12°C, still & no wind. 0 cloud.
Sunny and still: ride the fixie. The Paddy Wagon is running well though the original.rims are worn out. I just got a quote for rebuilding them with new rims – £40 per wheel. I’ll do that after I fit the summer wheels.
6°C no wind, grey & drying.
60km of fun. I had a few mechanicals, the chain needed tensioning better & the wheel bearings were also loose.
Kona Paddy Wagon, 5°C, sunny with light northerly, dry
The weather has finally broken; we had more than 5 weeks of grey drizzle and SE wind. Now it has swung around and gone cold.
This bike definitely feels lighter and quick compared with the Mustang.
Chilly 14°C tops. Light N breeze.
Paddy Wagon: a swift ride but there is probably some selection bias in that claim. I tend to ride this bike when winds are light, and light winds are conducive to fast rides. Today the overall average was 23.6kph, that’s only 1 kph below my best in August.
26°C, 3/5 cloud, light SE breeze.
No wind so I got the fixie out again. This was nearly 1km/h faster than yesterday, so that’s very encouraging. I had another road rage from a driver of a white van. He blasted the horn a few times & shouted something incoherent on entering Croston. I have no idea what that was about.
22°C, sun & clouded over later, no wind & dry.
Rode another 23.7kph on the fixie. This matches last week’s ride but was much further. I caught up with a nice little group of roadies; a guy, his daughter & friend. They had nice modern road bikes in contrast to my 15 year old steel single speed.
He told me they were regulars at Manchester Velo and did National events too. I asked about their training while we were talking about Garmin data. They both had cadence & power meters but that was really only for the use of their coach. They typically did 10 hours a week and about 6k per year.
I was dead impressed which drove me on to set a pace after my cafe stop. I’m quite inspired actually.
Kona Paddy Wagon, 11°C, moderate SW, clear blue sky, dry
Used the morning for repairs to prepare the summer bike to go out. I got a replacement pair of Mavic Aksium elite wheels and put them on with 25c tyres. The rear went down so I swapped the tube. There is a drawer in the kitchen where I put repaired tubes, so I took another one. That also leaked away. Possibly, it was caught by the lever while fitting that new tyre. How annoying!
Anyway, the ride was excellent. It really looks like spring out there and it’s only February. The GPS failed saying average 11.4kph. stupid machine.
Kona Paddy Wagon, 14C, no rain but muddy, light SSE wind.
It has a new chain but it doesn’t ride well over the teeth. Under load, each tooth clicks. I should have changed the rear cog (and I expect the chainring has gone also). Last time this happened, I couldn’t get the cog off with the chain-whip. Fixie cogs screw on, but as you ride them, the thread tightens. By tyhe time the teeth are worm out, the cog is too tight to remove. The bike shop had to practicaly break the cog off in a vice, it was that bad.
Furthermore, the rear tyre has a slow puncture that didn’t bubble in the bucket so I replaced the valve. Yet, it still slowly deflates.
November has been an odd month, it started and ended warm with an icy week 3. That makes acclimatising difficult.
21°C, light SE, sunny & dry
Same route as last week and the bridge is still shut. There’s nothing visibly wrong but cracks can be tiny (if that’s the cause).
It looks like the bridge will be closed until the end of the year.
16°C, light onshore & light clouds.
There’s no squeezing past those fences. There’s no visible reason why it’s closed though. I took a detour north & under the bridge and from underneath, no visible reason.
Micycle 