepsis Trust.  Having lost a brother to this killer condition back in 2003 I was keen to help Dr Ron Daniels and the trustees raise money to help their organisation get off the ground.  The UK Sepsis Trust is a new charity but Sepsis has been around for years and kills literally hundreds of thousands of people every year.  Sepsis is not actually a  disease in its own right, but rather a condition where the sufferer’s body is unable to fight off other infections which are attacking it.  Consequently it’s widely mis-understood and there needs to be a widespread programme of education about the condition among the medical profession and the wider public alike.

Thanks to the riders  on 26 June,we have rasied a fantastic total of £4100 for the coffers of the UK Sepsis Trust and Ron and the trustees are now planning how to put this money to the best possible use in the early days of the organisation.  With temperatures hitting 30 degrees celcius many riders found the going tough but everyone finished and many reported how much they enjoyed the course.  One club rider commented ‘I could tell that course was designed by someone who loves cycling’ which I took as the best possible compliment.

Many riders have enquired about a repeat of the ride in 2012 – it takes a lot of organising, so at the moment I’m thinking in terms of it maybe being a bi-annual event to be run next in 2013.  In the meantime I have plans for a charity ride of a completely different type (longer but with much less to organise) for 2012 – watch this space!

With the better weather come more chances for training. Managed to get out to do the 47 mile main loop of the Staffs Stunner charity ride on Sunday with old mate Steve. He loved the route and thought the 3 (shortish) hills were more than acceptable to the average cyclist.  I’ve now added a downloadable GPX of the route to the website ‘ride with GPS’ if any of you need it.  Click here for the page

Registrations continue to come in steadily for the ride and the route has now been approved by the police.  See you all there on the day!

I’ve recently had contact from a small Stafford based bike hire company called Desire to Ride – see http://www.d2ride.co.uk

They are offering a discount to riders on the Staffordshire Stunner on 26th June, plus delivery of bikes to the event and support for riders.

Contact them if they can help you out!

Just back from France to catch up on the work on the Dinan appartment, help out with some building work and check out some fine old French machinery while I was at it. 

Ebay France has a ‘small ads’ section which offers quite a few interesting bargains, lots of old european bikes at reasonable prices, the downside being that most are aimed at the local market only (ebay.fr has a regional search filter to help with this) hence very few are offered for shipping and you need to be able to pick them up.

Arriving at Dinard airport by Ryanair at very low cost enabled me to take a quick taxi to St Malo and stay in the ultracheap and basic Formule 1 hotel, walk into town the next morning to rendezvous with Pascal, seller of a pretty old and grubby but very servicable late-1970s Gitane road bike.  I had already paid the princely asking price of 25 euros by Paypal so was able to pump up the tyres and ride away, but not without first getting soaked by a huge wave over the sea-wall where I had leaned the bike for the inflation!  Following that little set-back there were no further problems and I was soon in Dinan to join Phil at the appartment and help him plasterboard the front bedroom.  The Gitane was pressed into service throughout the Monday and Tuesday morning, running errands around town and generally engaging the locals in conversation about its age and the history of Gitane in the hands of greats like Fignon and Hinault.  The bike is now secure in the bike-store at the house ready for future use.

Better things were to come however in the form of a Vitus which was minimally photographed and described with only a few clues to its full identity.  Having finally located the seller’s address on Tuesday afternoon I managed to bargain him down from to a more realistic price given the frame’s obvious signs of use and some repaired crash damage, and the fact that a new rear rim was required.  However I still bought the bike on the basis that it firstly has some very good quality kit (including Chorus ergo shifters and Dura-ace cranks and brakes) and secondly is a very interesting bonded aluminium Vitus 992 frame.  These frames are fairly well documented on the ‘net so look them up on google, but suffice to say that Sean Kelly won Milan-San Remo on one of these so it’s a bike with top professional pedigree!

This bike will also stay in France, safely stored at a friend’s house ready for the Tour de France trip in July, where hopefully it should prove a fun, distinctive mount for the trip.

I used to be involved in competitive motorsport and back then I was always looking to tweak the car and my driving to find extra speed. Having got back into cycling in a massive way following several years playing with cars that competitive spirit is still there on a bike and I find myself a little obsessed with average speed, even on relatively short training runs.

The problem currently is that I did my first ever century (the Manchester 100 mile run) last year at the age of 39 on my old steel Lemond and managed to complete the course at an average of 17.3 mph, and it’s this average that I always compare myself with when tracking my development as a cyclist. And 17.3 seems to be my personal average speed of choice, even with more miles in my legs and a new, full carbon bike! OK, the 100 miler was on flat-as-a-pancake Cheshire tarmac and my normal training runs are on lumpy Staffordshire roads, but I can’t help but compare. Not having enough spare time to train really regularly doesn’t help and I know that miraculous progress doesn’t just happen, but I’d hoped to get a bit quicker and I’d like to average over 18mph at some point. I’ve realised I’m just too comfortable and I’ve found my speed at an energy level that’s good for me – I just need to push harder and hurt myself more!

So, the cold and snowy weather seems to be finally passing, replaced with rain. The last month has been a nightmare in terms of opportunities to exercise, too cold to cycle, too snowy to go out running – in the end I called my normally under-used rowing machine into action and ended up using so frequently and zealously that it broke…

Luckily Santa brought a Wii console for my two small children so that has provided at least a little exertion for the last few days. The last 24 hours has finally seen the start of a thaw so hopefully we can get back to some real exercise very soon!

November 28th should have been a great day. I’d saved up enough brownie points to earn a full day off from work/house/kids duties and planned a semi-epic 92 mile round trip to Llangollen with my good mate Chris. The Great British weather however had better ideas and by 9.00am it was showing -6 degrees so we thought better of it. By 10am I was getting twitchy to go out and do at least a bit of riding so I put the Lemond in the car and headed towards rural Staffs. Spotting a few other hardy souls I decided that I should stop and give it a go. Eccleshall provided a handy parking space and as I unloaded the display in the car was still showing six below. Not surprisingly the long hill out of Eccleshall on the Newport road was a good warm up, but any level or downhill sections were truly tortuous with the wind-chill factor, despite two pairs of gloves, two pairs of socks, woolly hat under helmet and the rest. After 90 minutes and about 20 miles I decided to call it a day and went home to defrost and I haven’t touched the bikes since, nearly a week later. Note to self – buy a set of rollers and find space for them in the garage…

Well, after two weeks without being able to use the bike on the daily commute to Stafford, finally got a full day in the office today so could return to pedal power. Thick fog in the morning didn’t auger well but I decided to brave the A34 nonetheless. If this journey proved anything, it’s that the UK government’s strategy on sustainable transport in general and cycle use specifically is little more than a bad joke. However bad the weather can be, the main drawback to cycle-commuting in England is the sheer amount of traffic, pretty much non-stop on roads like this.  It’s not truly scary, just a little disconcerting, but certainly not fun and you only do commuting like this to save some fuel and get a few extra miles in the legs. 

Heading south from Stoke you might see the odd other cyclist (in more than one sense of the word!) in these cold months, perhaps four or five when the weather’s better, and there are certainly more than a few years ago.  Stoke is one of the government’s ‘cycle towns’ and money has been spent, a little is always better than nothing, and I was told recently that something like £250k has been poured into the new stretch of cycle track just south of Stone heading up Yarlet bank.  However, I used this for the first time this morning, only due to the increasing fog as I descended the hill.  In typical British half-baked style, the cycle track actually feels more dangerous than the road – it’s bumpy, strewn with thorny debris, cuts across the end of numerous side roads where motorists never ever look or stop, and on a Friday the farmer blocks it with his wheely bins…  It’s also only very short, and starts and finishes within a much longer section if dual-carriageway, so you can’t avoid the road anyway for most of your trip.

Sorry to be cynical, but it’s pretty much a waste of time and money.  And talking of bad jokes, one way I while away the time is by making them up while in the saddle, so here’s today’s effort:

Why did Miss Piggy never marry?  Cos’ she had problems with kermitment.  Boom boom!

Billy Connolly once said ‘there’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes’. This has rarely been more correct than my commute to work last Friday. It was the end of a week of unseasonably mild weather, and the morning sun for the 17.5 mile dash to Stafford lulled me into a seriously false sense of security.   I did however arrive with the warm glow of a record time for the trip and having pushed 53/25 up Yarlet bank.

The rain started in the mid afternoon and was set in for the rest of the day by the time I mounted up for the trip home in the the dark, wet and fortunately still not-too-cold evening rush hour. Unfortunately I had chosen to travel light and was more dressed for a spring sportive than a November commute, high-viz coat notwithstanding – mudguardless Felt F5, short shorts, mesh shoes, nothing very waterproof on me at all…

As a relative newcomer to winter riding and long commutes I simply don’t have the kit for the job and by the time I got home an hour later I could not have been wetter if I’d be held underwater for the full duration of the ride.  Never mind, remind yourself that through the suffering comes the glory, and a load of other stuff to add to the letter to Father Christmas.

After several months of occasional riding of my circa-1990 Orbit America (when I can fit it in around my other bikes), today saw my first experience of what was I suppose an inevitability – a tub blowout!

This is the only tub equipped bike I’ve ever owned and in a way their place in racing history and the complexity of their fitment intrigues me, although I’m aware that their once important advantages over traditional tube/tyre combis have now been severely eroded by developments in modern-day ‘clincher’ tyres. The Orbit is however exactly as it was supplied 20 years ago and I like the fact that the Mavic GP4s rims have been there since day 1, so I’ve stuck with them.

I knew one would pop eventually, but didn’t know what to expect when it happened. About 10 miles into a planned 33-miler there was suddenly a noise as if a valve had blown out (I was running 120psi) in the rear followed by pretty rapid deflation, on the part of the tyre and myself.  Having only fitted a couple of tubs in the past (and then using glue), it was time for me to have my first experience of road-side tub changing, this time using tape. Fortunately it was dry and sunny despite being November in the UK, and my mate Steve was there to help stretch the spare tub, which I had impressively produced from my jersey pocket, over the ageing Mavic.

Around 10 minutes of general struggling later, I had a ridable Orbit once more and we set off back on a shortened and steady route home. I’ve heard horror stories of tubs rolling off so this was no time for breaking speed records.

An uneventful journey home later, the Orbit is now tucked up in the garage, where it will stay over the winter while I hope to give it a good general overhaul, including a more permanent fixture of its new back tyre. It’s such a beautiful bike, the hard bit will be resisting the temptation to fit a full modern groupset and use it all the time…