Tag: cycling
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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…
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Just A Regular Cycle Ride Home
I turned on my bike camera this evening for the first time in ages, and a single ride pretty much captured everything in a single shot. Two separate cars turning across me either not indicating at all, or indicating half-way through the manoeuvre. A bus entering a box junction before it can ensure it can…
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UCI World Championships – Harrogate 2019
With the first home cycling World Championships since they were at Goodwood in 1982 (which very much predates my interest in cycling), I was always going to be spending late September in Yorkshire. There were a series of events held over a week, but I headed up after the time trials had taken place, reaching…
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Eight Seconds
This year is the 30th anniversary of what in my lifetime has been the greatest Tour de France of all time. In 1989, American Greg LeMond defeated Lauren Fignon by just 8 seconds with everything coming down to a unique final stage time trial. Usually, the end of the Tour is a processional stage followed…
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Need For The Bike by Paul Fournel
My Tour de France inspired cycling themed book marathon continues with Need For The Bike, a classic that I’d somehow never heard of. Paul Fournel is a French writer, poet, publisher, and cultural ambassador – a wonderful job description to have, I’m sure you’ll agree. He’s also been in love with bikes since he was…
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Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar
Continuing my non-stop cycling reading during this year’s Tour de France, I turned to a volume has been sitting around on my bookshelf* for a number of years – David Millar’s book where he digs into his life story, and in particular the years that he doped. I’ve always liked David Millar, and latterly he’s…
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The Cycling Podcast Mug
I was delighted to receive this in the post today. Stacey Snyder has been making these mugs during the Grand Tours this year to help raise some money for good causes in association with The Cycling Podcast (on which I am a producer). They sell out quick, so listen to The Cycling Podcast and check…
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Three Weeks, Eight Seconds: The Epic Tour de France of 1989 by Nige Tassell
Channel 4 burst onto UK TV screens in 1982 – a new commercially funded public service broadcaster. One of the things it would do was cover sports that the traditional BBC and ITV weren’t showing. They would show highlights of the NFL and even kabaddi. But for me, the sport that Channel 4 would really…
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The Yellow Jersey by Peter Cossins
The first thing to say about this book is that it’s beautifully made. Telling stories from the Tour isn’t a new idea – there are dozens of books that, quite often, recycle the same stories of races of yesteryear. But this book takes as its starting point the Yellow Jersey. This year is the 100th…
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The Tour According to G: My Journey to the Yellow Jersey by Geraint Thomas
For many people, Geraint Thomas was the surprise of last year’s Tour de France. He had gone into the race as joint leader with Chris Froome with Team Sky. Having spent years as a loyal lieutenant, he’d be a protected rider. While Froome had triumphed in the Giro d’Italia earlier in the year, to become…