it’s an interesting notion that people should necessarily (a) want to or (b) be automatically able to – find work that lets them live in the same place their parents did.

Yeah, weird take. If your parents own the kind of house folk cycle past and lust over, chances are you will more likely than not be going to university (probably Russell Group) then getting a grad job somewhere and living away from home. Of course you won’t want to live in the arse end of nowhere age 21.

While we’re sort of on the subject can anybody recommend a good shampoo bar?

I wanted to move away from unnecessary plastic bottles, so i’ve been buying a bar from Sainsbury’s. I haven’t checked the price for a while, but today I noticed it’s £5 a bar! Actual soap bars range from about 50p to £3 (apart from the posh stuff I don’t even look at), and the sort of shampoo bottles I’d use are maybe 2 or 3 quid.

Lush? They do have some nice manly smelling stuff, despite what passing the place on the High Street might lead you to believe.

Hands up who’s been looking at Mercians on eBay?

This one is bonkers in a good way: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/276471103906

I love quiet hubs and really wanted the new (ish) Shimano XT M8100 hubs for my next wheelbuild, but I got put off by too many internet posts on their unreliability.

I ended up going with noisy Pro 5s instead – shame they’ve got two less ‘pros’ than HASSNS Ali specials, those must be amazing…

Supination = weight on outside edge of foot

Pronation = weight on inside edge of foot

Stability shoes are the classic go-to for overpronation, but you don’t really get supination control from a shoe – standard advice for a supinator would be to just go for a neutral shoe.

In short – I’m not sure this is something shoes are going to cure. You might be better off trying a  custom orthotics place (if indeed shoes are the answer… you probably won’t know until you try!).

Yeah, I’d say 40 people would be necessary really – even a shit show as disasterous as yesterday’s takes some serious planning.

I liked the junk shop/workshop vibe of the bricks and mortar shop, but I don’t bemoan the loss of the frames really – they’re a nice historical artefact now but nothing more to all but a vanishingly small subset of cyclists.

Press fit is the wrong terminology and standard here, so drop that.

You’ll not get anything to work with an Octalink chainset unless you can fix the BB threads and use a regular Octalink BB.

Similar to @jhpbk’s suggestion, you could also get a square taper crank and fit something similar to this:

eBay link

A friend of mine used a BB similar to the above (not sure of the exact brand) for years on a Surly with knackered BB threads.

Hmm – if the kid who is doing the blocking is a bad’un, its plausible and sounds like you might just need to have a private word with the coach.

Not sure I can think of any other approaches unless you get your boy some 15mm spikes and encourage him to give as good as he gets😈

‘Flicking out spikes’ at pace might be quite hard to do with intent, without slowing yourself down too much. And also hard to flick them out far enough you’d be obstructing someone in a different lane. So that sounds a bit odd.

Getting spiked in XC when you run too close together is definitely a thing though (or deliberately trying to scrape the back of someone’s calves in front), ouch… albeit not as bad as a proper shin/pedal impact in my experience.

I was relatively close and saw one incident where the boy in front veered into his line, causing them both to stumble.

The coach should be having a word about that – if the kids are training in specific lanes, the importance of not straying out of your lane (which will get you DQed in a race) ought to be emphasised. Although if it’s just a one off the coach might think, as you say, it’s only a training session and they’re only young so let it slide the once.

Haha that giant horse doing a wheelie next to the smiling lady on a mountain bike looks silly.

Well, most MTB jerseys are pretty much indistinguishable form a tech t-shirt

I totally disagree with this. They are completely different because a technical polyester running t-shirt is £10.99, whereas a short sleeve pocketless polyester MTB jersey is £44.99.

It’s easy for me.

I believe in social democracy and the Welfare State.

Won’t vote for any Party that supported Brexit.

Live in Scotland.

Greens?

All those poor MPs who thought they had another four months on the take, my heart bleeds :D

The PA outside No. 10 playing D:Ream was absolutely brilliant, chapeau to whoever did that. And it took the police absolutely ages to move them on. And then they started singing the same song!
What a fitting start to ex-PM Rishi’s campaign :D

A potential interest rate cut to 5.00% in June would be an epoch-defining success by post-Covid standards…

My Dad did the rivnut thing on an alu Decathlon frame for a pump bracket* and it was fine, but he did them off centre. The man is an animal.

*No, I don’t know why he didn’t just put the pump bracket under the bottle cage either…

What? Are you 12 ?? 😂

I’m just messing with you ;-) . I do like Miley Cyrus though.

I don’t really know who Talking Heads are (were?) but I like Miley Cyrus. Suspect I may be more of the target market for this, I’ll give it a listen later!

Won’t that Yeti be back at full price by the time you’ve paid import duty and VAT?

Well since everyone ragged on the pen idea which I like, I’ll mention that I got a Leatherman from my dad and a fancy handmade Sheffield steel luxury pocket knife from my fiancee. They both sit in my drawer and whenever I need a knife I use my Rolsen folding utility thing with replaceable blades which I’m not afraid of abusing.

Also I don’t know the grandmother in question, but a knife strikes me as more a man-t0-man type gift….

I got one that was essentially a very thick and specially shaped ziplock bag in the goody bag from a sportive. It’s split now but that was ideal – light, very waterproof, clear so you could see your screen without taking it out, and zero faff. I’d buy another if I could find one.

I got a Montblanc Meisterstuck from my mum when I was 21. I haven’t used it a great deal but it is a treasured possession, especially now she’s dead.

Pens and cufflinks are still great coming-of-age presents I think.

That was really something. His Youtube videos are next level.

Unsurprisingly – the shot of espresso I had which I now judge all others by (and they come up wanting) was at Prufrock, made on James Hoffmann’s vintage Faema machine.

I subscribe to Retro Gamer magazine, which is genuinely brilliant – it’s filled with lots of in-depth articles that have real care and attention paid to writing them, with loads of research and interviewees. I can’t think of any other ‘leisure’ magazines that have that amount of effort put in.

I also subscribe to one cycling magazine at any one time, for nostalgia’s sake really. Oscillate between Cycling Plus, MBUK and Cyclist.

Wasn’t Jamie Hibbard off of MBUK (and latterly Metal Hammer) going to launch a magazine about beards and axes at some point? Does anyone know what became of that?

Since when did Hope Hoops get so spenny?

340 euros where I live!

Probably something to do with us “taking back control”, sorry about that…

Comeooooonnnnnnn Singletrack this isn’t a bike and any goon who buys one will likely never pedal it.

△ very fair. And while they are owned by a VC firm, it is an English VC firm.

For me, Ribble will always be the mailorder company you didn’t use in the 90s/00s, because Merlin and CRC were better.
They also did those £150 blue winter road frames everyone in my uni club rode because they were £150.

The new first straight looks mint though so I’ll try it out.

The first straight was (more than) big enough for me when I rode it last year. Think my coccyx still hurts from looping out…

Enjoyed that, thanks for posting.

I’m itching to make some progress into actual dirt jumping. It looks like the perfect place to do this

Whereabouts are you? Bolehills BMX track in Sheffield has a similar albeit smaller vibe (smaller in land area, there’s  definitely still some massive jumps). Probably various other spots dotted about all over.

Those Cleethorpes trails do look sick though.

I have a friend from uni who’s been chipping away at this for nigh on twenty years. She’s done some impressive stuff for BBC and Sky, current affairs and arts, but ultimately she still earns hand-to-mouth.

Hardtail yep, without question, full sus, probably not unless it was a super deal.

AFAIK most (all?) of the processing (drafts, etc) is done client side!

Zwifts operation seems to put all the demands on the hosts CPU

Ah, that explains why my laptop has such a tantrum if I accidentally leave Zwift on in the background after a session.

For a high street suggestion, Reebok are wider than other big trainer brands (well, Nike and Adidas at least).

There’s some proper great songs on this thread even if, as others have observed, I can think of more I like by many of the artists.

My nomination (because it’s the most commercial of his output), Freeze by Cut La Roc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxOwcj2qgec

I’m sick of platforms totally washing their hands of this stuff. I was looking for a 27.2mm seatpost last week on eBay and happened across some of those fake ‘Ritchey WCS’ Aliexpress ones. Reported them as fake because, well, why not and eBay messaged back after a few days saying they didn’t see a problem with the listing.

IDS :D

Also wants a pension age of 75.