Fred Dibnah, steeplejack.

"Teaching boys to bake cakes? That's no way to maintain an industrial empire."

Baden Powell, Scouting for Boys, 1934, on the subject of shorts…

"They give freedom to the legs and ventilation. Another advantage is that when the ground is wet, you can go about without stockings and none of your clothes gets damp. Damp clothes are dangerous and would soon make you ill."

"When I give to the poor, people call me a saint.
When I ask why there are poor, they call me a communist.
When I help refugees, people call me a saint.
When I ask why they are here, they call me a fascist.
Maybe I should stop asking questions"

MilitantGraham

Some of us find vivisection pretty sickening too along with the way vivisection charities use emotional blackmail and peoples reluctance to ask questions about exactly what they do with the money to keep themselves in business.

I'll do a bit more research when I've got more time later.
This will have to do for now.

‘‘Heart disease rarely occurs in dogs, and it’s usually because they have been bred to grow abnormally large. In one BHF-funded study, experimenters cut open dogs’ chests and circulated their blood out of their bodies and back in again in order to cause the blood pressure in the dogs’ neck arteries to change rapidly. The experimenters’ conclusion? That a person who bends down and suddenly stands up could experience dizziness and fainting! In another experiment, experimenters implanted electrodes into dogs and injected other dogs’ blood into their bodies. The stated purpose was to find out about blood storage in the liver, even though the experimenters acknowledged that dogs store their blood differently from people.’

And in the great tradition of religious arguments, the onus is on the BHF, or its supporters, to provide positive proof of medical advances, not for me to provide negative proof.
What is the BHF's budget and what have they achieved ?

"Never eat more than you can lift" Miss Piggy

The optimist says the glass is half full.
The pessimist says the glass is half empty.
The accountant says the we have a 100% glass overcapacity.
The engineer says we have an adequate glass safety margin to avoid spillage under normal operating parameters.

Yes, it was something like red laces for the NF, white laces for the BNP.

BHF is just a vivisection business that has made no significant advances in the prevention or cure of human heart disease.
Don't waste your money on them.

Surf-Mat …I'm on some "list" somewhere…

So am I, although I suspect it's not the same list, as I am banned from certain military areas. :wink:

No squirrels, just men in tights.

"Putting a 1.6kg hub into the back of the bike completely screws up the way the bike handles"

No it doesn't.

I've never understood why claiming to be a communist or displaying a hammer & sickle emblem is acceptable, while claiming to be a fascist or displaying a swastika is not.
Does it really make much difference to the people living under either system of government ?

I've never understood how wars can have rules either.
Surely, if you're going to have a war, genocide is the best way to do it.

There's water on site, but some people get used to the taste of their local water and find water from other areas tastes funny.
If you're fussy like that, bring some from home.

Bottled water can come in handy for noisy generators too. :wink:
"Well, there's plenty of fuel in the tank. I don't know why it stopped"

I ran a Rohloff on a full sus with a tensioner and needed a guide at the front to keep the chain on.
On a hardtail with EBB or slot dropouts, no, you don't need one.

The Chunky Challenge.

As a way of spicing up this event in the absence of a veterans class, I will put up a £10 prize fund to go to the charity of choice of anyone who weighs more than me and completes more laps.

So, come on you Clydesdales, who wants to take on a 47 year old 98kg vegan ? :P

Terms and conditions.
The total prize fund is £10. If two or more people complete more laps than me, it gets shared out.
I'll round the weight limit down to 95kg or over. I'm not taking my bathroom scales with me, I'll take your word for it.
I've broken two frames in the past two months. With that track record, there's a good chance you'll beat me simply by riding for 8 hours while I'm sat in the pits with my bike in two halves.

There was an orienteering event based at the Visitor Centre last night.
I spoke to the organiser after the event and he gave me an orienteering map covering about 1km x 2km near the VC.
There's far more information on it than I need. If you're on a bike, you don't really need to know if the bits between the trails are "Forest, slow run", "Forest, walk" or "Forest, fight". :-)

Good move, Bunnyhop, mild goading is sure to work. :wink:

Don't forget also, a lot of STWers won't want to enter a race for fear of being beaten by…
a kid
an old bloke
a woman
worst of all, one of the above on a cheaper bike

Put your money where your carbon is. Enter the race.

Most of the suggestions so far don't sound very healthy for the chicken. :(

mushrooms
onions
peppers
sweetcorn
tinned tomatoes
cashew nuts
basil
in one pan

wholewheat pasta
in another

When they are both cooked, stir them up in to one.

Oh, yeah, with a beard as well.

I'm going for a bike race, not a pop concert.
Cancel the band if the saving means the race goes ahead.

After sleeping for 6 hours during last year's solo attempt, I finally admitted 24 hours is too much for me and got a place on a team with three guys I only know via STW and haven't met yet.

I'll be going for the Most Niche Bike and Team Kit Combination award by riding a fully rigid Ti 29er Rohloff while wearing a Vegan Cyclists jersey.

I've entered and spammed the event on veganfitness.net. :-)

Have you reached the break even point for entry numbers yet ?

aracer, I mentioned all this to a friend last weekend and he said something about orienteering maps which rang a bell.
I'm sure I saw an orienteering map years ago and it had vegetation and track surfaces marked on it far more clearly than the 1:25000 OS map.
Have you got a similar map for the Wyre Forest ?
How do I get a copy ? Can I buy one ? Would I get given one if I entered an event ?
It's something I've been meaning to do myself for a long time, but it's such a big project I never started.
For example, the bridleways heading West and North from the bottom of the hill near Park House will be almost unridable in December, while the track branching off the family cycle route towards St John's Lane is not even shown.
It would be handy to have a map with all this information already on it if I could find one.

Can we have laybys as well so I can stop for a picnic.

Derailleur rider !

You still on training wheels then ?

Where's killer ?
I hijacked his thread and took what should have been his place in jimr80's team and still feel guilty about it.
http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/mm-mountain-mayhem-spare-place-available
I don't know what age he is, but he may still be interested in getting in a team.

Speed cameras should be replaced with snipers.

I'd guess at ANPR, rather than speeding, as well.
That would explain the computer to check records and bike for pursuit.

Try speeding past him in a taxed car, then driving slowly past in an untaxed car to see if he chases you. That will settle it.

I take it a backward facing helmet cam mounted on the bars isn't within the spirit of the competition. :?

I got one of those £8 head torches from Tesco.
I use it almost every day at work and it's one of the best value for money pieces of kit I have ever bought.

It's a bit sad isn't it, that for millions of people, the most exciting thing they have got to look forward to over the next couple of weeks is watching some people they have never met kick a ball around a field.

Wasn't there a very similar thread a couple of days ago ?
I voted Decathlon on that one as well.

I usually use Torq, but sometimes I have shared Mrs Militant's SIS drink.
Torq's a bit bland, SIS is a bit sickly. I like bland. I guess I could always mix a bit of squash in if I wanted to.

I also drank a fair bit of Emerge on Set2Rise. It's the same as Red Bull, except that it's 66p for a litre bottle, not £1.15 for a 250ml can. Now that stuff is sickly, but it kept me awake overnight

Thanks Giant, especially for the discount code, I got it for nearly half price. :-)
It's a 2200mAh battery, which will give me a total of about 2.5 times my current battery life on its own, plus a 200mA solar charger, which should roughly double that again if it recharges the batteries at about half the rate they are discharging.

A couple of my recent favourites.

6 hour marathon, seconds to go before the Le Mans start.

12 hour solo marathon. Picture taken at 12:01

Thanks for the offer st, but as the FC in the Wyre have said they're not interested in discussing trails and marked routes, I'm not going to pursue the matter.
I'm solely interested in getting permission to use non RoW hard tracks for a specific event on one day now. I think that that is so different to what Chase Trails are doing that there isn't really much in common.
Thanks again, anyway. I'll get in touch if there is anything I think you could help with.

I phoned Natural England again today. That was nice and easy. She said straight away that we could use any hard track in their bit of the forest plus the short descent from the railway down to Cooper's Mill footbridge.
I'll go in and see them soon to clarify exactly where the border is between NE and FC land.

Fig rolls for the perfect mix of sweet and savoury in one food.
Salted cashews for replacing salt on a sweaty day.
Malt loaf for ballast if it's a windy day on the mountains and you're worried about getting blown away.

Ha ha, I've had one of my posts deleted.

And it's not the one where I suggested someone scanned a page out of MBUK and posted it on the web. :wink:

Yes, Decathlon. I find them fine for commuting and general riding.

Try the wiggle price drop thing as well. Occasionally there's some real cheap stuff on there, you've just got to keep looking until something turns up in your size.