I woke up to a lovely Sunday morning. The sun was shining, I was feeling fit and well, the bike was ready to go and my other half would happily have gone out for a ride with me. But I’m training for a marathon and the schedule said “steady 13 miles”.

So, I went for a run, tore my calf muscle and can’t run or ride now.

Should’ve gone riding!

Sad news indeed.

This one[/url]‘s good and has your hubs and rims in the database. Cross check everything, though – measure the hub and rim and compare with the dimensions on the calculator then use a different calculator (try DT Swiss, for example) and enter your measurements in that, too.

Always cross check spoke calculators. I paid for a cycling Android app with a spoke calculator in it and it was plain wrong, by about 5mm, on the first set of wheels I used it on.

EDIT: sorry – forgot the link!

I practise ARSE – All the Right Stuff for the Environment. Where’s the fun in having a face full of mud when a few grammes of front mudguard (I run removable SKS Shockblades) would make a wet trail so much more enjoyable? Likewise, why lug a redundant mudguard up a hill on a dry day?

Isn’t it all about balancing excess weight and ruining the “clean lines of your bike” with staying out longer and having more fun because water isn’t spraying up off your wheel and flowing like a river off your back, into your already soaking shorts?

Park Tools’ Big Book of Bike Repair is very good.

You might be reacting to the aspartame or acesulfame that SIS put into some of their stuff. Look for one of the natural alternatives. I’ve found Torq to be excellent.

Also, don’t use a recovery product containing protein during exercise.

There are two ways of doing it. You can either book your bikes on board the same train as you, which costs more, or they have a “non-urgent” thing that costs less but the bikes don’t necessarily travel on te same train. HOWEVER, if you can take them in more than 2 hours before your train is due to depart, they will be at your destination by the time you arrive.

Give them a call on the number on this page.

It’s a fact that 2/3 of the earth’s surface is covered by water and everywhere else is on the edge of a map. So go to the OS website and get a 1:25000 map centred on your house. Then, pin it on the wall and spend lots of time looking at all the available routes.

I was thinking the other day, it’s only a matter of time before Strava strip Lance of his KOMs. 😀

I bought a Montane Photon. 100% waterproof, packs down into a small bag the size of an orange and weighs less than an inner tube. I wore it in pouring rain one day on a ride in France and I was completely dry. CRC are sellng them for £85 at the moment.

Never order from CRC over a weekend if you want it fast – your order just gets caught up in the mass of weekend orders. But, from Tuesday onwards, most orders I place show up within 2 days. The only exception to this seems to be when they’re having a massive sale, which they are at the moment.

Their returns process is bloody brilliant, now. A sticky label in with the paperwork and a load of places (such as my local Spar shop) where you can drop the parcel, FOC, to send it back.

My “legendary” Specialized warranty experience goes like this:

The brain shock collapsed on my 2009 Stumpy Expert Carbon during a flattish XC ride. I took the bike to the dealer who removed the shock and sent it to Specialized who said “Yep, it’s a warranty repair but, as the bike’s nearly a year old and is probably very near to doing 1200km, you need it serviced. So, pay up £130 and we’ll fix it while we service it.”

“No,” says I “I always ride with a Garmin and the bike’s only done 600km and is 10 months old. This is much less than the service interval shown on the paperwork that came with the bike.”

“Ah, we changed the service intervals and put this in an addendum to our service manual”

“So, where is this addendum?” I asked

“On our website.” they said.

After much searching, I found it under Stumpjumper 2007 models and it said it applied to 2007 to 2009 models. It wasn’t listed under 2009 model manuals. They didn’t give me the addendum when I bought the bike or send it when I registered it on their website. And they continued to insist that I paid for the shock to be serviced. I caved, paid up and it arrived back.

The top cap assembly of the Brain was completely different – clearly redesigned – on the returned shock.

Gutted for you.

If you’re anything like me, the new bike won’t stop you being angry about having the old one pinched and you’ll still want to find it. Start scouring the usual places – Gumtree, Cash Converters and eBay and set up searches. Gather all your pictures of the bike, make a flyer and drop it into every local bike shop.

Good luck with catching the thieving scum and either getting the bike back or getting it replaced.

I’d actively avoid the big brands unless I was spending lots of money. The big brands have their own component divisions and, unless it’s top of the range, a bike will usually be made up of one or more own branded bits that, on examination, are of pretty poor quality and have little or no spares backup.

I’ve owned three Specialized bikes. Replacement cones weren’t available for the own-brand rear hub on my Rockhopper, meaning a replacement hub, the own-brand shock on my Stumpjumper FSR collapsed and every own-brand bit on my Roubaix had to be replaced either because it turned out to be junk (brakes had no stopping power) or died ahead of time with no spares (another Specialized rear hub). In replacing all this stuff, I’ve spent the small difference in price between a Specialized and a smaller brand who makes its bikes from off the shelf parts.

Look at Lapierre. No own branded junk on their bikes.

It’s linked off the website. http://www.memory-map.co.uk/kb/questions.php?questionid=87

The three leaders in the rock garden at the top of Dean’s Drop

Schurter on the wall at the foot of Dean’s Drop

Burry Stander at 45 degrees

I’m just under 6ft, have a 32in inside leg and the large frame fits me perfectly.

I saw this story this morning and was surprised as I’d assumed they would be riding the same bikes they used in the test event a couple of months back. I’d hope they’ve been tested on proper roads to make sure they won’t fold the first time they hit a crease in the road surface. But I’m not aware of any occasion when they’ve been subjected to the stresses Cav puts a bike under in a bunch sprint.

Although, if the bike does decide to fold underneath him, Cav will be allowed to take it on a train.

I think the UCI has a responsibility at every level of the sport to ensure safety and leep the playing field reasonably level. Look at what happened with swimming – Speedo brought out a hugely expensive skinsuit that gave such an advantage at the last Olympics that the Japanese team, who were sponsored by Mizuno, bought their own Speedo kit and wore that. Move down to the club level and the rich parents of kids in Surrey were buying Speedo swim suits and getting an unfair advantage. They’ve had to ban skin suits outright to restore the human dimension.

The UCI keeps a bike looking like a bike so that you don’t get a rich muppet buying the latest, silly priced, superman positioned TT bike, riding it in his local TT and either going under a car or wiping the floor with his opponents. The weight limit, sticky stuff on the saddle and saddle angles are part of the same exercise.

971 here. I have no empirical evidence but I think the lighter, more expensive chains are probably for racing, where they get replaced much more regularly, and are going to stretch faster and fail sooner under normal use. I have 971s on all of our bikes and they last well if cared for.

Does anyone have a view on how long Cav will stay in the race? I think he’ll probably quit within the week. Wednesday’s stage is flat for most of the first half, so he will probably stay to make a hole in the air for Wiggins on that stage. It seems pointless him risking everything to spoil Team GB’s chances in the ‘lympics, though. We saw what happened to one of Spain’s Olympic team yesterday – carted off in an ambulance after a low speed crash.

2 minutes lead in the GC after a week is almost obscene!

I don’t know if it’s the nature of this year’s TDF or its proximity to the Olympics but riders seem to have crammed more outbursts into the first week than I think I’ve seen in recent years. So far, we’ve had Wiggo’s outburst on doping and punching of a cameraman, a rider (whose name I can’t recall) clouting a spectator who was running alongside on a climb and Farrar’s confrontation at the door of the team bus of the bloke who caused his crash.

Maybe the enjoyment to risk ratio is pretty low this year.

If I were Specialized’s tyre man, I’d keep away from Tony Martin for a day or so.

He and Spike Milligan shared an office for years. I would have paid good money to just sit in the corner and listen in to their conversations.

+1 for motorcycle enduro. The bike’s more sluggish to steer, hard to pick up when you fall off, bogs itself into mud and has lots of power you can get into trouble with, especially when you’re tired. The course designers put in lairy obstacles that test your trials skills but put them on the uphills as well as on the downhills. You’re putting in the same effort and concentration going up as down.

You’re timecarded, meaning that you have a start time and a set of times to do each lap or series of laps within. On shorter courses, your times might look like this:

Start: 10:04am
1 lap – 50 minutes
2 laps – 65 minutes
1 lap – 25 minutes
1 lap – 23 minutes
1 lap – 14 minutes

If you finish a lap early, you’re not allowed to cross the line and start your next lap or you’re penalised, as you are for being late. If you do come across late, you have to “carry” that lateness into the next lap’s time, and so on. So, you have to get good at mental arithmetic, while riding fast.

There’s an MX style individually timed “special test” that directly affects your overall result. Very often, you have to include this in one of your timed laps, including the queueing to start.

And notice how the lap times shorten throughout the race. So, while you’re riding hard and trying to stay on top of the machine and the maths, you’re given shorter and shorter times to complete a lap. You end up utterly knackered and having to ride a trashed course in a faster time than at the start.

But it’s damn good fun.

Every time this comes up, I think about the effect it might have on Livestrong funding. Armstrong moves amongst very powerful and rich people and Livestrong benefits enormously from this in funding and profile. If he was found guilty of doping, the effect on cash flow for labs in the US and elsewhere, searching for cancer suppression and cure, has got to suffer badly.

The effects of this research ultimately trickle through to cancer treatment centres for you and yours here in the UK. For that reason alone, whether he doped or not, I hope this case goes the way of the others and fails to convict him.

Removed my first tubeless tyre the other day and thought exactly this. You have the valve blocking with sealant when you try to deflate the tyre, the stubborn refusal of the tyre to part company with the rim strip, the sidewalls sticking together when you try to pull the tyre off the rim and the rest of the evening trying to get latex off the hairs on the back of the hands.

I did tubeless as a trial. Slimy inner tubes seem to offer the best of both worlds.

Try http://www.tracegps.com/ or http://www.vttour.fr/topos/

Upload the ride to Garmin Connect to make sure it’s not Strava that’s doing something dumb.

Also, check the Data Recording setting to make sure it’s doing Smart Recording.

There’s supposed to be a designated cycle route from London to Paris, called the Route Verte, that’s the brainchild of a Sussex councillor to enable people to ride from Paris to London (via Newhaven & Dieppe) for the Olympics. I’m not sure how well marked or how complete it is, though.

My eyes hurt when I drink coffee?

Take the spoon out of the mug.

Any reason why you wouldn’t just get Hope ones from a dealer, other than their £10 cost[/url]?

There’s all sorts of stuff written about having the spoke doing the work (leading on rear wheels, trailing on front) inboard of the flange and the one doing the supporting outside. Then you look at wheels on other bikes and Shimano’s own instructions and find that very few do it this way.

The only thing I can’t see from your pic is the valve hole. There are 8 parallel pairs of spokes if you lace 3 cross on a 32 hole rim. The valve hole should be in the centre of a parallel pair to make access to the valve easier.

I’ll give it a go – the bearing seemed to be in quite tight. Trouble is, I have a spare Smoothie Mixer and risk damaging the bearing in that, removing it to put it in the cup on the frame.

Cheers for the advice.

9mm RWS bolt thru hubs – fit standard dropout forks but are a bit tighter and stiffer and still allow you to swap wheels between different bikes. I’d love to know if there’s an alternative to the very pricey DT Swiss RWS hubs and the Specialized Stouts.

The police told me that it’s really, really hard to prove that the owner of a stolen bike acquired it under the dubious circumstances needed to make a handling charge stick. Thieves aren’t daft, either – they keep the bike for a while then a mate of the thief does the selling. If police start to investigate, the seller denies knowing that the bike was stolen and who the thief was.

My bike wasn’t insured – I did make lots of enquiries about insurance and bike only schemes on my collection of bikes cost more that it costs to build a new bike every year while contents insurance is limited to who will insure my house with its newly discovered flood risk. In a way, no insurance made life a lot easier. It also made me more determined to get the bike back.

I feel for you – I t happened to me a year ago. However, you do have a chance of getting it back, by doing the following:

Produce a document with pictures and a description (including all the quirks, like the swapped brakes) and take a copy to to every cycle shop in the area.

Set up eBay and Gumtree searches for the bike and look at every email you receive.

Find all the paperwork relating to the bike – serial number, manuals, receipts, etc, as it helps to prove it’s yours if it’s found

I just found my bike that was stolen a year ago, so they do show up.

Good luck!

I did the maths on this a couple of weeks ago as I’m off to France for 5 days riding and carrying everything along the way. I wanted the highest carb content per gramme of weight carried. I’m taking Torq energy drink powder as it worked out about 2 to 3 times more effective for the weight than energy bars or gels. We’ll be buying cereal bars every day from local shops just to add a bit of variety but only what we need for the day’s ride.

I live near Hankley Common, near Elstead in Surrey (where they’re currently filming the new James Bond film) and we see Chinooks all the time, flying high circuits during the day. As soon as it gets dark, they switch to night vision and start terrain following going to the drop zone at Hankley.

We’re at the bottom of a tree lined valley, with 1 in 7 hills going up from 73m outside my door to 110m on the hills either side. The Chinooks come down there so low, in the dark, that they’ve blown the smoke back down into our log burner!

A trials vid I watched progressed from static bunny hopping to hopping on the rear wheel (by starting with the front propped up on a raised object) then carried this on to manuals. I wondered if it gives you a better feel for balance point from a static start?