I’m about to find out…
Today I set up a group on MyCyclingLog for the lovely folks from the BV Forums. It’s a nifty tool for keeping track of your ride stats… if you can be bothered updating it.
Personally I’ve never been particularly interested in keeping a ride diary, but with Geek overseas and Keith riding at weird times, I thought it’d be a nice way to keep in touch. As it turns out, we’re all doing about the total distance even though we’re hardly riding together these days.
More interesting will be when the BV Forum group stats start to build up. I’ll be interested to see if the types of weekly distances I do are at least somewhere in the middle of the group. There’s no way will I be near the top when it comes to total distance because some of these guys are dedicated roadies.
What will be interesting I reckon is seeing how slow and lazy I am. For all of the riding I do, I hardly ever push myself. HR hardly ever rises on my commute and I never get home with jelly legs. What I want to know is if any of the stronger riders in the group actually ride similar weekly distances.
I reckon something like that could actually motivate me to make an effort…
… maybe.
For a bit of a change, Sunday was spent with equine power, not pedal power. Perfect day to be out and about in the Mt Disappointment State Forest (what a terrible name!), with the temperature in the mid-20s and a gentle breeze.
Unfortunately I’m feeling a tad bow legged today, which made sitting on a cramped train rather uncomfortable.
Yahoooo!
Dirt crits are back!
Time to start actually making an effort on the bike!
It’s 16°C at 7:30am in the morning.
Expected top of 25°C today.
Spring is most definitely here.
Woohoo!
Off for a gentle bike path pootle with C.
(except for the hayfever… that’s not so woohoo)
Some say that cycling doesn’t work out the upper body enough. I suppose that they’re people who’ve never ridden track or a MTB. Although for the most part, road riding or bike-path-pootling doesn’t really give your upper body a work out.
Well…
I’ve found a way to make it happen. Due to some slightly-too-vigorous pumping of my rear tyre at the office, I ended up with a slow leak around the valve. I’ll admit that I hit the road not actually knowing that there was a leak, but it didn’t really take too many sets of traffic lights before I realised that something was wrong.
No matter.
Just pull over and change the tube.
Uh oh…
Where’s my spanner? (no rear QR on my Nexus8 commuter bike).
So there I was, standing by the side of a road with a soft-ish rear tyre and no way to fix it. Take the train? Nah, that’s just soft. Pump it up and ride on I say! So the next ~25km of my commute turned into a crazy game of *pedal* *pedal* *pedal* *pedal* *pump* *pump* *pump* *pump* *pump*. Six stops I made. BUT the important part is that I made it without fully flatting!
Let’s just say that by the end of this whole saga, I was pretty tired all over. It probably didn’t help that I brought the dinkiest pump that I have along…
Note to self. DON’T FORGET YOUR SPANNER.
Second shot at making the rice bricks. Exactly the same ingredients in the same proportions, however this time I’ve cut the ham a lot smaller and followed David’s suggestion about baking the eggs.
So after about 20-25 minutes at 180 degrees celcius, I must say that it came out quite differently.
More like a quiche than the loose rice bits that I got last time.
I think we’re on to a winner here. Not only are these less crumbly than my first batch, I also saved one batch of frying since the egg was baked. I reckon I could even go without frying the ham first since I’m going to bake the thing anyway.
The taste? Well aside from the fact that it could do with a bit more salt, it’s far more eggy than the first batch, which had a far stronger rice flavour. It might be the Asian in me speaking out, but I think I preferred the rice flavour, but I’m willing to trade that off for how well this one sticks together.
I suppose I’ll be road testing it on the weekend again, but given that the ingredients are exactly the same, I don’t see why the resullts will be any different.
Thanks to some browsing on the sly by Geek, he picked up the fact that wurple had fallen prey to a search engine spambot. A whole bunch of dodgy links had been inserted into the header file of the site using some vulnerability in WordPress. That probably explains why my page rankings have been decreasing lately. Hmph.
Anyway, it’s been fixed and locked down.
I think…
Shouldn’t happen again…
I hope…
Yesterday’s ride at Forrest was the first real road (well, off road) test of the rice bricks. I packed four bricks – two per snap lock bag, in each of my side jersey pockets to make a nice balanced load and off we went. As it turns out, despite being nicely sliced, having two in the same rather small snap lock bag meant that by the time I got to eating them, they became one. Not that it really mattered.
Anyway, rounding out our first loop of Mariners, I started to get the tiniest inkling of hunger. Not proper hunger, but I knew I should start eating (well, okay I should have started eating before this). As we rested a bit in the carpark, I started munching on the first brick. Good stuff I reckon. Easy enough to eat, requires no real chewing and tastes quite a lot better than yet-another-muesli bar. Despite my initial concerns, they weren’t all that crumbly. I think that packing them so tightly mushed them together into a more solid brick.
Soon, we were Off on the second loop around number 14 track. The hunger was still there at first and I was worried that I was going to conk out, but this faded away as the carbs kicked in and I started to feel satisfied again. This actually kept me going quite comfortably, even through wind and cold (which usually knocks me around quite badly) until we rode back to town quite some time later.
I think we’re on to a winner here.
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