If you’re a strong climber, Relentless24.
Bit of an exercise is self torture for non-climbers though.

Excellent variety in the descending, few rocky sections, few flowy sections and a bit of muddy off piste stuff.

Trying to join.
Not easy getting under the 100pts!

Come to the east coast.
I can’t promise a significant improvement in the weather, but there’s far fewer midges.

What happened to 26″wheels?

They were a ploy by bike manufacturers to milk consumers before moving onto proper size wheels

Breakfast: Toast
2nd Breakfast: Porridge pot
Morning Snack: 4? Bourbon Creams
Lunch: 2 Slices of Chicken and Ham pie from the Morrisons Deli counter
Afternoon Snack: TBD
Dinner: Basa Fillet and Chips

Hidden motor 😉

+1 for the 29er/B+ HT movement.

Edit:

That’ll do you from DH tracks to the local chaingang with a change of wheels and dropper.

Maybe you can keep up with the local chaingang on a FS MTB, but that’s not particularly likely for the rest of us mere mortals!

Does MSE have a gaming mode option to ensure you aren’t interrupted when you are about to unleash your best leeroy jenkins impersonation?

Or in my case:

The ones that enjoy the hot weather will often be the ones moaning in wintersummer that it’s too cold

13°C on the bike last night, forgot arm warmers and my elbows nearly turned into ice cubes 😥

Just get a dogtablet. End of thread.

Loads of cats on youtube, and no need for food or pet insurance. 😀

Put some mile in using the shots and see how you get on. Never ever test something for the first time on ride/ race day.

+1

I don’t think the closed roads effect will be that good.

It may well be.
Ride London is widely thought of to be one of the fastest courses going, and its not uncommon at all to hear people say they are an hour faster than other similar length sportives.

And at the risk of being blunt/rude, if you genuinely think you are going to take 8.5hrs on such a fast course, maybe doing some training would have been a good idea

As I said to my friend when he emailed me a link to the event last night:
At £1.50/km someone is having a laugh.

Err, hard question to answer.
If all cars stopped working tomorrow, i’d be better placed than most to manage without. Work <10mi away, parents <10mi away, local coop, and Tesco only 5mi or a bus ride away. And no kids to ferry around places.
So in theory, if I had to manage, I could manage.
However, it’d make life rubbish. None of my cycling would be for fun any more, and my experience of public transport is generally that i’d rather cut my toes off with a spoon than use it.

Kinda obvious one on a MTB forum, but:
Ride my bike well instead of working hard at it to be at best mediocre.

@goldenwonder, i wouldn’t say its lacking, the shifts are always perfect, its just annoying doing it every few mins for hours at a time. When shimano make a nice subcompact i’ll probably take that route with an 11-28. But given that they just released details of new ultegra and it doesn’t include one who knows when that will be. I’m pretty sure until sub compact is widely adopted 1x is a valid alternative for many riders

@goldenwonder, there’s one very good reason for wanting 1x on a road bike. If you regularly average around 16-17 mph in gently rolling terrain you end up changing up front (and twice at back) all the time, and its a royal pita!

Feel free to send me some ‘hot’. I love it, and at 15deg its still borderline arm warmer weather here.

It’s 15°C and raining outside – this heatwave thing is a myth

@CH, have you considered taking the bull by the horns as it were in the last lap? Takes luck out of the equation.

Sounds as though you stayed fresh the whole way round so should have plenty in the tank. Put yourself on the front coming into the chicane and then go, you might not win, but how many are going to come round you if you are putting out a 1400W sprint?
Not going raking back through the whole thread, but don’t i remember Nath getting some points from starting the sprint a long way out?

I always recommend a bit of time planning.
Time X 3-4 days a week is bike/run time, remove as many excuses as possible. If rain stops you, get a rain jacket or an indoor trainer and ride anyway.
No appointments, no visitors, an unmissable appointment in the diary. Might take a month or 2 to get into a routine, but once you are in one it’ll seem normal.

Only my moustache

The new Arkose LTD looks nice.
But if you’ve got a hardtail with some fast tubeless tyres, then you’ve already probably got the bike you seek.
On anything more rough than the most sedate fire road the bigger volume of a 29er race tyre is just faster and more comfortable.

If i was going for an adventure/gravel bike i’d be looking at something like the Mason Bokeh with two sets of wheels. That way you’ve got a gravel bike and an audax bike all in one.

I took my forks to get serviced once, does that count?

Training stress and general life stress both add to the overall load as it were.
Training at a ‘normal’ level on the bike – even with a well structured plan – can be too much when rest isn’t actually rest.

IANAD, but pretty sure the ‘cure’ is going to be the same whether you’ve got something viral or just simply gubbed yourself – rest harder.

Like a couple of others, i haven’t tried road+ yet either, but running 700x38c with 45mm guards on my charge plug. A little slower than 23c when doing over 20mph on smooth roads, but actually faster over the all too common terrible surfaces, and so much more comfortable.

@aracer, unless you know something specifically about that cycle lane that isn’t shown in the photo i’m not sure how you can claim the road doesn’t narrow after the cycle lane ends. It looks fairly clear to me that it ends at an angle as the bridge starts.
If the cyclist went straight on as you suggest they’d veer across both carriageways into the police cars.

But anyway, all we actually know about the case is we’ve got:
A definitely terrible cycle lane
A probably careless driver
A possibly careless cyclist

Certainly not enough to point the blame directly at anyone except perhaps whoever created that cycle lane.

Earth is a conspiracy, it only exists in the minds of the brainwashed

Off to the Trossachs Ton sportive tomorrow.
Highly looking forward to leaving the house at 05:30 to leave behind forecast sunny weather in Fife for a ride in the rain instead…..

Different ants seem to respond differently to different bait for me.
Have several nests, driveway, front lawn, back garden. Sprinkle granules on/around nest in the back garden and they gleefully all rush out to carry dinner home and kill themselves.
Driveway ants on the other hand pick the granules up and take them away from the nest then just carry on.

Basically, buy every ant killing product you can find on Amazon, and then spend a month experimenting to see what works.

Not very helpful i know – good luck 😀

@DezB, the thing is, we don’t know the answer, we weren’t in court, and we haven’t seen the evidence.

I know for sure i’ve made mistakes in traffic whilst on the bike before, and if my mistake got me squished by a truck, i’d hope the driver wouldn’t get locked up for it.

Equally, i’ve come very close to being knocked off by idiot drivers a couple of times and i’m strongly considering getting a 360° camera as in some cases it’d be the only proof.

I’m all for protecting cyclists, and handing down harsher punsihments for poor driving, but as with anything else, innocent until proven guilty.

The spark is ‘almost’ a good bargain, but the wheels have shrunk along with the price 😆
At least it does actually meet the OP’s original requirements unlike most other suggestions so far.

@oldracer, have you tried putting sky news on in the last 3 days?
There is aparantly only one bit of news in the whole world.

Sorry, you say you want a lightish XC machine and are looking at hefty trail bikes? I’m confused 😕

Exactly how drivers think and exactly why cycle lanes in this country and by-and-large totally useless, or **** dangerous.

Basically yes.
One of the primary reasons for cycle lanes is to remove cyclists from the general flow of traffic.
Mostly, they allow drivers to continue on interrupted, and the ‘expected’ outcome for a driver is they continue following the road and everything is fine. What the cycle lane has effectively done is remove a rolling hazard from the road.
Unfortunately most of our cycle lanes are added as an afterthought, and aren’t really fit for purpose (like the one above). There’s one in StAndrews for example that’s nearly always full of parked cars, and is so broken up at one end you need a MTB to ride it. The end result is it forces you to repeatedly move out into a flow of traffic that may have quite a large closing speed, and may not be expecting you.

Basically, I don’t use cycle lanes that are going to force me into traffic like that as imo they actually increase my risk of being run over than just taking a normal position on the main carriageway.

Well looking at the pictures I too can’t see how that’s not careless driving. What was she supposed to do?! Stop becuase the kerb wiggles out?

This country.

Or careless cycling for not looking/signalling when ‘swapping lane’ onto the main carriageway when the cycle lane ends?

It’s one of those cycle lanes that personally i’d never be in as they present more hazard than being in the middle of the road.

Alternatively, scrap Trident

Wouldn’t really scratch the surface.
Did a bit of googling on that the other day.
We are currently spending ~7.5%GDP on NHS.
The estimated lifetime cost of Trident renewal varies depending on which source you look at, but looks to be an annual cost of ~0.2%GDP.
Even the fairly modest LD pledge for 1% Income tax rise for NHS would raise more than scrapping Trident.

Then there’s all the rubbish about free parking etc. why spend money on clinical care when you can use it providing subsidies for the folk who can afford to drive?!

Because its basically a tax on either being sick or having sick family members. And unless you live in a city, a car may be the only practical way to get there. Bit harsh to ask parents for £3 a time to visit a sick child twice a day.
But I agree, I’d rather spend the money on actual care than free car parking.

Or do you want the standards to go down and keep the funding the same?

I don’t think anyone actually wants standards to go down, but we’ve been living off artificially high standards based on debt (both personal and national) for a long time. Standards and quality of life are quite likely to stagnate or deteriorate for a while until things re-balance. And I don’t think thats unique to the UK, and its being shown throughout the developed world (hence Trump).

100% take the bike, fabulous place to ride, although being a mountain range, limited flat options.

Seems to me that JH is just trying to do his job as his boss has told him to do it.
Get more results with less resources – not much different to 1000’s of other middle managers hated by their employees in other companies/sectors up and down the country.

ninfan makes a very good point about ‘adequate funding’, and imo the way the world is these days, there’s so many people that would be unhappy no matter how much money you throw at the NHS.
Great Auntie Doris has X terminal illness, we can extend her life by 6 months for: £1k? £10k? £100k? £1mil? £10mil? Where do you draw the line? To her loved ones you cant put a price on it, but someone somewhere has to assess whether £XX would be better spent on Auntie Doris or something else.

With new and more expensive drugs/treatments being developed all the time, costs are only going to increase and much as we would like there to be, there isn’t an unlimited amount of money.