5-8°C, sunny and calm.
Fresh, mild warm air the at doesn’t smell of spring yet. It’s still dark early but uncharacteristically mild. Storms are approaching.
Does this route look rude to you? No? Okay, it’s just me then.
11°C sunny but cool. Brisk S.
A fresh cool day where I rode to my house and in this ride, rode back. I headed south through Southport towards Formby. Then I heard a sellotape sound. There was a chemical spillage in the left hand side of the road. In some places, it was a few cm deep. Traffic had gone through it and spread it for a few kilometres to Ainsdale.
On narrow bike wheels, it felt unsafe. I couldn’t tell whether it was greasy, corrosive or what. It was viscose and odourless. Very strange. I tried dialling 101, the non-emergency police number I was.put onto hold for a very long time.
In the end, I gave up and rode on the pavement
9°C, belt of ran and dank after.
12°C, sunny and calm.
Short visit to the Green Machines. It’s good to.pull the bars while staring out to sea. The wind is light today, though a breeze pushes inland near the coast. These are ideal conditions for the fixed. It’s been so long since its last outing that the tyres were only on 30psi. These run best at 90psi. We’re in the last part of October, soon is the time to fit winter wheels.
22°C, S breeze, full sun.
Fixed gear ride and some moderate hills via Dalton. Excellent coffee at Twin Lakes Velo., But it didn’t return all of the energy I wanted.
22°C, grey cloud with occasional sun.
I could ride this bike all day, unless it’s windy. Though my legs are getting sore, that turgid feeling has gone. Rides like this remind me of a the way we can take several days to warm up to exercise.
The last three days adds up to 100 miles. Result.
13-16°C, light wind and dry.
A decent ride with variety in hills and flatlands. Home commitments left me with too little time to ride 100km which wouldn’t be much extra effort. Shame.
8°C, brightening up with increasing SW wind.
1, The birds were lively today. I heard curlews, lapwings and another strange one. The latter’s sound carried a very long way but eventually I got there. A guy stopped his van and had just finished playing his bagpipes. I stopped for a chat; he played in a band in Liverpool and couldn’t practice at home.
2, Look, this is creepy;
On a lamp-post in Formby.
“WAKE UP WHITE PEOPLE
SAVE THE WHITE RACE.
Er what? Save them from what exactly? A quick search using those words returns white supremacists in the USA. What is going on in their poor little minds? I’m not offended by this crass slogan, I’m disgusted by it. Needless to say, I scraped it off.
3, Later, a puncture. The tyre is something that the rubber delaminated from the case. How did I let it get so bad? There followed a nervous ride home, it could so easily puncture again. It didn’t.
4, new pedals:
Swapped from the Arrow winter bike, semi-platform SPDs seem a more natural option on a fixed gear bike.
The black cage is actually plastic and weighs very little. Clipping in feels no different. Shimano do a very wide range of SPD pedals and I may slowly phase in this style as others wear out. It’s only the cross bike that needs the extra mud clearance offered by the minimalist design.
Occasionally, I may ride this machine in ordinary shoes so a wider footprint is necessary. They feel better too and I can see a smoother movement of my knees with less side to side motion. I had no twinges in my knees today. Problem solved!
8°C, light W, dull and dry.
https://www.mapmyride.com/workout/3317449414
January is possibly the most miserable month of the year, but things can only get better. January is in competition with December, mainly because December contains the detestable Christmas stress fest.
Anyway, today I dragged out the fixie, dragged it over to the coast by dragging round the cranks. That wasn’t an easy ride despite the distance.
For all these decades of cycling, I’ve had a rule of thumb for warm-ups. It usually takes me 8 miles or half an hour to warm-up, whichever comes first.
After that stage, everything loosens up and I can ride all day. In previous years, when I rode long rides more often, there seemed to be another threshold too. Two hours in is usually a good time to take a break, maybe have a snack or even a cafe stop. The next stage could be really long, taking up to 70 or even as much as 90 miles. It was this phase that average speed was highest. Today was not a day like that.
Today, that threshold didn’t really pass. I decided after 10 miles, to ride home.
5~7°C, grey, dank and a S breeze
https://www.mapmyride.com/workout/328970721
Slow but long. 4h 40′ and the headlight lasted (though the orange warning light came on). Better still, the phone’s battery (a Motorola g6) ran down to 87%. My old phone (a Samsung S3) could run flat in less than 3 hours and I had to carry a booster at all times.
A good outing. Good figures and a good feeling afterwards. There was a time when a metric century was the normal for a Sunday ride.
Micycle 