Category: Cycling
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Boxing Day 2022 – Festive 500 Ride #3
I’m doing the Rapha Festive 500 this year – riding 500KM between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. This was my third ride on Boxing Day which was gloriously sunny if still cold. This was a ride between Sheringham on the North Norfolk coast and Norwich. The full route is over on Strava. So far…
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Repairing a Garmin Edge Mount
[Now updated with changed fix!] This week I had an accident on my bike and crashed in the rain on my commute to work. No damage to my bike… or to me. But my Garmin Edge 1030 bike computer came off the worst, getting detached from its mount on impact, and damaging the mount in…
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Urban Hill Climb 2022
The UK has some very individual events in the world of cycling – a good example being the classic 10 mile time trial, often take place on stretches of dual carriageway. And then there are the hill climbs. These events tend to take place in the early autumn, organised by local clubs, and involve riders…
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L’Étape du Tour 2022
There is an accompanying podcast to this blog! Listen at the bottom of the piece or follow this link. I’ve done a few sportives over the years, but the one I’d always wanted to have a go at was L’Étape du Tour, the sportive from ASO, the organisers of the Tour de France who each…
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Festive 500
The “Festive 500” was a cycling challenge cooked up by Rapha, the cycle-clothing company, in 2010 to promote more cycling across the Christmas and New Year period. Essentially the idea is that you cycle 500KM between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. With the advent of Covid, the “rules” allow to achieve this either out…
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Bikepacking King Alfred’s Way
Here’s a trip I made earlier this year, but didn’t write about at the time. I’m publishing this piece now because I did always mean to write about my experiences, but also because I made a podcast of my trip, and that podcast has just been published as an episode of The Cycling Podcast’s Explore…
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90s MTB to Singlespeed Conversion
Sometime around 1995 or 1996, I bought a Giant ATX 850 mountain bike. This was a rigid bike – not even any front suspension. It had an aluminium frame and 3 x 7 speed chainset. That bike went a lot of places with me. In late 1996, I rode it in the Moroccan Atlas mountains.…
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Making the Most of 2020
This post is a bit unusual, since it’s very much about me, and I don’t usually write that much about myself. In many ways, everything I write is about myself, but this is explicitly such. 2020 has been a tough year for just about everyone, and while I’m fortunate enough to have a secure job…
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Froome at the Giro in 2018
I don’t mention it here as often as I should, but I do work as one of the producers on The Cycling Podcast. It’s has once again been nominated in the sports category for a British Podcast Award, and if it’s the sort of thing you do, you can vote for us in The Listener’s…
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Using a £20 Lidl Ultrasonic Cleaner on a Bike Cassette
In my local Lidl this weekend, I noticed a stash of ultrasonic cleaners retailing at £19.99 each. Usually they’d be used for things like jewellery. But I’d seen a couple of videos online with people using them to clean bike components – particularly cassettes and chains. So I bought one, removed the cassette from my…
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Playing with GoPro’s TimeWarp Feature
TimeWarp does a kind of timelapse for motion, but smooths everything out. I still wanted a ride that took over an hour to be faster, so there’s some post-processing here to further speed up large sections to get a video under 90 seconds.
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Driving Under Lockdown
As the roads are currently much emptier during the UK coronavirus lockdown, in general terms it’s actually somewhat safer out there. The air is clearer and there’s much less traffic. Of course only those who are doing work that can’t be done from home, and those either shopping or doing other critical chores are supposed…