Anyone who runs unless it’s being employed as a method of survival (i.e. escaping kidnap, large carnivores, kids, wife, etc.,) should be summarily executed. They’re all miserable bar-stewards.

A wise man once said that in the wild you don’t actually need to outrun the predator, just be ahead of your companions.

So as a regular runner and therefore probably faster than you on my feet… see ya 🙂

Thanks v much – some really useful info there.
Confirms my initial thoughts about how to go about it and what the issues might be. (I work in Marketing and the basic methodology of defining objectives and understanding your audience’s needs is the same…)

Not there yet (still 39!) but getting older means you know a bit more about life and people, know what works for you and what doesn’t. Much easier to spot the shysters and game-players and being confident enough to walk away from them…
Downside is some people become very stubborn and inflexible in their views, which is less helpful…
Oh and I’ll be running as a Vet from May onwards which means less competition 🙂

A few thoughts:
1. Get a running shop to check your shoes are the right ones for you. Also consider Superfeet insoles
2. Don’t increase your distance from one week to the next by more than 10%
3. Work on your core strength for speed/strength and flexibility to keep injury at bay
4. Stretch at the end of each run
5. You can’t out-train a bad diet
6. Enter a few races – it helps motivate you to run regularly
7. You’ll learn a huge amount if you join a club. They’re not just for fast runners and there’s literally hundreds of years accumulated experience in any decent sized club
8. Watch out for injury – and stop when you get injured, it’s not worth the long term risk
9. If you want to get fast, speed work and track sessions are a lot more fun than a regular run (harder work tho’)
9. It’s the most time-efficient and cheap way I’ve found to get fit
10. It’s not anything like as much fun as riding a bike, sadly…

To me the issue would be saying – ‘def here Weds’ and then not delivering. That’s simply poor service in any industry
Why give a guarantee you’re not in control of, which they clearly weren’t?
How about ‘we’ll try for Weds but can’t guarantee’ it.

You’d have to be a nasty piece of work to troll that thread

I tried to smoke when I was 17. Luckily a friend told me I looked like a dick… + my grandad died on my 17th birthday – drowned on a load of fluid on his lungs right in front of my gran, which kind of gave me a useful perspective on the reality of it.

What amazes me now, given everything that’s known and all the government messages, is how come people are still coming to the conclusion that it’s a good idea to start…

Did Island Peak in 2004. I like the way they describe it as a walk in the park – it was a total beasting!
Spending time with Sherpa’s made me realise how much we have in the West and how much we take it for granted. The most generous people I’ve ever met. Looking forward to making it back sometime

Yes, I suppose some people think that by ignoring trail closure signs they’re sticking it to “the man”. Actually though, they’re sticking it to the trailbuilders, who are anything but faceless, remote bureaucrats. Plus, indirectly, themselves and other MTBers, for reasons such as those given by wordnumb.

I think there’s a fair bit of this. Some people don’t like being told to do anything. They just need to grow up.
I do regular trail maintenance days and it’s funny when those who’ve ignored signs and nearly ride into us never have the balls so say sorry and admit they’ve been dicks.
And we’re not the man – we’re all keen MTBers who see the value in putting something back. As it happens the organisation who arranges the trail maintenance is a charity…

Your guy sounds like a psychopath. They’re not always serial killers, and more common than you might think.
I had a boss who was a psychopath. Not so much anti-social like the OP’s but utterly devious and manipulative… very few people who knew him wanted to carry on knowing him… felt sorry for his wife and kid…
The Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells was pretty depraved IIRC

I’m not sure we really need BMI to know if we’re in good health or not do we? Surely people can tell how much fat is too much? Even if they don’t admit it/do anything about it…
The state this country’s got itself into is shocking. Being of sensible weight now puts you in a minority.
And we’re nowhere near having to deal with the full costs of it yet either… if anything’s going to wreck the NHS it’s people’s inability to look after themselves…

Don’t know what to say that I think could help here but pass my sympathies to you and your family and friends. This must be incredibly painful for everyone.
No kids of my own but would be in bits if I lost any of my godsons or nephews.
From that perspective I suspect friends and family will want to be there for you, to help you through the pain.
And as others have said, sharing the grief and accepting the help available rather than trying to carry it all yourself would seem to be a healthy way forward. Full credit for having the courage to post on here.
Best wishes

Brooess are you down here also? We met a few years back on one of the STW meets.

In that weird and wonderful STW way I think we’ve met twice!
Surrey Hills (I think njee20 organised it) and Peaks Pootle just over 2 years ago… I temporarily relocated to Cheshire until I remembered how often it rained and came back down South 🙂

Lucky you 🙂 weather’s better down here and economy is in a better shape than anywhere else. Plus it’s a great city anyway.
I have 4 bikes summer road, winter road, commuter and MTB and they all get plenty of use. There’s plenty of great riding in Surrey Hills, Swinley, Chilterns and various other pockets.
If it were me I’d try and bring MTB and the road bike cos there’s plenty to do with both.
If you end up SE London then Dulwich Paragon are a really sociable road club

1. Get some proper 121 coaching. The techniques are all well-known now, and the coaches know how to teach it. It can transform your riding
2. Find a pump track and go and play on it lots
3. Before you go out for a ride, read the bits of the Brian Lopes book you want to practice. Go and do the things he says. Come home and re-read the same bits and remind yourself of the techniques. Do that for every ride over a few months and it all becomes natural and you don’t have to think about it so much anymore.
4. Enjoy yourself, MTB is not a competition!

I’ve had it used against me ‘performance managed out’ as it were.
The process was a sham. There was nowhere in the process which allowed me to make the point my manager was a) taking credit for my work b) basically saying his boss didn’t like me (as opposed to me not doing my job as per the job description) and c)point out the fact the company was failing fast had not been mentioned to me throughout the 3-interview recruitment process.

Over the years I’ve had 8 direct reports, most of them promoted whilst working with me. IMO you don’t need a process to get the best performance out of people, you manage people every single day with every interaction you have with them.

The basic principles are easy, you just need to give a shit about other people’s needs, help them when they need it, provide some leadership and forgive them their mistakes (whilst helping them learn lessons from it). Targets and whatnot send people in the wrong direction…

It’s why I never want to go perm in a corporate ever again. Either contracting as I am now (and get to avoid all that stuff) or work for a small owner-managed business where this stuff is done informally

Duck/Gaffer tape is tried and tested. I superglue mine for longevity.
For stuff which needs to flex a lot I’ve found Spinnaker Repair Tape pretty good too. It’s more flexible than Duck tape and made of ripstop fabric. Not too pricey either

I would email them.
I run 183mm without any problems

No riding but spent 5 hours walking in a whiteout on South Downs Way. Quite a few runners out (must’ve been hard going) and was passed by one guy rattling along at a hell of a pace on a 29er. Great day. Much more interesting than average winter day

Back to the OP I think we need to take care with taking a few recent media stories and treating it as empirical evidence. We all know that the media choose which stories to publish, and how prominent they make them…
True, a few of the most shocking recent stories seem to have involved Asian men but it’s not like the Asian’s have a monopoly on organised abuse of the vulnerable is it?
Jimmy Saville, Catholic priests anyone?
I think looking at it through a cultural/religious lens is unhelpful and probably misleading. At the end of the day abusive behaviour by ANYONE is the problem…

Didn’t ride but went for a running session on the track at lunchtime in Paddington – 2 inches and couldn’t see the lanes. All good fun 🙂

I’ve used to be a suit in ad agencies and loved working with creatives. They all loved to push boundaries and were naturally unconventional – that’s why they came up with great ideas.
Try and suppress people like that and put them in a conventional environment with ‘rules’ and you stifle them…

I’ve worked in large corporate clients and small ad agencies and I know which is most fun way to spend a working week. I don’t like large corporate either – Ricky Gervais was spot on with his observations. It simply doesn’t suit some people to fit in with the group. Nothing wrong with that IMO. Life would be boring if we all followed the crowd.

to the OP, my recommendation is if you don’t like large corporate then go and work for a small, owner-managed company, it’s much more fun being yourself and working with like-minded people

Don’t forget a lot of the money consumers have been spending on retail for the last 15 years was debt.
We’re now paying off that debt and saving.
There was massive overcapacity in retail, businesses which survived because there was too much money flying around looking for some stuff to buy…
Now we’re thinking a bit more about what we spend our money on, we’re sticking with the businesses which give us what we want, the businesses which were never that good anyway, are going to the wall
It’s a necessary correction… why we got so hooked on shopping as the best idea we could have for spending our spare time is beyond me…

It’s not snobbery to question why a high-end, aspirational brand would distribute via a mass market non-specialist retailer. They’re just not well-matched.

Association is everything in positioning a brand. From a marketing/brand strategy point of view this is a very odd decision and a real mismatch. It’s likely to make Pinarello a lot less desirable IMO, it takes away all the exclusivity which is currently part of the Pinarello appeal

Sounds like a strategy by someone who doesn’t like Team GB winning!

More likely, it’s a strategy for applying pressure to UCI and bringing them down – no way the national teams will allow cycling to be removed from Olympics because IOC have no faith in UCI’s ability to police doping.

Totalshell I’m worried that you’re right. Which is totally unreasonable… the point of a tax code and PAYE I thought, was to take my tax at source, not harass me for big chunks of cash months later…

Regular cyclists have the body of someone 10 years younger apparently (although roadies have more grey hair from the shock of all the close passes!)
I think I look young for my age. It’s great 🙂

Just to say thanks to Cheesyfeet for the original PSA – I was given a £40 voucher for Xmas so I made sure I got in there on Saturday morning and spent it!
With 25% off I got 6 albums for my £40. All good 🙂

An interesting sign for me about the changing nature of music formats is that I’ve had a separates system and CDs since the early 90’s because I always wanted the best sound quality I could get. Not a massive hi-fi buff but ‘bothered’ about sound quality. For the last year I’ve been running Bose PC speakers through my laptop and iTunes and more than happy with the sound quality, in exchange for the lack of CDs in my lounge and easy accessibility of my tunes through iTunes.

So even a semi hi-fi buff prefers downloads and a PC… hard formats are dead IMO.

1. You’re more likely to successful and therefore employable if you do something you really like doing… IME it means you’ll be motivated to do a good job, and break through any barriers in your way.
Too many people* spend their working life doing something they don’t even enjoy, it’s a waste

2.

I’m adequate at all five of them (projected 5 A’s)

sort out your perfectionism! It’ll hold you back

3. Hardly anyone at your age knows what they really want to do – most graduates don’t either. Do a degree you’re interested in and then see what you think would be my advice

* including me!

Bit niave. Dopers just step ahead of the game.

Looks like that wasn’t quite the case…

To some degree they doped in way which could get them round the tests (refusing to answer the door when the testers came round – not hard!)

But the other side of their strategy appears to have been working on governing bodies so that for those times when the testing regime did catch them, they could simply avoid it being properly dealt with.

This strategy has also now been kicked in the knackers…

On the road descents today (without pedalling) I was constantly on the brakes after catching the riders in front.

I get this on my road bikes. I’ve assumed it’s a combination of being relatively slim across the chest (less wind resistance) and very smooth hubs…

My road bikes are like that – can cause problems group riding tbh, I have to keep enough space so I don’t pile into the back of the riders ahead slowing up…
No idea how or why…

Cynicism – knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. A terrible way IMO to spend the few years we have to live life…

People don’t seem to appreciate that what LA did was not a simple thing to do and required a certain type of extreme personality to deliver. And even then he’s not been successful – he’s been found out. Very very unlikely to be repeated…

The likelihood of Brad being able to dope and not get caught given all the attention given to both him and doping these days is pretty unlikely. And as said above, he has no record at all which suggests any reason to be suspicious.

If you love cycling, have some hope the battle’s beginning to be won FFS!

Time for the UK to grow up and recognise that poor driving skills are a much bigger issue than poor cycling skills…

Personally I stick with flats on MTB, MTB Eggbeaters and shoes on commuter for quick release, and proper road clipless and shoes for the road.

I generally reckon there’s good reasons for MTB and Road shoes/pedals being different, so go with it… if a single design was optimal then that’s what manufacturers and all the riders would have chosen surely?

But if your road rides are relatively short and sensible (sub 40miles) then maybe MTB clipless will be ok. For longer rides and/or pushing yourself, I would expect sore spots and lower efficiency would make you wish you had a proper road setup

Bromley 10k was interesting this morning. Billed a a fun run to be fair, and very few club tops to be seen. Waiting for final results to be posted but it looks like I was top 10 with a 40.51 – which IME means it was a slow field…

😯 if she pulled out onto the road without looking properly it would be more appropriate to apologise for nearly injuring you rather than asking for ££ to fix her car!

Mikewsmith and others, your objection comes across as being founded in snobbery that someone would be so beneath you to want to attempt the challenge and are ignoring the OPs very sensible approach to doing something they see as worth doing.

As one of the ‘others’, please can you re-read the BMC piece. It’s about consideration for the locals, consideration for Mountain Rescue (charity btw) poo on the mountain and sustainability of the paths…

Keva – Member

That’s weird because if you turn up to any 10k event and finish in 40min you’ll more than likely be in the top 10% of runners.

I don’t agree with that at all! Maybe you’re talking about fun runs, but most of the local 10k club races are won in around 30-31 mins and 40 min would see you in the bottom half! Or maybe races have got slower since I used to do them?

Speaking as a 39:35 PB, sub 40 is most definitely NOT ballpark for a regular runner. A sub-40 will see you in the top 25% of a 10k – not a fun run but one with club runners too. A combination of natural talent, speedwork and bloody-mindedness needed for a sub-40. A new runner would have to be very talented to see sub-40 with only a few weeks training.

Look at the tables in the post on the previous stage which provides empirical (rather than subjective) figures…

Metallica 10 times I think – poss getting better with age.
Cardiacs about 15 times (but they usually only cost £5!)
REM 3 times
Radiohead 3 times