starting my new year revolutions

I've just loaded a few targets into Garmin for 2017. I used to load monthly targets, but last year I worked from annual ones, along with some of the cycling training plans in TrainerRoad.

At this point the main thing is to get started, so I've clocked up a few creaky miles today as a way to signal that Ive restarted. Actually, Garmin wouldn't even let me log on, with some kind of password problem, so I can tell it's been too long since I was last on a bicycle.

time to restart the cycling TSS climb

My silver bicycle has a somewhat chequered history, being made of parts from other bikes cunningly re-assembled.

The underlying frame is a modest aluminium Carrera and it has bits of SRAM road climber gearing on the back and mountain bike doubletap shifters on the front. The wheels are unidentifiable because the original labelling has been removed leaving them -er - black. The saddle is a leather Brookes B17 narrow. Altogether a bicycle built for comfort over speed.

It's been out and about in the winter months because it can easily take fatter tyres and mudguards and even the occasional rack.

Most useful of all, it easily hops on to the turbo, where the little number windows on the gear shifts are a handy way to keep track of the gearing. It is easily my best bike for the turbo, even if it rides differently from a normal road bike.

This Gryphon remix has been my friend as I restart some pedalling for 2015. The Garmin keeps track of my progress and my accumulated TSS (Training Stress Score) graph shows I'm at a very low level at the moment. It is nearly the lowest since I started recording back in 2011. A few of us have entered for the L2B again later in the year, which gives me a friendly target to aim towards.

conkers and a roundabout

Yesterday's woodland walk may have been away from the main road, but when I descended the last hill, the highway and its agents reasserted themselves.

A £10 million road improvement scheme, no less. Yes, ten million quid buys you a replacement roundabout nowadays. This one being constructed over the next year.

More lanes and one of those cut across the middle things, in this case featuring an inserted merging junction. A roundabout short cut, maybe?

I don't think there is a proper word for this complicated formation yet although I expect the commuters will soon come up with an improper one?

In fairness to the road builders, they have done a pretty good job along parts of the A30 where they thinned it down to a single track, added white safety markings and a space for cycles and in some areas an uninterrupted extra dual-use paving for pedestrians and cyclists.

It's all far more low key than the CS routes in the centre of London, but does start to provide clear and improved stretches for cycling.

The replaced dual carriage way sections were often illusory on these stretches in any case, with insufficient distances to make the apparently faster vehicles gain any real time advantage.

A case of 'catch them doing it right'.

pickin' me a bouquet of dogwood flowers

I took yesterday's bike picture with the camera set to 'automatic' and the flash-gun popped up. I couldn't help notice how it made the bike look quite shiny.

No such luck with these pictures of the bike's pedals. Most people seem to use either the original flat pedals that come with bikes, or get those road clipless pedals. For some reason I've always used the mountain bike type clips even with road bikes.

I'm sure there must be some down-side to using them on a road-bike, but I'm not sure that it makes all that much difference.

It also means that I can have the same pedal types everywhere and also that they have little flat pedal surfaces for cycling in other shoes.

The ones I use are called Candy and I notice I still have what would now be a collector's edition of an old type on one bike. The black ones are the long surviving originals, with special plastic inserts for different colour combinations - see my imaginative choice of grey.

The blue and the gold pedals supposedly signify different qualities, although I'd say the blue ones are by far the highest mileage.

And speaking of mileage, I see that I have now passed my 3,000 mile cycling target this year, which I think I decided would constitute a Silver Wagon Wheel award. My original target set back in January was 1,600 miles, so I think I'm doing quite well.

And I'll now see if I can achieve 4,000 miles by the end of the year to achieve a Gold Wagon Wheel. Construction and consumption of the wagon wheel (Silver at this stage) will follow in another post.

* title is a line from a banjo song... called Wagon Wheel.

steel frame and disk brakes being prepped for the upcoming season

This is going to sound sort of daft, what with it being sunny outside at the moment, but I thought I'd better check a different bike in preparation for the upcoming seasonal changes.

After my recent musing about the fixie, I've decided I'll go back to a retro steel frame and some wider tyres for the winter. I took it out for a preview spin to check that the various components were working. I know it's early, but I'd rather be adjusting things in the warm than later on when everything gets a bit more painful.

Truth be told, everything was in good nick, except that I discovered after the trip that the brakes were very slightly 'on' the whole time.

I'd initially put this down to just being on a heavier bike but after I'd finished I thought I'd just spin the wheels to see how they compared with my road bike.

Hmm. Quite a difference. The road bike's wheels will spin for quite a long time (many revolutions), whereas the steel bike was only 2-3 revolutions at most.

I initially wondered about oil and bearings and things like that, but then loosened the brakes just in case they were the culprits. Sure enough, there was a marked improvement. This winter steel bike has disk brakes, so I did that thing with the thin piece of card to get the clearances right and then retightened everything.

I think the next trip will be easier.

Next is to remember where I've put all the little lights and clip on mudguards.

cycling moments

Coincidentally, after my post yesterday, I read FAQ's concurrent blog entry about cycling.

It reminded me of a few of my own non-expert observations during cycling.

City Version

• Recognise that fixies are generally ridden by quick people. Some commuter lanes (like the Embankment around rush-hour) can be very competitive.
• Other cyclists will, in general, be faster than me.
• My own fixie is more or less a vanity project. I have even flipped the rear wheel so that it can freewheel. And yes, it has proper brakes.
• The weight of the security and safety devices needed for London are around 1/3 of the bike's weight.
• Stay away from the left hand side of big vehicles and expect car doors to spring open at a moment's notice.
• Don't tell anyone where your secure secret bike parking spot is located.
• For entertainment, it is worth stopping with the Brompton foldable bike around Westminster or Buckingham Palace and collapsing and reassembling it. There will be tourists genuinely interested in the process. The reassemble with a 'rear-wheel-flip' is particularly crowd pleasing.
• The Brompton's hub gear is surprisingly useful.

Country Version

• Overtaking in hilly countryside needs to be ego-less. The elderly couple or the tourers with laden panniers will inevitably re-appear. It is best to hop off and adjust something.
• The countryside route long hills often have alternative quieter routes which are just as difficult but with less people around to watch the struggle.
• There is a ping-whizz sound from fast cyclists as they overtake.
• It's courteous to make noises when otherwise stealthily overtaking joggers and pedestrians in quiet lanes
• It's good to say hello to people moving at similar speeds in the other direction

Everywhere

• There is a point where getting wet ceases to matter. It is better to just smile in such circumstances and watch motorists give a wide berth.
• Everyone has already heard all the smug quotes about the right clothing.
• Surprisingly small adjustments to the saddle and even the handlebar height can make quite a difference to the amount of aches and pain.
• A small camera is better than a mobile phone when needing an excuse to stop for a rest because it can look more obviously purposeful.
• Take the small bag with the spare bits, mini pump, emergency £10 note and all-in-one tool.
• Even a heavily squashed Nutri-grain bar at the bottom of a rucksack can be extremely welcome after a certain amount of pedalling.

I'm sure there's more and I may come back to add some at a later date.

cycling update

I've been keeping the cycling going, when possible, and just uploaded some more stats from the little Garmin gadget on the handlebars. Amazingly, despite the European vacation gap, I managed to keep up with my minimum of 160 miles per month in August (262 miles).

I've already passed my original target for 2012 (miles and calories) but back in January when I set it I said that I'd low-ball the target so that I could feel good about being ahead rather than always trying to catch up.

The interesting thing now is that I'm within sight of the 3,000 mile mark for 2012, which is a kind flattened version of London to Athens, zig-zagging via Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Rome, Venice and Zagreb. I shall nonetheless consider it as my own Olympian journey when I click over the 3,000 mile mark some time in the next month or so.

No gold medals, but maybe a chocolate wagon wheel* when I get there.

* The XXL sized Olympic medals this year remind me of chocolate wagon wheels, although I suspect the currently sold wagon wheels are smaller nowadays. I will test them in due course.

Below: The truth about wagon wheels

reset to London co-ordinates

I suppose there comes a point when I need to post another straightforward London picture. The type with a bus and a taxi in it.

A sort of punctuation that the holiday type gadding around is coming to a close for a while and more normal work type things will resume.

We've actually had a few trips around different parts of London over the last few days. One day I was back on the Air Line - which I discovered others had thought was some sort of hoax, although I can vouch for its authenticity, having made four trips on it now.

I know it is supposed to be a sensible way to cross the Thames, but it is also a good tourist type trip, especially if coupled with a look around the Dome and maybe a trip along the river on one of the fast Clippers.

Suffice to say we've done all of these things over the last few days, including noticing the changes at the Dome for the Paralympics, which was all signposted and had various entry gates ready for use.

Across at Royal Docks there were more gates and systems linked with the ExCel centre, and I must admit at one point to getting confused at a roundabout that had been coned and nearly started to go around it the 'French' way.

Oops. But I do know I am back in London.

Really.

squeezing TSS and IF metrics from the Garmin

Thursday evening I was out for an agreeable supper in a fancy restaurant. It's another one of the times when I've not got around to posting anything to the blog, but it does open a slot for me to back-post in a handy reference table.

The handy reference table is for the general opposite of what I was doing Thursday evening. Eating duck egg amuse bouche followed by courses that could have ended with a serious amount of chocolate (except I managed to side-step the pudding).

So my handy reference table comes courtesy of an article by two wheel blogs about cycling.

Some might know I've set up my bike with a gadget that stores various metrics that can be uploaded to spreadsheets and the internet. There's all the usual stuff about speed, pedalling rate and calories, but I thought it would be interesting to try out the extra measures (I'd call them proxy metrics) that show (a) how demanding a particular ride is and (b) what state it's left me in. I've been using trainingpeaks.com for this.

There's a measure called Intensity Factor (IF) as a way to show the difficulty of a particular session and the Training Stress Score (TSS) relates to the personal impact it will have and how long to recover.

There's loads of cleverness around all of this, but I'm more interested in figuring out whether one ride I do is measurably more demanding than another. One way I tell is by how clammy I feel by the end, but I thought it would be fun to play around with the numbers too.

Hence the simple ready reckoner, which gives me a sense of what is happening.

I thought I'd also post my current plots from when I started the current measures in January.

It shows that I could ride a fairly short distance and it would seem like a fairly 'intense' ride. Through January the perceived intensity of individual rides started to lessen (see the blue dots dropping), presumably as I got more used to what I was doing. The actual loading of the rides varied somewhat (the red dots for each ride), but were mainly within a middle band.

The most interesting line is the blue one which is gently rising. That's supposed to be my general bicycling fitness, which does seem to be going up. Empirically that also seem to be the case because as an example I did around 18 miles this morning with relative ease. I'd have been spluttering a bit more a few weeks ago when I did this.

The pink dip in the middle of the range is a week when I was away somewhere and didn't do any cycling at all. It shows my residual degree of fatigue dropping until I restarted (it soon gets back to the same level though).

I'm doing this for fun, and don't necessarily have the charting model very well calibrated at the moment, but it sort of feels as if its saying the right kind of things.

I've also separately noticed that except for weekends I seldom cycle for more than an hour in one go. I'm thinking I should tip over the hour in the week now the weather and hours of daylight are improving.

If I can get it working properly I'll probably post an update, because rather than just counting miles and calories, this has some interesting potential.

For fans of detail, the amuse bouche evening is the second red/blue dot pair from the right hand end of the x-axis. Oops, do I see a small dip afterwards?

cycling with a statistical edge

I seem to be keeping up with my bicycling plans and have managed to avoid revising my targets downward as well. The biggest change to my original plan was to move the start of the week from Monday to Sunday for cycling.

That gives an encouragement to cycle on Sunday at the 'start' of the week, when I can get ahead of the plan. I still have a Saturday at the end for any last minute catchup miles as well.

This week, it's only Tuesday and I notice I only have 9 miles left to finish the target I set for the week.

I shall hesitate to increase the target number though, because I'm sure there are weeks when I'm away and then it can be more difficult to find the relevant slots.

To make the counting simpler, I upload the miles from the bike speedo gadget (its a Garmin Edge 800) and the system I use lets me set the targets and will monitor them for me. Actually it monitors a wild range of things well beyond those that I currently use.

I think it's better than me trying to remember to keep notes and I only have to clip the little unit onto my bike to be fully wired and counted. Ant+ Personal Area Networks are a good idea.

I discovered that the Garmin Connect system will also let me set up all kinds of other targets too, so I've been adding some such as monthly targets and moving away from just miles to other things as well. I've included some deliberately easy ones in the set too, so that I get some positive feedback and encouragement along the way. The longest ones I've set up are for the whole year, in miles and in calories.

Update : and as I've also been for a spin today, here's the 'after' from the 'before' version shown above. Those targets with 4 days and 7 days left will scroll away at the end of the week into a history section, but a new set will then appear to replace them.

So far, so good!

Cycling London Skyride 2011

It's the third London Skyride I've cycled, each year with a slightly different route. This time I arrived quite early (before the official start time) and that meant I could crack around the mainly flat route relatively unimpeded. An addition this time was a short spell south of the river over Westminster Bridge.

By the second loop (Westminster/ Buckingham Palace/ The Mall/ Trafalgar Square/ Whitehall/ Embankment/ Blackfriars/ Tower of London/ Embankment/ Westminster Bridge/ Waterloo/ Parliament) there were a good number of people joining in, but the route was still free-flowing.

Already there were a wide variety of cycles, from super fast carbon fibre machines being spun by Great Britain athletes to trikes and mini-bikes with stabilisers being driven by four-year-olds. Not forgetting the penny-farthings, recumbents and vintage steel frames.

There were also noticeably more of the London cycle scheme bikes being used this time. I guess now they are access for all it makes it a lot easier. Everyone was smiling and I could see proper shadows on the ground.

This was a good moment for a brief stop and a chance to take a few pictures in St. James Park whilst sipping a cup of coffee (free Gatorade for all if preferred) as well as a short listen to the entertaining (don't know name) rock band. See if you can spot the 'friends of the band' in amongst the photos?

On circuit three there were rather a lot of traffic jams caused by the reported 60,000 people attending the day. There were also a few minor spills, which seemed to mainly involve a few tearful younger ones who had slid to the ground. The general spirit was very good-natured with everyone giving way and generally enjoying the views around London.

My cycle helmet and the high viz bib provided helped keep the spots of rain away on my final lap although the sky did look as if it was getting ready for something more significant.

Great fun as London and Great Britain also becomes more bike-friendly.

I noticed my tee-shirt is looking somewhat the worse for wear as I returned home.

my cycling encounters a car treasure hunt

This morning I re-pumped the thin tyres on my speedy bike and decided to go out for a spin in a few twisty lanes. I did okay with the hills but had inadvertently chosen a route which was also being used for one of those car treasure hunts. Clearly popular, turning the normally tranquil single track lanes into something akin to school run traffic congestion.

It was out of sync with my own mindset, which was to meander and occasionally pause to look at cows and horses. There was revving of engines, awkward five point turns, large scale maps and plenty of clipboards and mobile phones in evidence. I also seemed to be invisible to several of the motorists who were determined to accelerate along the very centre of the mainly single track, requiring me to pull over to let them noisily pass.

It wasn't simply a case of diverting to another route, I suspect that most of the area I'd selected was part of their course.

I did adjust my route and diverted briefly past a small trading estate which brought a wry smile to my face. It was a location I'd used when I was scribbling my second attempt at a novel and needed somewhere to place some folk who were up to no good. A few days ago I was sent an allegedly final draft of novel one, and seeing the sheds reminded me that I've a partly written novel two, which could be pulled back into daylight.

I'll admit that before some structured shopping this afternoon, I've just spent an hour with Scrivener starting to re-arrange what I sometimes refer to as 'The Square'.