Nice, that would indeed be a welcome addition.

“NOOOO” tends top stop them in their tracks

May as well have this on a speaker system on a perma loop when using shared use paths. Hence why we also have threads about why cyclists choose to cycle on the road not the paths.

Tri bars with no bar plugs. Once they’ve been impaled by a bicycle once they should be less dopey in future.

Disclaimer: may not look like this in Decmeber/January

Yes, image above was taken on one of 3 days a year it doesn’t look like this:

Personally though I would want something a bit more fun to drive ie rwd.

The fun in the Leon is the opposite kind of fun – just throw it at corners and it rockets round them with an apparent infinite supply of grip. Still sometimes miss that car – don’t miss needing a new set of top spec tyres every 6k miles though :P

Slightly off topic, but those hoods are an abomination, absurdly long.
Great if you are getting aero in your race winning solo break, not so great for the other 99.99% of the time.

Who wins for the best looking bike?

Santa Cruz and Specialized have both done really nice looking bikes.
Ratboy’s is best looking at the moment, but going on form he’ll crash it in practice, qualifying and race run, and it’ll no longer be looking quite so nice.

I personally wouldn’t run high pressures in non tubeless tyres. It’s one thing at MTB or CX pressures. But on a road bike with a non tubeless tyre you’ve got a far higher chance of it blowing off. What happens if that’s at speed going round a corner or in front of a car?

I wouldn’t risk it. There are lots of good road tubeless tyres – schwalbe, hutchinson or my current favourite IRC

Agreed – last thing you want is it blowing off rim whilst cornering at 35mph with a double decker bus coming in the other direction.

Do they do any decent sets for XC?
Either i’m failing horribly at navigating their site, or they seem a bit on the heavy side.

Great.

I’m going. Heard positive reviews about this:

Kings Arms Hotel Castle Douglas

Anyone been?

Yes, its where I stayed when I went.
Staff were friendly, room was fine, dinner was average – but nothing to complain about, breakfast was good.
Would happily go back again.

Thing is those narrow spikey things are good until you have a couple miles of road or fireroad tonlink trails up..

Anyone used an HRII on the rear?

Thing is those HRII things are good until you have a couple of miles of road or fireroad to ling trails up….. :P

I had the FR(170) great to drive, cornered like it was on rails, but already struggled to get the power down until you got the tyres up to heat. Can see it being hard to really utilise the extra 120bhp without 4WD.

To be fair, it doesn’t take a genius to see that Hans Dampf isn’t going to be good in mud.

indeed, my 800 crashed at ~12.5hrs last year fortunately I noticed quite quickly and managed to save activity and start a new one.

As Jonba said, make sure you have some way of keeping Garmin and backup battery dry whilst charging.

Also, have you a strategy for ride/rest yet?
As per Relentless thread, unless you are planning a top20 finish you are probably going to be spending at least a couple of hours in the pits resting/eating, so you could just consider plugging in the external pack whilst stopped – saves you worrying about an on-bike setup.

You could maybe try just riding to work?
The ladies are never going to be impressed by your crazy commuting prowess no matter how many other mamils you overtook on the way to the office.

I wouldn’t travel all the way from yorkshire just for Kirroughtree, but several stanes are close together so you could easily add Dalbettie and/or Mabie to your trip too.

Erm, XKings and Trailblazers 8O

Hardpack is still hardpack even when wet!

ITB? Irritable toxic bowel?

Certainly could be that – too much squatting in the bushes is well known for causing knee troubles….

Alternatively, it could be:
iliotibial band

Is it OK for me to want disc brakes on one of my road bikes but not on the other?

I feel like I’m sitting on the fence here.

I certainly hope that’s OK, cos that’s what I want too.

it’ll be a mental knock just at the start of a big plan

That’s a tricky one, i can see exactly where you’re coming from. Easy to see a number lower than expected and have your head go down.

However, for me its illogical to have a mental knock before the plan starts.
The FTP will purely be a starting baseline, neither something to be excited or disturbed about – its what happens over the following months that can lead to disappointment.
The risk is that if an old FTP value is used which is too high then it leads to a month of continual perceived under-performance as target figures will in fact be too hard.

If you are feeling physically fresh i’d go ahead and do the test anyway.
Worst case scenario is that you under-perform slightly and have value set a few (single figures most likely) watts too low for first training block, which will A) be no disaster, and B) give you a mental boost when it shows an improvement next time.

Interesting table – suggests the opposite of what is commonly published.
For Example

This one looks like a useful source of info:
http://bikedynamics.co.uk/kneepain.htm

A 10p ziplock freezer bag from Tesco

If i was being critical of my set up i would say the saddle might be too far forward but it cant be by very much. Plumb line from knee when pedals in horizontal position ends up about 5mm in front of the axle spindle, i think all prevoius bikes were on the spindle.

Correcting that would be a good starting point.

The pain i get runs down the back of the knee and actually up about 5 inches in to the hamstring. Its not painful as such it feels like when going to the gym for the first time and then lifting heavy weights and the next day your muscles feel stiff and tender to the touch. It is very tender around the fibula and you can kinda trace the tenderness up and down from there.

And that would suggest saddle too high.

I thought for cycling the best estimate for calorie burn = power x hours x 4
If you don’t have a power meter, using Strava’s estimated power is probably still more accurate than any HRM derived value.

It is a difficult age for sure.
You are doing a bunch of stuff at school that seems pointless (and mostly is pointless) to get some grades that in a year or two no-one will care about because you have some more recent and more advanced qualifications.
The only thing that motivated me was that I knew it was the path of least resistance to one day earning enough to have a fairly comfortable life.
I surely wasn’t motivated by a career, because I certainly didn’t know what I wanted to do (in some ways I still don’t 20 years later).

Rather than sit down, and put pressure on, try sitting down and asking what he actually wants from life? Odds are the answer will be he doesn’t know. The next step from there is maybe talking to friends and see if you can organise a few days ‘work experience’ in a number of different fields. Maybe one of those will trigger an interest and seem much more relevant than 4th year maths/english.

Or in other words they’re not burning as many calories as they think or that their devices are reporting…

Lots of people think they’re an exception – until they work out how many calories they’ve been eating, east less – then start losing weight.

Got to agree with this. Got a friend who pretty much proves it.
He’s a fit/regular cyclist, has done LEJOG etc.
If he doesn’t log what he eats he ends up at 90kg, as soon as he starts writing it all down it starts dropping back towards a more normal 75kg.

Regardless of adaptions your body may or may not have made, you cant magic energy from no-where. If you put in less than you take out it has to come from a reduction in body mass.

attractive young students go about their business

Girls in tight vest tops will only strengthen your argument.

Clearly not been visiting any Scottish universities recently.
Overindulgence in in Kebabs and deep fried marsh bars make the first quite difficult to find, and the 2nd quite horrifying.

indeed.
just as soon as someone makes a power meter that either easily swaps between 4-5 bikes or is cheap enough to buy 4-5 meters.

The TSS for that Z2 ride seems really low. I do about 30 TSS an hour Z1 and usually somewhere around 50 TSS an hour Z2. Based on power.

Though maybe suffer score is worked out differently to TSS.

Agreed, there are clearly some minor differences in the calculation. Without power data they have to make some assumptions about intensity.
Still, in terms of how a ride ‘feels’ i don’t feel its too far off. Certainly felt more tired/sore after the 2×20’s than the Z2 ride.

I am using power. Re distance / time fair point I did actually mean time on he bike. E.g I can do four hard Turbo seasons a weeks and see a point jump of 3-4 in strava per session, but then a few days later do a 100k z2 and see that ride jump the score by 10pts or more. Vis a Vis it would appear that I got loads fitter doing a months worth of weekly 100k z2’s than it would if I spent a month on Turbo intervals, which isn’t necessarily the case.

Not my experience at all.
Just did a bit of digging through training calendar for recent rides.
3hrs30 Z2 produced 84 Sufferscore, 1hr25 inc 2×20 @LT produced 100 (the 2×20 will account for 66.67.
Only really short hard efforts seem to underscore imo

Edit: As blobby pointed out – IF of the whole ride is used in the the calculation, and as shorter harder intervals require longer easier rest periods you end up with sessions that are both short and don’t have a particularly high IF.

Depends on the driving really.
I’ve managed to get through a set in <10k miles of ‘spritied’ driving on country back roads

Kryton57: If it’s basing its stress scores on heart rate then it will under estimate the intensity of interval sessions due to heart rate lagging behind effort so much.

Kryton is probably using power, so thats most likely not it for him. However yes, this is one of several reasons the HR metric on the chart is flawed. Other examples include HR being suppressed when heavily fatigued, and HR being grossly overinflated on rough descents on the MTB.

No idea how relevent those numbers really are though – it’s hard to see how form could be dropping given I’m setting lots of Strava PB’s on each of my rides at the moment.

If you are gaining fitness (trending over several months) you can go faster even with poor form. However -7 isnt poor form, its very close to peak condition. -50 would represent poor form, and is not at all uncommon after a particularly hard race or training block.

Edit: @mrblobby – I believe the strava one is almost a direct copy. But you cant do manual entries or see the effect of planned workouts.

However “distance” appears to be a big factor in its calculations, so hammering away on a turbo appears to have minimal impact on the graphic and therefore doesn’t represent fitness that well.

Distance doesn’t have any impact on the calculation at all. Its purely a function of intensity x time. The effect you are likely seeing is that it undervalues the effect of short hard efforts (VO2 Max for example).

I use it, but mostly as a comparison against how i’m feeling to guard against over-training.
My premium runs out in 2 weeks and not planning to renew – don’t think i’ll miss the chart.

My dad has a pair on his MTB – (clipped in for mtb, flat for fetching the paper on sunday) and seems to like them well enough.

Yeah, ‘G’ravel not ‘G’rass, and certainly not ‘G’mud.
Sounds like you really want the newly released X-One

Does anyone have any feedback on the Fluxient U2 Mini from torchy?

Looks like a cracking little emergency backup light, and probably good for carrying on road bike in the mountains when tunnels are involved.
However the maths really don’t add up. The U2 running at 1000lm should be pulling ~1400mA from a 7.4v battery pack, however Torchy’s advert says 2hrs on high from a single 2600mA/3.7v cell in the U2 mini. Strongly suggests that ‘High’ on the U2 Mini is only actually driving the LED at 50% for 500lm rather than the claimed max values.