I have no objection to poppy wearing. And I take a moment to reflect. But the more politicised poppy wearing becomes the more inclined I become to not wear one. I do things because I believe in them, not to conform. And I have respect for people who give without needing to demonstrate the fact.

TSB is 5% but only up to £2k (not 5k).

More cyclists inclined to go up the left of a vehicle when they are planning to turn left on red…and the lights change as they are undertaking.

That’s my worry.

At the moment if I get to the lights and they are on red, and there isn’t a big queue, I won’t bother filtering at all. I’ll get through on the next green phase anyway so I just sit at the back of the queue. If I know that it’s legal for me to turn left while the other traffic waits I suspect that I’d be more inclined to filter up to the front.

And yes, I know the risks and would hope that I’d restrain myself if there was a lorry or something at the front, but I can see how it would potentially increase the risk to me. (If I habitually filtered anyway and waited at the front it would potentially decrease it, admittedly).

Bruised abdominal muscles (which happened with no apparent impact so it’s a bit of a mystery how I did it). Had me in such pain that I was admitted to hospital with suspected appendicitis.

Dislocated finger and broken ankle were more bearable as at least I knew what the issue was.

I was in zadar the other weekend and spent less than I thought I would. All good.

I go there most Januarys for road riding, and it’s great. You sometimes get to see the pro teams (particularly Tinkoff Saxo) out there at that time of year.

Yes, but it’s a tt bike so possibly not the most relevant to this discussion!

90k on the roadie. Probably the last ride of the year for the good bike as I’m away the next two weekends and then we’re into November.

I also ended up with pedalcover – came in about £200 than m&s.

Mine is a 3 cup one. I recently bought a 6 for when my OH wants coffee too but I suspect there will be days when I use it just for me.

Ouch!

Tickhill GP for me today. My preparation wasn’t ideal as I was still in gran canarian at 9pm last night! Very tired and I had no expectation of being in the front group, just wanted to ride in a group further back for as long as I could.

Not in a great position for the start and in danger of going straight off the back at the first bend but I chased back on to a group of three ahead of me, then realised that I’d dragged another four or five along behind me. So we ended up in a decent sized group, dropping some stragglers behind us. We also gathered some more people who’d been ahead of us solo.

We then got pulled off the course when we got lapped. Annoyingly there were people riding solo who had been behind us who avoided the attention of the commissaries and who were allowed to finish the full distance.

No worse than I expected given how tired I was at the start! Last road race of the season I think.

I’m out here at the moment as I have family here. I tend to use a diy approach for road riding – I have my own bike out here and a map. In the south there aren’t that many roads so it’s fairly easy to work out the routes. My other half has hired bikes from most of the places with decent road bikes – free motion, cyclo canarias and happy biking but we’ve never used their guiding. He’s never had an issue just popping in and getting something without prebooking but we don’t tend to be here at the busiest times for road cycling and isn’t bothered about getting a specific bike, just whatever they have.

The cyclo canarias maps are best for diy as they have elevation profiles for the main routes in the south.

Today’s ride was 70k with 1300m of climb.

Interesting reading. I am dithering about whether to go to zadar for a few days next weekend. I have flights booked but a family illness in another country means I might be better cancelling and saving my holiday for trips out there. But then it does look lovely, and maybe I need some time for me too. Decisions decisions.

Have spent the week working from home aka sitting in a hospital with my mum and trying to keep on top of work via emails, BlackBerry and working late into the evening.

An hour on the bike in the sun this evening worked wonders though.

Next week is booked as holiday so although there will be hospital time the gaps in between won’t be spent working thankfully.

Cougar – the next paragraph in my post is a cut and paste from the current regs. The key is whether communication is exclusively by distance means up to the point the contract is concluded. Which means working out when that point is.

If contract is concluded on payment then it will depend whether payment is online or at the point of collection.

Novice race at Skipton for me. Easing myself in gently.

As I thought, whether a contract is a distance contract or not depends on the point at which the contract is concluded.

“distance contract” means a contract concluded between a trader and a consumer under an organised distance sales or service-provision scheme without the simultaneous physical presence of the trader and the consumer, with the exclusive use of one or more means of distance communication up to and including the time at which the contract is concluded;

It’s 14 not 7 now, it changed recently.

I’ve got one definite race to go (Tickhill GP) and two possibles (ladies circuit races at York – one is an evening race, one is on a Sunday). Plus the club hill climb at which I will totally suck but I need the club championship points.

Today I ventured into cross. Just the novice race while I get a feel for it, but for the first time I finished a cross race without crashing and/or breaking my bike so we’ll call it progress…

I’m fairly sure that it is where the contract is concluded online. So if you buy online and then collect then yes, if you just reserve online and conclude the contract when you pick it up then no. But I haven’t double checked against the regs so may be wrong.

I can’t be bothered to go upstairs and count, but there are two drawers of them – one for long sleeve and one for short sleeve. There are at least four gilets before you even get onto jerseys…

I moved in 12 years ago and have barely started let alone finished. I want to wait until I’ve got enough cash to do a half decent job of it and don’t mind living in a bit of a tip til then. Half the house is given over to bike storage anyway so it’s never going to be a show home…

I cycled in as normal. I tend to vary my routes so not sure whether there were that many more cyclists than normal as I ended up on a busier cycling route than I normally take, so I’d expect to see more than normal anyway.

A bar in town was doing free coffee for cyclists but I was the only person there (admittedly I was only there for 10 minutes out of 2 hours so more people may have turned up later). A few people at work seem to be doing it – they are doing a twitter thing to post cycle to work selfies and there are a few people on there who I don’t think normally commute.

Not sure about the bike parking as I have a bike cage in the basement car park rather than having to use the racks outside. As I have the only key for it there’s not much chance of anyone nabbing it before I get there.

I also got a reduced bike from Evans. It was actually reduced between ordering it and collecting it and they let me have the reduced price 🙂 As I already had a voucher for the full amount it meant buying more accessories to use it up rather than paying less, but I wasn’t complaining.

Funnily enough it was a Norco Threshold.

Haven’t decided yet. Thursdays are the one day I don’t normally cycle to work because it’s race night. That said, the club TT season is over as of last week, and tomorrow was to be a trip over to York for some closed circuit racing instead. I’m not sure I can be bothered with the drive over there so I may just cycle to work anyway.

Mudguards got fitted on Monday, lights are on there permanently.

I used to use a mix of car club and rentals depending how long I needed it for/what car I needed. No car of my own. I could switch between a c1, a van and a people carrier depending what I was doing. My main problem was picking it up/dropping it off if I had to get to an out of the way depot. OK when hiring a van as I could cycle out there but less easy with smaller stuff. I reckon it worked out cheaper than owning based on my usage at the time.

I needed this thread earlier! Fitted new mudguards to the commuter/winter bike and there wasn’t enough clearance for my 25mm gatorskins. Looked at a few but ended up plumping for 23mm gatorskins as I was pretty happy with them.

Considering giving it a go this year. I’ve done a couple of novice races in the past on my MTB but now I have a cross bike I may try the proper race. Will probably still stick with the novices race for the first one though while I get a feel for it.

Mainly cash (or at least a credit card which is then paid off in full). I have one bike on cycle to work though and a few years ago did 0% shop finance (could have bought it outright but made more sense to use their money).

I was going to say the Volt 50 too but someone beat me to it.

Sunny but windy until about an hour after we got back from a 100k road ride.

Bucketing it down now though.

I have a Threshold A1 Forma but have never tried the Arkose to compare. I wanted something I could race as well as occasionally commuting on it and like it so far (although I haven’t had it long). I did get a top 10 Strava placing on a fairly well ridden road route on it when I decided to get into a bit of a race with another cyclist so it can certainly cope with a bit of road as well as the off road stuff.

I return from the world of Cat 2/3/4 ladies stage races and I’m still (just!) in one piece.

I didn’t have any major goals as this was my first road race let alone my first stage race, and I’ve only done one circuit race before. I expected to get dropped but just hoped that I’d hold on for long enough to learn stuff along the way.

The main learning experience was two things I knew from reading up but had never had demonstrated properly.

1. If you’re not moving forward you’re moving back. No matter how much I tried to get off the back, the second I relaxed I’d find myself back there. So there was a lot of chasing harder out of corners than I’d have had to if I had better positioning. But I always made it back on in the end.

2. Don’t race what you can’t afford to replace… Crashing was one of my fears about racing, but I figured that I’d get dropped anyway so didn’t need to worry too much about it. But within the last km I was still with the group (albeit at the back of it). And then there was a big pile up in front of me. I had time to brake hard, lock the wheels up and eject myself (my bike ended up on top of one of the riders in front but I didn’t). It could have been worse – some scratches on my leg which I think are catching the chainring as I ejected rather than the road, and some cosmetic damage to replaceable bits of the bike (bar tape, QR skewer, pedal etc). The one more expensive bit is that I appear to have completely screwed the saddle – the left hand side is noticeably lower than the right. But as crashes go it could have been a lot worse (end even the people who looked in quite a bad state were apparently relatively OK).

The state of the saddle made the second stage TT a little interesting – as someone said, it’s not something you bring a spare of!

But I survived 🙂

Sunday – first road race
Saturday – worrying about first road race 😉

I’ve just had one from california, liking tonight’s TT is fine but last night’s commute was rather unremarkable.

I had a real confidence boost from the TT on Thursday. 6th overall out of 23 riders and the fastest time by a female club member since at least 2008 (which is as far back as the results on the website go). And that was despite getting stuck behind a tractor at the end.

Which won’t necessarily help me when racing as the TTs don’t involve accelerations etc, but at least it gives me a bit of confidence!

I also tried focussing on group riding skills on the club ride yesterday – we don’t go amazingly fast but I paid attention to holding the wheel in front round corners and when taking a drink rather than my usual habit of dropping back a bit then chasing back on.

The finger is hovering over the entry button.

We were having lunch at naburn when it came over us very low – we weren’t really expecting it and could hear something behind the building then it emerged. Rather impressive. A bit north of the route on the map.

Yes, the race I did only had 9 entrants so I can kind of see why they don’t try to squeeze a womens race into the evening events when time is limited and there is a bigger field for the junior/mens races. And I’m sure that if they did squeeze one in it would end up being too early for me to actually get there in time anyway…

It’s actually one of the reasons I’d like to do the 2 stage thing even if I’m a bit out of my depth because if I don’t take the opportunities that are there they might disappear too.

I may see the organiser tomorrow anyway (he does our club TTs) so can sound him out about how beginner friendly it is.

They do sometimes (my first race was there) but the evening July series was juniors/men. I could race with the men but I’d be dropped fairly quickly (my OH got dropped when he raced and he is faster than I am…)