wurple.net

It’s hot…

Very hot.

A week full of +40°C days.

But that’s no excuse to not ride riiiight? I like to think that my Blade 8 is an all weather commuter bike, which gives me no real excuses about commuting. Unfortunately it doesn’t come with an air conditioner. So what to do in this heat?

My solution which has worked pretty well this week is to take a shower. That is – get changed, hit the shower, then start riding.

mmmm evaporative cooling.

Sure it looks a bit funny to be rolling along dripping, but it’s SOOOO much more comfortable.

Read more…

I’m quite a fan of muesli. My morning post-commute breakfast happens to be a cup of muesli and a banana with honey drizzled over the top. Good combo to keep me fueled up for most of the morning.

I’m also quite a fan of fruit smoothies, especially in weather like we’re having at the moment. Nice and refreshing. It’s nothing to do with the low-fat marketing hype that surrounds them and I know thaat they are almost entirely sugar and water.

So surely I can’t lose with a combination of these two things.

Right? Right?

Wrong.

I’ve now decided. Muesli in a smoothie is just wrong.

It’s something like adding sand into the mix.

Gritty.

Blargh…

What a stupid day to decide to ride the fixie…

27°C at 7:00am.
Gusts ~30 knots.

Gah.

Pooped.

There’s a new woman at my office who I think is crazy. She’s the kind of person who enjoys suffering… hours and hours on end of pounding pain.

No, no, none of that kinky stuff. I’m talking about running.

She’s a marathon runner.

Like me, she turns her past-time into part of her routine – the commute. Her commute is around the 10km mark, including a couple of not insignificant hills which get my HR up when I’m mechanically assisted on a bike. With the hot weather that we’ve recently experienced, she will no doubt have some kind of hydration strategy like I do.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have many routes to go to the facilities. Thankfully, the mens room is tucked away around a corner, with two possible approaches. It’s also near one of the meeting rooms, so walking in that direction holding a notebook also proves to be a handy decoy. For the most part, this allows me to mix things up nicely and I don’t think the guys who sit near there notice.

One route from the gents to my desk takes me past the door to the ladies. As I walked past yesterday, Ms Marathon Runner (MMR) walked out. Now guys don’t generally chat in the mens and for me this extends to a good 10 to 20 seconds after walking out. Maybe it’s got something to do with the “I know what you just did and don’t want to think about it” factor. As such, I gave MMR a small and a very quiet “Hi”.

The day continues.

Not long after, I’m headed in the same direction again. En route, I cross paths with MMR, who is also headed in the same direction and I flash another smile and “Hi”.

And it happens again later in the day.

By this third time the smile has progressed into a small giggle as we both realise what’s happened. Hopefully no one noticed because I suppose it could be interpreted badly that the two of us repeatedly walk away from the facilities giggling.

Now you’d think that out of embarrassment, one of us would have tried to alter their schedule such that we wouldn’t cross paths any more, but that would require much pain and suffering, beyond that of a 42km jog or a 200km ride.

So we continued on with our day-to-day, with our timing sychronised. A fourth time.

And quite amusingly, a fifth time, after which I went home.

Another warm day today. Hope it doesn’t happen again.

Following a double lap of around 52km around the local hills on Saturday, I was feeling a bit too tired to hit Lysterfield on the MTB. Since I couldn’t cycle, I figured that I might as well do something bike related around the house.

I’ve been using the Delta Botticelli for some time now. It’s not too bad a system, especially for the price I paid. Sufficiently stable. Keeps the bikes off each other. The problem is that you either need to put the darn thing in the middle of the room to be able to access all of the bikes easily. Alternatively, if you put it near a wall, put the two bikes with the skinniest handlebars or that you ride the least, against the wall.

I chose to go for the second option. Not too bad, but still, not an ideal situation.

Oh… and the other major failing of this system for my purposes is that I have five bikes.

Anyway, I made myself busy on Sunday afternoon with some hooks, wood, bolts and a power drill to end up with this.

For those who are interested in doing something similar, I used a horizontal spacing of 30cm between each mount. Don’t ask me how that spacing works when my widest handlebars are 68cm, because it just does. I’ve also offset each of the mounts to reduce the amount of seat/handlebar overlap. If I did it again, I’d get a wider piece of wood so that I could get more offset, but this seems to work fine. For the mount, I used a 35mm deep piece of outdoor pine mounted to the wall with four Dynabolts (rated at 70kg each).

Pretty pleased with this actually because it actually makes my tiny garage look more spacious. It’s also allowed me to hang all of my five bikes and given me visitor parking or *cough*roomtogrow*cough.

So there’s this guy who I always see on the train. A fellow multi-modal commuter. Fluoro yellow jacket. Pretty basic helmet. Very standard recreational MTB. The one thing that always confused me though was bike shoes and flat pedals. Nevermind. He has the look of a REAL commuter.

The one thing I always wondered was what this guy thought of me and my varied bikes with carbon fibre bits and shiny chrome wheels. The guy must think I’m nuts having so many bikes.

Or so I thought.

Pootling home the other day, I hear the distinct *ZZZZZZZZZZZZ* of a Campagnolo freewheel from behind me. I’m not really in the mood or on the right bike for a game, so I ignore it. Soon after there’s a flash of colour beside me and a bloke on a Pinarello whips past me in team kit.

Hey, that’s the guy on I see in the mornings.

Ah a fellow bike nut.

I’m not alone.

With a wide array of bikes to choose from, it can sometimes be hard in the mornings to decide what bike to ride to work. Sometimes the weather decides for me, but with the fine weather that we’ve been having lately, it doesn’t really matter what I ride.

I do however go through phases and invariably find myself on the same bike for weeks at a time. For example at the start of ’08 I was riding the MTB everywhere. Mid-’08 I was definitely on the Blade. More recently, I’ve been riding the fixie around my local neighbourhood a fair bit, doing errands and what not.

Back on the Blade this morning, it seems that all of this fixie-ing about has stupidified me. Here I am lugging around a rather heavy hub geared bike and as I approach a hill, instead of changing down and spinning, I find myself standing to mash my way up. This kind of stupidity, a loaded pannier, combined with the overnight low of 28º meant that I was a sweaty, blubbery mess by halfway through my commute.

Maybe this is what attracts so many stupid people to fixies. You know, the stupid folks who use a cycling cap as head protection and run red lights on busy city streets. After years of mind numbing TV sitcoms and senseless computer games, the concepts of more than one gear, lots of little levers, deciding when to pedal and for the truly stupid, these weird things called brakes, is all just a bit too much to take in. I mean honestly, how can one be expected to pedal, maintain that fine balance which allows jeans to ride low but not fall off AND change gears at the same time.

Of course, none of this applies to me… no no… *shakes head*

In the last few weeks, I’ve lost count on the number of new-diet-health-kick-I’m-gonna-lose-this-spare-tyre conversations I’ve had. Is it this time of year or is it just me who’s been on the receiving end of these conversations?

I wonder if it’s because of my exceedingly healthy diet…

Anyway, this got me thinking. What is it about this time of year that gets people thinking about this kind of stuff?

• Christmas pudding
  Honestly, I’m really impressed about how some people say that they gained X kg over the holiday period. To me, the time off work means that there’s more time for cycling… right? This year we had a four day weekend over Christmas. That’s enough time to do the Paris-Brest-Paris!
• New Year resolutions
  I’m guessing that some of this number of people are those who made new year resolutions. All I can say to them is – just give up… now. I mean really, who makes these things and actually keeps them?
• Beach weather
  As summer warms up, it’s clearly time to strip off and head down to the beach. A darn, a bit of excess insulation still hanging around from winter. Need to find a way to get rid of it. Face it buddy, it’s too late. You’re going to hit the beach with your own inbuilt floaty this summer.

Honestly though, there are some people who are just plain old serious about it and who will succeed. Good on you. Keep it up. Just don’t talk to me about diet because I’m honestly not very helpful.

And give me a call if you want to go for a ride…

I need some riding buddies who I can beat while I burn off this spare tyre that I gained over Christmas.

It appears that everyone is back at work today.

*sigh*

The last few weeks on the train have been bliss. No problems at all getting a seat and a spot for my bike. Plenty of space. No crowds.

However, looking around this morning, I’d say that the holidays are over. Crowds are back. Seats are scarce. Meanwhile, there were only five bikes on the train. That’s down a bit from the highs I saw late last year, but I suspect that with the rather temperate summer that we’ve been having, we’re going to exceed those numbers by the end of January.

Oh well, it’s about time to hop on the bike and head home. Hopefully the holiday period has left everyone in a good mood and the agro will stay off the roads for another couple of weeks. Better put the shields up just in case…