Fork crown bolt is too short – need to find a longer one.

A longer sunken nut may be a better/cheaper option. Shimano offer sunken nuts in 10mm-27mm lengths:

https://www.sjscycles.co.uk/brake-spares-shimano/?page=5

and Planet X for example sell a 31mm version:

http://www.planetx.co.uk/i/q/FSPXBB/planet-x-brake-bolt

I would be very surprised if there was a successful libel case against Cycling Weekly based on the story so far.

Cycling Weekly say they asked Steve Fenton for his side of the story, but had not had a response from him, and I guess that under those circumstances it’s reasonable for them to go ahead and publish based on what the cyclists involved have told them. I suspect it would be different if Steve Fenton had told them that the allegations were untrue and that he would give them his side of the story (or get his lawyer to do so) when he got back home, and in that scenario I expect that CW would have waited for his detailed response.

Under the circumstances, if the story were untrue, I imagine CW could easily defend any libel case seeking damages by publishing a correction/retraction once they had received Steve Fenton’s account, and by arguing that any damage caused in the intervening period to Steve Fenton’s reputation and business was caused by his own failure to respond to their request for his reponse.

The fact that there is no comment from Steve Fenton after all this time, makes it look like the article was not without substance.

Cassini Maps sounds like what what you are looking for. They offer personalised versions of the various historical OS maps, and the ‘Old Series’ is the one that shows the topography with shading, albeit monochrome, as opposed to the contour lines now used in OS maps. You can see what they look like by entering a location on which the map is to be centred and clicking to see a sample image of that location.

They have resized the original maps to the same scale as Landranger 1:50,000, so you can get both old and new maps centred on the same location in the same scale, and display them side by side (which is what I have done).

Although Cassini offer framed and mounted maps, I would instead get the large format flat option, and get it framed myself.

Sport Pursuit have some Sidi shoes on their website at the moment, including 3 road models in Mega width (but I have not looked to see what selection of sizes they have).

All the gravel tracks around High Corner inn and redshoot inn are fine to ride all year round.

That’s very useful to know: I confess I based my own comments on an experience of pushing my bike from Ogdens to High Corner Inn during dry Summer conditions. Evidently I need to explore that area more myself.

if you take Hampton Ridge to Fritham, which is a nice ride, you can then take the gravel track/fireroad from Fritham to Holly Hatch and onto Broomy Lodge. Then pick up the road to Ornamental Drive.

That looks like a very good option.

I shan’t be too worried to use an ‘unofficial’ fire road to get where I want.

In my experience, and given the routes you are likely to take, it is generally not worth cycling on the tracks prohibited to cyclists. If they are fire roads, then either there will usually be alternative gravel tracks which cyclists are permitted on and so there will be no point in using the unofficial option, or they will not be fire roads but rather muddy/sandy paths which I would avoid, especially in Winter.

For example, if you are starting from Fordingbridge, you might be tempted to try cycling across the Forest from Frogham/Ogdens to the High Corner Inn, and there is even a short section of bridleway for part of that route, but I suspect it will be very boggy and that you would have to walk and push your bike for much of it.

DT78 mentioned Roger Penny Way – that can be a delightful ride in the right conditions, especially with a tailwind. In bad weather – and especially with a headwind – it is a miserable ride. The same can be said of some of the other long sections of open and exposed road in the Forest. I would suggest therefore that you plan your route with a few alternative options you can choose on the day depending upon the weather, the wind and the wind direction. Most of the official gravel paths are in woodland and well sheltered from the wind.

One other option I forgot to mention, seeing as you plan to start from Fordingbridge, is Hampton Ridge, which runs east to west from Frogham to Fritham, from where you would need to loop back on the road in a south westerly direction to get to the northern end of the Ornamental Drive.

Are the waymarked off-road routes (ones with numbered posts) worth using to help get me from place to place?

Generally not, with a few exceptions, e.g.

Ringwood – Lyndhurst (Linwood, Slufters Enclosure, under the A31 and then Emery Down either via Acres Down or Millyford Bridge)
Lyndhurst – Brockenhurst (options both west and east sides of the A337)
Lyndhurst – Beaulieu (via Furzy Lodge and with fair few ‘dog legs’).

I would include the Ornamental Drive in your ride, which I think is better from north to south.

Including the coast, other than Lepe and Calshot via Exbury, would entail some riding through built up areas, e.g. there is a track between Keyhaven and Lymington.

If you ride to Brockenhurst via the Ornamental Drive, and want to then go south to Lymington, avoid the A337 and use the bridleway from Church Lane at the southern tip of Brockenhurst to Blazemore Farm, and then follow the lane south through Boldre.

From Lymington you could loop east to Beaulieu (rather than the B3054, use the back lanes via Sowley Pond).

Couple of cafes in Brockenhurst, pub at Keyhaven, Red Lion in Boldre, and various pubs and cafes etc. in Lymington, Beaulieu and Lyndhurst.

My mate has found a place in a very small village called Orto but looking on the map and doing a bit of online research it seems a bit remote, with no shops, cafe bars or anything. I’ve been looking around the area of Corte and the villages to the south but my mate is saying it’s too far from the GR20 which he wants to hike on.

I don’t understand why your mate thinks it’s essential to stay in a remote location like that purely because of its proximity to what will inevitably be only a small section of the GR20.

The key to making such a holiday work will be good planning, especially surrounding transport and logistics, and a good degree of flexibility.

Transport – presumably you will have a hire car, so given the relatively small size of the island and its narrowness, and the relatively short distance from the coast to the rocky spine along which the GR20 runs, there is no reason to stay in an out of the way location in the midlle of the island. As ElShalimo says, the GR20 is linear, so even with a car you are going to need to plan and research carefully to identify suitable walks. Apart from just doing ‘there and back’ day walks, you should be able to come up with some circular walks using sections of the GR20, and probably also use the train which runs through the island to do a walk where you use the train to get back to your parked car.

A good degree of flexibility – at the beginning of October, there is probably a high liklihood of bad weather, e.g. thunderstorms, in the Corsican mountains on at least some days. I hope your mate isn’t the sort who, once he has got an idea in his head, is so rigid and blinkered in his outlook that he insists on doing a particular planned walk on a set day whatever the weather and circumstances.

Much of the best of the GR20 walking and scenery is in the northern half, e.g. Cirque de la Solitude, so I would not stay in the south of the island.

In your shoes, my preference would be stay in a resort hotel in Ajaccio or Calvi, and use the train (more so from Ajaccio) and car for walks inland, since those will be better places to be on days when weather is bad or you need a break from walking (the terrain is rocky and hard on feet and knees, especially if you are not conditioned/fit from hillwalking in the UK).

Flood London and you will probably find the supermarkets cant take your card for payment. The cashpoint machine in your town wont work. The “Cloud” where the internet now lives will stop, its not actually in a cloud.

Actually no, cos these things are planned for

Agreed – Visa’s data centres for e.g. are out of town even though Head Office is in central London. I imagine that all critical infrastructure is sited and defended or at least risk-managed for such events, or being planned to be moved or defended according to climate change forecasts [/quote]

From the little that I have seen, a major weakness of the resilience and disaster recovery planning for a major London flood, is the fact that much of our critical infrastructure and services etc. is owned by hundreds/thousands of different private companies, in addition to the publically owned and managed parts (which are themselves fragmented between different levels of government and different departments).

A huge difficulty in disaster and resilience planning for a massive widescale event like a London flood, is that it is impossible to predict/model the consequences on all these different services and infrastructure. I have seen commercial modelling of a large London flood where the consultants only considered the damage to their large corporate customer’s sites in isolation, and in quantifying the effects (both cost and speed to recover), they effectively assumed the rest of London was undamaged, when in reality the damage to the rest of London would affect the business far more than the physical damage to its own sites.

A classic simple example of this was the 7/7 bombing: all the disaster plans for the businesses in the City relied on the mobile phone network for communications in the event of landline failure, but the emergency services seized most of the mobile bandwith, and as a result many people could not use their mobiles.

But that’s exactly what you did in your initial post, otherwise why even mention it?

My point is that the fact that a rider rode for a team known to use doping is not proof or even evidence of that individual’s guilt, but it can be part of a bigger picture where it forms part of a lot of circumstantial evidence, any one piece of which would not meet the standards of evidence required in a court to try one individual, but which collectively is damning for the Sky organisation.

So, it’s not just Simon Cope’s background. For example, what on earth were Sky doing employing Geert Leinders? There is no proof that he doped riders at Sky, but he was the last person you would employ as a team doctor if you want to promote yourselves as a clean team.

Brailsford seems to be throwing up a lot obfuscation, instead of getting to the bottom of the issue and giving definitive answers, e.g. incorrectly saying that Cope’s flight was also arranged so that he could meet up with Emma Pooley.

So, it’s not about whether Simon Cope did or did not dope, but rather that there is more and more smoke coming from Sky, and it’s getting difficult to see how it’s not being caused by a fire.

Look at the timelines he’d left well before the dodgy folk arrived, I think yours and Nicole Cooke’s accusations are very unfair, both on Cope and Wiggins.

Accepted, I was simply going on the basis of Cooke’s testimony.

So you’re saying that Simon Cope is an ex-doper then?

No, I am not. I am trying myself to envision a reasonable explanation for that package and all the circumstances surrounding it, in the absence of a – to me – credible explanation from Brailsford. As I said above, the fact that the whistle was blown on this particular package after so many years, suggests it was unusual. If it was a not uncommon event, I can understand how Simon Cope would not ask or be told precisely what particular drug happened to be in the package every time (although I would have expected such routine packages to have had some accompanying documentation each time which would also create an audit trail), but if it was unusual then not knowing or asking and getting on a flight to go through French border controls seems very odd, unless there was some implicit understanding (“Don’t ask, don’t tell”) when he was told to take the package.

Nicole Cooke has highlighted that testimony from ex-riders about doping in the Linda McCartney team has not been properly investigated by UKAD. Pointing out that Simon Cope was a member of that team is no proof of anything, and it is unfair to tar someone for guilt by association. However, in the absence of a credible explanation from Brailsford, people will start to wonder. If you assume that the package did contain a PED as the starting point for a hyopthesis, then what we now know from the 1990s and the Armstrong era leads many to look for similar patterns in the Sky case. One of those patterns is the employment of people tainted by past involvement in/links to doping. Yes, for those individuals it’s all purely circumstational evidence, but all the circumstantial evidence that built up around Armstrong left few people knowledgeable about the sport – apart from some diehard fans – in any doubt that he was a doper long before the USADA investigation actually brought him down.

So, I am not saying Simon Cope was a doper, but when you look at what happened and how Brailsford and Sky are responding to the accusations, it does seem increasingly more consistent with what we have learned about the use of PEDs in cycling, and increasingly less consistent with it all being totally innocent. Simon Cope’s having ridden for a team which is the subject of doping allegations by ex-riders, and his acting as a Sky gopher when officially he was employed by BC as national women’s coach, is not significant in itself, but it is consistent with past doping scandals. In Armstrong’s case, USPS employed Pepe Marti as a coach, but it is now known that his function was to courier and administer drugs.

Frankly, what we are seeing now with Brailsford, Sky and the House of Commons committee, is reminiscent to me of when Armstrong said he was working with Ferrari. No matter how much you might try to put a positive construction on it, it was simply not consistent with being a clean rider. It stank, and the more time went on and the more that came out, the more the stench grew around Armstrong.

likely explanations…

3. They really can’t remember what was in it and it was one of many similar packages.

If it were a fairly common event for the team doctor to get drugs sent over from BC/Sky HQ, and consequently they could not remember what was in one particular package out of many, then surely Brailsford would have given that explanation.

I think Simon, by delivering the package, was simply doing his job and showing willing to Sky. Never a bad thing to keep an eye out for yourself when you have a career in the fickle world of cycling.

It was not his job: he was British Cycling’s national women’s coach, and instead he was performing the function of a gopher.

It would look less suspicious if he was flying out with a shopping list of various items that the team had identified as urgently needed mid-Dauphine and in the run up to the Tour. Instead the trip was arranged solely to transport an unidentified pharmaceutical and nothing else.

Nicole Cooke has pointed out that Simon Cope rode with Wiggins in the Linda McCartney team, and that there is testimony from riders that PEDs were used in that team. It would make sense that if Sky were using PEDs, then any support staff involved would likely be ex-riders who had themselves been dopers. This is how cycling’s Omerta has always worked: riders know that if caught doping, they can still get a contract at the end of their ban and other work in the sport when they stop riding, e.g. directeur sportif, but the price is not exposing their co-conspirators.

If someone innocent who had not been involved in doping were asked to take a package containing pharmaceuticals under these circumstances, I would expect that natural curiosity alone would mean that they would expect a bit more information about what they were carrying and why an unusual special trip was needed, and they would ask questions if that information were not provided up front. It would be very risky to ask an innocent person to take PEDs on a flight, since they would answer ‘yes’ when asked if they were carrying anything for someone else, resulting in the package being opened and questions about the contents. However, if an ex-doper is told without explanation to take such a package, I can imagine how there would be no need for spoken explanations: part of the deal of an ex-doper being employed is the expectation that he will do what he is told and either be actively involved in doping or at least keep his mouth shut.

The fact that Simon Cope was officially employed as the national women’s coach, but much of his time instead appears to have been spent doing other things, including acting as a gopher, to the detriment of women’s cycling as detailed by Cooke, suggests that Cope was not actually employed by BC for what he could do to help to improve the results of UK women cyclists.

Cooke is probably dead right about the sexism, but seems to be over-egging it a bit about the mystery package IMO.

I would disagree. The longer this goes on without a clear simple straightforward credible explanation, the more it starts to look like something dodgy may well have happened. These were not vague insinuations, which by their very nature can be impossible to definitively rebut. This was a very specific question about a single event involving named individuals and a single package, and it should have taken a few days at most for Sky/Brailsford to have got to the bottom of it and provided answers. The only valid reason for not doing so is patient confidentiality, but in that respect I would expect Bradley Wiggins and his advisors to realise that it was very much in his interest to agree to full disclosure, given the damage that could be foreseen to be done to his image and future earning capability as a sporting hero by serious suspicions of doping.

If anything, I think Nicole Cooke may have under-played the importance of the mystery package. Simon Cope would have been well aware that the Festina team was busted in 1999 precisely because the team’s soigneur was stopped by police/customs at a routine border check, and was found to have large quantities of EPO in his car. Similarly on the last day of the 2002 Tour de France, the wife of the third placed rider, Raimundas Rumsas, was arrested at a border when customs similarly found EPO etc. in her car.

Given that background and the risks involved, including criminal prosection and jail under French law, I cannot understand how Simon Cope would have been prepared to carry a package through French border controls which he knew contained a pharmaceutical, without wanting to know what drug it was, and even have some documentary proof to protect himself (in case he were stopped and it turned out the drugs were not what he had been told they were). Simon Cope would have known that if he were caught with drugs, his career in cycling would have been finished in the UK (in contrast, Lance Armstrong used a bike shop owner, referred to as Motoman, to transport their drugs across borders and to hotels during the Tour, i.e. someone who was expendable/deniable if caught, and who did not have as much to lose as a team employee who might be banned from cycling for life by the UCI, and so could probably be paid to keep quiet and take the rap).

What also strikes me is that it must have been someone with inside knowledge who has blown the whistle on that package. That suggests that this particular incident was unusual and appeared suspicious at the time. The implication is that the whistleblower did not know precisely what was in the package, but was aware of its existence and the circumstances surrounding it were unusual enough to raise suspicions in the mind of someone inside BC/Sky.

Vickpea, I am sorry to hear that things are not going better for you.

I wonder if maybe it would help if you started to adopt a much more selfish and ruthless attitude to your problems.

If the therapy you were getting was significantly helping (and only you can know how effective it was) and you believe that continuing it will help, then I think you need to be more assertive and pro-active in continuing.

So, if therapy is the answer, or part of it, I suggest you consider going private, even if finances are tight or you have to sacrifice other things like a holiday, take a mortgage holiday or whatever.

If the therapy you have been receiving has been good, then going private will have a number of positives:

– you are not starting from scratch trying something which may not work for you
– even if your previous therapist will not or cannot offer private consultations, I presume that they will be able to refer you to a private practitioner and will be able to brief that therapist, to make the handover as smooth as possible and allow you and the new therapist to quickly make further progress (I suspect that the limited number of sessions offered by the NHS means that this sort of situation is not unusual).
– just the action of you doing something about this may in itself help a little, since you will be taking greater control, rather than being in the position of someone who feels they just have to accept whatever they are being offered by others.

Good luck, whatever you decide to do.

Does your shell ride up at the back when on the bike? This might be more likely if it has an elasticated hem, and especially if it is not designed for cycling with a longer cut at the back.

A cold lower back is bad news, and I think even many purpose made cycling jackets are badly designed and fail to properly cover the lower back. Similarly in my experience many manufacturers produce base layers that are not long enough in the back.

Does the paste “set” as such or stay as a paste once applied out of curiosity?

It is essentially a grease type product with tiny particles of plastic added which give it a gritty texture and increase the friction between surfaces.

That said, are you sure you need it? If all that you are going to use it on is the seatpost in the seat tube, you could check first whether there will be an adequate friction fit without carbon paste, before spending your money on the paste.

Really?

Sometimes descriptions are vague, often inaccurate too by the time it’s filtered down to the people who need to know.

In those circumstances, the police officers know that the description they have is probably not enough on its own to constitute reasonable grounds for suspicion to justify an arrest, and other evidence is therefore needed before they can make an arrest. Someone refusing to tell you who they are, does not qualify as the extra evidence needed to make the arrest.

A he had to do was give a name and have a little chat. He chose not to.

But he did not have to do that. He had done nothing wrong, and there was no legal requirement for him to give his name.

Instead of just focusing on his actions and blaming him for what happened, turn your scrutiny on the two police officers. They were the professionals doing a job which they had been trained and were being paid to do: the onus was wholly on them to do their job properly and within the law. When he refused to identify himself and walked into his house, all they had to do was let him go and make further enquiries, such as walking over to the various bystanders and asking them if they knew the man and could tell them his name and radioing to request further information/instructions from their colleagues (better description, whether the person they are looking for is known to live at that address etc.). Instead, in your words, they chose not to. They chose instead to completely screw up a situation which should have been well within their communication, management conflict and people management skills, and to (probably) break the law in doing so.

Sorry office I am not the person you are looking for.. My name is John Smith, if you would like proof here’s my ID.

Ok thanks, have a nice day and I hope you find the guy you are looking for.

All done – 30 seconds. Not that difficult.

Teamhurtmore, you say ‘Not that difficult’ – try putting yourself in his shoes, something which is difficult, in fact extremely difficult and probably impossible for most of us on this thread, because his life as a 60+ year old black person who has lived in inner city Bristol is probably worlds away from your and my life experiences.

Bear in mind, that it is not only virtually certain that he has seen and been on the receiving end of racist attitudes and discrimination from white people in authority positions throughout his life, but in his case he had already been wrongfully arrested previously on suspicion of being the same man the police were seeking this time. Can you imagine what that must feel like? You are simply going about your normal business and suddenly two police officers appear and accuse you of being that same person yet again?

If it were me, after having been on the receiving end of racism for probably many years, after the trauma of the previous wrongful arrest, and after actively getting involved in a police community liasion group to try to improve things, I think I would have felt utter despair and anger. Under those circumstances I can understand how someone would want absolutely nothing further to do with the police officers who were harassing them (in what would probably seem like some sick/cruel game), and would just want to get in their own home and away from it all. If anything that seems to me be a very normal human reaction and an admirably restrained approach in wanting to get away from the confrontation.

To expect him instead to simply put aside everything that has happened in the past and have a friendly cheery conversation with the police officers in the way you flippantly describe, shows a pitiable lack of comprehension and empathy.

So if a police officer suspect you’ve possibly committed an offence and are wanted, you say “it’s not me” and they walk away?

Others on this thread are better informed about the law, and I stand to be corrected, but I think that if the officers have reasonable grounds to suspect that he is the man they are seeking, then at the point that he refuses to provide proof of his identity, they are entitled to make an arrest, explaining in the usual language/formula that they suspect that he is XYZ, and that they are arresting him on suspicion of having done whatever that person is believed to have done.

What the officers do not have the power to do, is to behave as they did to try to force the man to provide proof of his identity (which makes it look as if they considered they did not have sufficient reasonable grounds to meet the standard required to make an arrest, but did not want to let him go inside as they should have, and so instead tried to badger it out of him).

Or do you say, no, it’s not me here’s my name… Or do you say it’s not me, become hostile and try to get away and scuffle with the police? And then wonder why it escalated?

Read the story: this is not the first time this has happened: “It is the second time Mr Adunbi has been mistaken for the same man. In 2009 he won a wrongful arrest case against Avon and Somerset Police and was awarded compensation.” Try and put yourself in his shoes. I am not black and do not live in inner city Bristol, but I can well believe that the police there have the same problems with institutional racism as the Met and GMP. That alone would make suspicious and wary of any dealings with the police, but this guy has already been wrongfully arrested before. Or do you think that he should have ‘learned his lesson’ after the first time?

You and I probably both live a rather comfortable white middle class bubble, where much is taken for granted, such as how you can always trust the police. The reality for many others is different, e.g. Hillsborough, West Midlands Regional Crime Squad, Stephen Lawrence etc. etc.

Civil liberties, such as Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, no ID cards, freedom from detention without trial, freedom from state surveillance etc., have been hard won and are often too readily taken for granted. The argument that ‘if you have not done anything wrong, then you’ve nothing to be afraid of and should accept it/cooperate’, is the usual starting point for those who want – or are happy – to see those freedoms eroded.

It doesn’t sound like it’s the first time this has happened to him so he knows the crack.

Think about what you’ve said there. It might give you some insight into why he might not feel like cooperating/doing what he’s told to do.

Why be unnecessarily obstinate when you could have just said I’m x here’s my details.

Why not? He has not committed any offence, and he is going about his lawful business.

We do not have compulsory ID cards in this country, and nor do the police have a blanket power to require people to provide proof of identity.

No joy. Another in the basket but no checkout. This on a poor connection from a Welsh farmhouse. Why couldn’t they run a lottery instead, since payment is not required until the end of the month?

I suspect the ‘first come first served’ arrangement was the simplest and least costly. AUK is a relatively small club with limited financial (and IT) resources, run by members who give up their free time to fulfil the various admin posts; similarly the event organisers and the volunteers who help them are doing it purely for the love of cycling. It is not a profit making business like the sportive companies.

I would suggest that you join AUK: existing members who belonged before March 2015 had guaranteed entry to this year’s LEL.

Breninbeener, I can’t answer your question, but if it’s any help I’ve measured a 28mm Pro 4 Endurance on my kitchen scales together with a few other tyres for comparison, including the 32mm Hyper:

23mm Pro Race (version 1 or 2, not sure which) – 214g
25mm Pro 3 Race – 221g
28mm Pro 4 Endurance – 291g
28mm Vredestein Senso Xtreme Weather – 273g (measures just over 28mm fitted on a Kinesis Crosslight wheel)
32mm Vittoria Voyager Hyper – 410g
40mm Vittoria Voyager Hyper – 466g

Incidentally, with regard to wider tyres, what about the rim width? Some manufacturers, like Pacenti, are promoting wider road rims which will alter the shape/volume of the tyre. So, is a 23mm tyre on a 20mm rim going to perform better than a 25mm or 28mm on a 15mm rim?

plus a pair of nitrile gloves in the bag on good summer bike (it has white bar tape )

and/or a couple of antiseptic wipes in individual sachets to clean grease etc. from hands.

I have started to question whether solo bike trips are the answer though, especially, if you are prone to depression.

I think it’s a mistake to think of cycling, or any other physical activity, as the ‘answer’, i.e. it’s not a cure for a condition like depression. Cycling can be very good at improving one’s mood (endorphins, fresh air and all that), but in that respect I guess cycling may have something in common with the drugs often prescribed for depression, in that they both only help to alleviate the symptoms, making day to day living more enjoyable or less unhappy, but a cure requires some other further intervention.

Unrealistic expectations that a bike ride is going to make things so much better, are probably not going to help, and the inevitable disappointment may only make things worse.

The important thing is to be able to enjoy and appreciate the ride for what it is and the pleasure it does provide, whatever that may be each time: a nice freewheel downhill, finding a good rhythm going uphill, the sun on your back etc. (which I think is what mindfulness is about, i.e. focusing on living in the moment).

It would be shame, and probably counter-productive, to give up what should be a relaxing and pleasurable leisure activity, because it failed to meet unrealistic expectations.

Brilliant. When I watched it, I couldn’t help thinking it’s just like one of the ‘Secret World’ sketches which featured Ray Winstone, Bob Hoskins and Ross Kemp.

anyone who rides a January 200 on a fixed-gear Genesis is hardly a supportive racer wannabe

I thought about making a distinction that, unlike Kinesis, the Genesis range includes not only racier bikes but also others which are more touring biased, but I figured my post was too long already. 200km on a fixed in January is very impressive.

Not saying you’re wrong, but often narrower tyres can feel faster even when they’re not.

I agree that in some conditions, especially on poor surfaces/gravel/off road, a narrow tyre may give a deceptive feeling of being faster, where in reality a wider tyre will give a smoother, more comfortable ride which is just as fast and which crucially does not batter the rider, with the result that the rider with wider tyres will be less battered, less tired, and consequently be in better shape and faster the longer the ride goes on. Paris Roubaix is probably a classic example, where the Spanish teams (admittedly for whom this was not an important race) routinely rode their usual set ups with narrow high pressures, and routinely made no impact on the race/DNF, until the odd Spanish rider who actually liked that sort of race, paid attention to what the Belgians did, and realised they used wider tubs and much lower pressures for Paris Roubaix than any other race (so horses for courses – not every race/ride/road is the same).

So, I am doubtful of this being so relevant on reasonably good roads, and with regard to ‘feeling faster’, what I felt when I replaced the 23mm tyres with the Hypers was not slower speed, but rather that the pedals were requiring more effort from me at my usual cadence in a given gear, and it was noticeable because I had not expected it.

fifeandy, if you are still reading, I mentioned the importance of group riding skills. On that note, one of the first things you should do to your Boardman and/or any new bike, is fit a decent (=long) mudflap to your rear mudguard. Both in the rain and after (when the roads are still wet), you will not be welcome by many riders in a group if you do not have a decent rear mudguard with a mudflap. Riding behind someone without a mudflap at those sort of speeds results in getting a continuous spray of water in the face. The usual solution used to be a piece of plastic cut out from a washing up liquid bottle or similar, or a piece of damp proof course, even though it may spoil the aesthetics of a £3,000 bike.

In my relatively limited experience of road frames, the most comfortable has been a 1987 Raleigh Randonneur. Soaks it all up, surprises me every time I get on it. Lightweight pre-CEN skinny steel tubes.

Bl@@dy hell, snap! I rebuilt mine last year, and was staggered at how good it felt, and this was comparing it with custom 853, 953, Colnago carbon and titanium Tripster. The transmission was also noticeably smoother than my other bikes, presumably due to the cup and cone Campag Tipo hubs and TA bottom bracket using loose balls.

I’m not so entirely convinced about very much wider tyres. My Raleigh felt noticably slower when I changed the worn out 23mm Vredestein Tricomps on it for 32mm Vittoria Hypers, and I suspect that at 32mm and above, you do have to buy the very best and most expensive tyres to get the both the speed from low rolling resistance and the comfort. I remember riding a 200km when I had fitted 30mm Michelin World Tours to the Raleigh; at that distance I didn’t notice the extra comfort, but I certainly noticed the extra weight and dragginess of the tyres, and was much more tired at the end of the ride as a result.

Breninbeener, you might be better off going a bit narrower and lighter rather than the half way house of the Vittoria Hypers, since you are presumably doing day rides wher you don’t needs loads of cushioning from the tyres. How about the Michelin Pro 4 Endurance in 28mm or even 25mm? If that does not make enough difference for you, then you know a wider tyre like the Hyper or even one of the much more expensive Compass wider tyres won’t give you what you want.

At one Audax last Jan more than 50% of the frames I saw were from Kinesis or Genesis.

I suspect that was a 100km, or at most a 200km. A lot of MAMILs will ride sportives and 100km audaxes on their high end carbon/titanium steed, which is often very close to a road race bike. The demographic shifts at 200km, and for 300km and above the participants will tend to be hard riding ‘touring’ riders. I remember an AUK champion telling me about one audax where a racing club entered en bloc, and set a high pace at the front, until the first very big hill, when they were simply dropped by the very tough hard riders you will find at the front of most audaxes.

No, I haven’t ridden an audax before, but i have done a 200km ride, and i have done a 1000km 6 day tour (although not self supported) so have a fair idea regarding what i’m after.

I have only done 200km, 300km and 24 hour rides, so cannot really talk, but have been a member of AUK for a couple of decades, and I think that it is inevitable that you will modify your idea of what you need/want in the course of completing a Super Randoneur series, especially the 400km and 600km rides.

That’s not say that you cannot make a good choice of bike now which would serve you well and which you could tweak and refine during the SR series, I simply think that there is a greater risk that you could choose something now which you would later decide was not what you really wanted/needed.

Whilst the very fastest riders who treat LEL and PBP as a race may be on what are to most intents and purposes full on road race bikes, I think that the key for most people, especially someone doing it for the first time, is comfort above everything else. That is probably more easily achieved with a more traditional steel frame biased more towards the (fastish) touring end of tubes and geometry.

So, in your shoes, if I had to get a bike now rather than make do with what I had and wait a bit, my own personal perferred option would be a Dave Yates[/url]: old school, but reliable. I am sure Shand could build something similar, and if they are close to you, I would definately have a chat with them.

I think that bikes like the Mason Definition and Kinesis Gran Fondo Ti are more biased towards the Sportive end of the spectrum, and may be less likely to be as suitable for the longer rides (although I’m sure some people will use them and sing their praises).

Already have a large saddle pack from bikepacking

If the bag is a single compartment narrow tapered bikepacking saddle pack, of the sort where you have to half empty the bag to get something in the bottom, I think you will find it’s not very practical compared with a saddlebag or rack pack, which have convenient side pockets in which to organise stuff (tools, brevet card, wallet, head torch etc.) and the lids/flaps of which give you full access to the main compartment. Looking at photos in the AUK mag, Arrivee, saddlebags and rack packs still seem to be the preferred option (plus some bar bags for longer rides like PBP/LEL).

The bag choice is minor in grand scheme of things, and I could be wrong in your case, but it’s typical of the sort of thing where you are likely to find some things don’t work and others do (and again, the quickest way to learn and avoid expensive mistakes, is to watch and ask what the experienced riders do/use).

bb7’s are mediocre at best

A lot of audax riders, probably the vast majority, are still using rim brakes. That said, I can understand a preference for discs on a bike that will be ridden on long distance rides that will inevitably at some point include prolonged heavy rain and possibly at night.

Incidentally, do you ride with a club on the road/do much group riding on the road? Being able to ride safely in a group is a key skill, and I doubt any rider who completes LEL rides it entirely solo.

with guards there is a huuuge toe overlap

Toe overlap is usually nothing to worry about, because you simply would not turn the bars enough for it to happen at normal speeds. However, a toe strike at slow speed and fall is just the sort of thing that is going to be more likely when are extremely tired/sleep deprived and making a slow turn into a control etc., so I agree it’s not something you want on a long distance audax bike.

Lastly, if you have not already done so, join AUK now. There are usually some good articles in the Spring edition of their Arrive magazine containing advice and people’s tales of their own rides and lessons in LEL and PBP years, and you will be able to download the previous editions.

Have you ridden any audaxes – or audax type rides – before? If you have, does that include some of the longer distances that you are considering, i.e. 200km and upwards?

If not, and assuming that is what you want the bike to be suitable for, then I suggest you join Audax UK, get the calendar of rides, and enter some first before buying a new bike.

Riding some audaxes will give a better idea than anyone on STW can of what might be the best bike for you, and will also give you the opportunity to see what bikes other more experienced riders use, and how they have set them up.

Once you start looking at 300km rides, lights are usually necessary (and they may be necessary for early/late season 200km audaxes and slower riders), so you would need to think about either battery lights or a dynamo hub. You will also need to think about what you will need to take with you and what to put it in, most likely a saddle bag or a rack pack (so you will probably want the frame to have rack bosses).

Frankly, your Boardman CX looks like it would be just fine, at least to begin with (and to use as a test bed on rides to work out what does – and does not – work for you): many people will be on old style touring and steel framed bikes that will probably be much heavier than the Boardman CX.

There’s nothing like an epic ride or three, especially in bad weather and possibly with a mechanical thrown in for good measure, to help you decide what you want on your next bike.

Interestingly, if you read some of the comments made by Dave Yates, a frame builder and himself a veteran audax rider, he actually advises people not to go for the more expensive Reynolds tubesets for an audax frame, because their lightness comes at the price of too much stiffness for long distance audaxes, and his personal experience was that the basic Reynolds fork blades are more comfortable than 853 blades and that this was very noticeable at the end of a ride like LEL.

Ton, in your shoes, I think I might be able understand and maybe eventually accept my mother keeping such a thing secret, but that would depend very much on the circumstances, especially the reasons for doing it.

As I am sure you will remember and know better than many of us, being a single parent in the 1960s and 1970s was generally a lot harder than it is nowadays, and there was a great deal of social stigma to being a single parent, which often also affected the children concerned. I hope my using this word will not upset you, but at that time the word b*****d was a much stronger swear word than it is today, and it was used more in its literal traditional sense to mean a ‘child born outside wedlock’. I can imagine a single parent mother in those days making a decision to conceal the parentage of her child to protect not only herself from social stigma, but possibly more so to protect the child. Sadly some adults and children can be extremely cruel and would readily use knowledge of any weakness to hurt others, and it’s much much harder for a child to cope with social exclusion and bullying (especially by other children), than it is for the adult parent.

So the decision your mother took when you were a child may then have been for the best, and once that lie was accepted, it would become more and more difficult to tell you the truth with each passing year, even when you were an adult.

As to her telling you now, I think her reasons – as much as you can be confident of what they are – are key to how I would eventually view it. Did she tell you because she she felt she owed it to you to be honest, and because she considered it wrong to keep it from you any longer? I would not be so willing to forgive if I thought someone told me something which they knew would upset me greatly, but they had decided to do it anyway because it would make them feel better (confession may be good for the soul, but it can be a fundamentally selfish act). In reality, I suspect it’s a usually a mixture of motivations, and only you can decide whether to accept – or possibly even overlook – your mother’s reasons.

However, in your shoes I think I would be most upset by her telling both your elder and younger sisters, and I would struggle to accept any excuse for that.

My advice to you would be to take as long as you need to process this information. Your mother has known the truth for half a century, and after so long and at her age she probably does not see it as being anywhere near as important or significant as you do. You on the other hand are only just now beginning to come to terms with what is a huge shock for you and a realisation that people whom you trusted implicitly have deceived and lied to you. So, in your situation, I would not be rushed into forgiving someone, and I would wait until I had come to terms with it myself before doing anything.

thepurist, as the others have said you probably need to see a professional for proper diagnosis and advice.

In the meantime following on from Cougar’s post I would ask if you cook?

As I understand it, some eating disorders like Anorexia are about exerting control over an aspect of our lives, as a substitute to – or a reaction to – being unable to influence or control other aspects of our lives, whether that be relationships, work, study, physical appearance or whatever.

If you do not cook (or cook very little), it might be that your particular behaviour is an extreme reaction to regain control over something that feels outside your control (and I do not necessarily mean just the choice and preparation of food).

So, whilst I am not suggesting this would be a cure for the underlying cause, I would suggest you cook more if you are not doing so. I think in some respects very mild obsessive character traits can be a positive thing when channelled in a constructive way: being very fussy and demanding about cooking something just right is probably a hallmark of the best chefs.

PS One of the reasons for saying the above, is your comment “any sort of buffet or prepared lunch sees me with maybe a sausage roll and some crisps while everyone else loads up on the sandwiches, pasta etc.” – I am being flippant but also quite genuine when I say that your pickiness is misdirected: freshly made sandwiches are a food where you can usually see and trust what you are getting and the quality of the ingredients, whereas given the nature of the meat and processed food industries I would not want to put a shop bought sausage roll in my mouth. When I fancied sausages last month, I cycled 45 miles there and back to one of the best butchers in the country, because my own pickiness meant that I would not ‘trust’ the sausages from any supermarket or even a local butcher.

EDIT I also think that there’s nothing as good as your own cooking failures and disasters to make you more relaxed about and appreciative of what others serve you.

vickypea, I can only imagine how hard what you are going through must be, and I would not pretend to have the answers. If what follows does not apply to you or is naive, please just ignore it.

It’s sometimes said that depression is an illness of the strong, rather than the weak. Your comments about “fight, fight, fight to stay afloat” and “I’m feeling under huge pressure to stay well” sound like you are putting a lot of responsibility and pressure on yourself to cope/keep on going, and I would be concerned that that in itself may exacerbate things.

I think we all have only so much reserves of mental/emotional energy or ‘get up and go’ (or however you might describe it), and putting on a brave face for long periods when that is not how we actually feel inside may be counter-productive, and the stress of the disconnect between trying to maintain a positive outlook versus our inner feelings may be a factor in finding it difficult to change those inner feelings.

Winston Churchill, who suffered from what he called ‘black dog’, said “when you are going through hell, keep on going”, but I think we also need to be able to be true to ourselves, and it’s not a weakness or a character failing to simply feel unhappy at times.

I guess what I am trying to say is be kind to yourself, and try not to put yourself under pressure to be or do more than you feel. I hope you feel better soon.

That is exactly what I am saying. There should be a procedure both for parking up AND starting. Either there was no start procedure (bad from the company) or he did not follow it (bad from him). The manager was definitely at fault, but PP may also have been

Yes, but the fact that the manager’s van was routinely parked improperly in a dangerous condition is more important when looking at the big picture (and was the underlying cause of the accident). From a safety management perspective, it is difficult/impractical to ensure that all drivers check a vehicle is in neutral and the handbrake on before switching on the ignition, but it is much simpler to check/monitor/police whether the vehicle has been left in a safe condition when it was parked, so the safety system should focus more on the latter because it can more readily be enforced and ensured.

Put it this way, how often do you pick up a hire car that has not been reversed parked and does not have the handbrake on and gear in neutral?

IOSH qualified and routinely risk assess very high risk marine environments.

Providing you are only undertaking risk assessments of specific activities in your own field of expertise, your fellow workers should be OK. However, if you are working at management level with responsibility for site wide safety and implementing and overseeing safety management systems, then I would be concerned.

Isn’t it also the new user’s responsibility to follow procedure for safely starting a machine or vehicle?

The manager routinely parked where he should not have done, and when PeterPoddy went to drive the vehicle, he found that it had been left in gear with the handbrake off. How likely was it that the first time PeterPoddy drove it also just happened to be the first time the manager had left it in gear with the handbrake off? It is very likely that the manager routinely left it like that, i.e. in a dangerous condition. Tolerating that sort of thing happening in a workplace and effectively relying solely on the next operator undertaking pre-start checks to identify the dangerous condition, is asking for trouble. Over-reliance on single individuals not making a mistake is a classic safety failure: British Rail’s safety management system for Signals Passed at Danger (SPADs) was similarly to treat them as human errors which were dealt with by disciplinary action, but after the Clapham crash it was forced to recognise that with so many train journeys and so many signals, it was statistically inevitable that drivers would pass a (small but unacceptable) percentage of red signals, and that consequently it was not sufficient just to rely on the driver seeing the red signal and stopping accordingly.

PeterPoddy said that the vehicle was not one he was familiar with and it was not immediately obvious that the gear stick was not in neutral. Continuing with the analogy of other machines, let’s say that everyone on site operates an Acme 4567 CNC lathe, with the exception of PeterPoddy’s manager who operates an Imperial Super Widget CNC lathe. It’s all the more important that everyone adheres to the same safe working practices when shutting down the machines and leaving them in a safe condition, if PeterPoddy or one of his colleagues may be asked to operate the Imperial Super Widget CNC lathe, with which they are less familiar.

PeterPoddy – That is as much your fault as his.

Nope. See my comments above about the value of site rules to get everyone to behave in consistent, methodical, predictable ways.

Rules for how cars should be parked (reverse in, handbrake on, netutral gear) are no different to rules about how other machinery should be be operated on site. So if you have a machine with various safety devices on it, there should be a written safe system of work covering how it is to be switched off/shut down/de-energised and left in a safe condition. Yes there is a responsibility on the operator to undertake pre-start checks which should identify if the last person to use it left it in an unsafe condition, but those should only be a back-stop. The primary responsibility rests with the last user to follow the rules and with management to check and ensure that the rules are followed. If operators are allowed to have different practices in how they leave their machines, then it becomes much more likely, even inevitable, that there will be an accident when someone starts up a machine.

So PeterPoddy was not as much to blame. The only entity as much to blame as the manager was Redland itself: having a manager routinely ignore company safety rules undermines safety across the site, and there should have been a safety management system in place which identified it and corrected it (routine safety inspections/audits and a resulting bollocking for the manager).

Whenever human error is blamed for an accident, the actual human error is often not that of the person doing the job, but the human error of managers and the organisation to properly manage safety in their business.

This link might help you.

HSE’s guide to safety management

hugor, as per my previous posts in this thread, I would strongly advise you not to rely on the Kinesis height guide (especially on its own and ignoring the other measurements compared with what you usually ride).

In my case, I am 178cm, and the 57cm should fit me perfectly (Kinesis suggest a height range of 174cm-184cm for the 57cm, so I am in the middle of the range). Instead it is far too large, and the 54cm is a much better fit which closely approximates to the ETT of my normal road bikes, despite my supposedly being too tall for the 54cm (Kinesis suggest a range of 166cm to 176cm). Kinesis do advise to size down when you are uncertain about choosing between two sizes, but I still think they have got the suggested heights wrong.

In your case, I suspect the 60cm would likewise be far too big. Whether the 57cm or 55.5cm would be best for you will probably depend on your own riding style/normal position and preferences. So if you prefer the bars higher for a more upright (touring) position you might prefer the 57cm, whereas if you prefer to have a lot of drop from saddle to bars and prefer to replicate the more aero position you might have on a road race style bike, then you may prefer the 55.5cm. Although the 54cm has a 55cm ETT, I suspect it would be too small unless you are very flexible and have an extremely aero position. Obviously each size is adaptable by varying the height of headset spacers and length of stem, but I think you would find that the geometry would mean that using a long stem, e.g. 120mm, to compensate for too short an ETT would noticeably slow the steering (especially noticeably off road), and to some extent vice versa. One thing I did notice with the greater saddle to bars drop of the 54cm compared with the 57cm, is that it meant I had better weight distribution (more weight on the front, which improved the control/feel when riding off road on the hoods). Hope this helps.

If someone had treated me very badly but failed to acknowledge the seriousness of what they had done, and did not show genuine contrition and did not – as far as possible – attempt to put things right, then I would find it difficult, if not impossible, to forgive them.

I think that letting go of the past and acceptance of/coming to terms with what has been done, to prevent being consumed with self-harming bitterness, is a different thing, and that does not make it necessary to forgive the transgressor.

It’s petty H&S BS like this that detracts from the real goal of H&S management.

I disagree. Firstly, as Denis99 now agrees, it is safer, and while the probability – and in a workplace car park the severity – is low, it’s quite reasonable for a firm to decide to implement this rule. The key thing, is that it’s explained properly to persuade everyone to comply (just as Dennis99 now agrees and just as he used to give safety talks to employees which got their engagement). It should also not be something which then takes up a lot of time or attention: again, as Dennis99 indicates there will usually be far bigger risks elsewhere, so having introduced simple rules like this and the handrail one, you don’t want to have to waste lots of time and resources monitoring and enforcing them.

With regard to the handrail one, bear in mind that some workplace environments will make this very necessary, e.g. those where lots of oily waste is unavoidably produced and stairs cannot be kept free of slippery contaminents. Even in low risk environments like offices, it can still serve a useful purpose: we might not run up the stairs or jump down them three at a time, but the energetic new YTS employee fresh from school might do just that. In that respect, site rules about parking, using handrails, no running etc. help to get everyone to behave generally in safe methodical and predictable ways. Much as I don’t like the phrase ‘safety culture’ these rules do help to instill that attitude and encourage a workforce that self-polices and employees looking out for each other. It should go without saying that it’s absolutely essential that managers and senior staff also comply with those rules, and you know that you are on the right track when even a junior employee has the confidence to remind someone much more senior to them (politely but clearly) to use the hand rail, wear PPE properly etc.

their car park is an ice rink

Why was it in that condition? This is key to whether the business could be deemed negligent, and consequently be held liable.

It might be that there was sudden snowfall/freezing rain only a few hours or less before your other half fell over, in which case there may have been little that the business could reasonably have done.

At the other extreme, it might be that the car park has poor drainage with the result that pools of water occur every time it rains and do not drain away, and will inevitably freeze in winter whenever the temperature falls to zero. In that sort of scenario, the business should have been taking active steps to fix the drainage, and in the meantime it should have procedures in place whenever ice formed, such as prompt gritting/salting. In that event, I would think you should most certainly claim: it’s important where businesses are irresponsible and they cause harm as a result, that there is some comeback (even if it’s their insurers that pay), otherwise there is no incentive for them to properly manage the risks on their premises.