Smile, you're on camera

Not something you see every day - a cyclist with a camera on his helmet. Must get as annoyed as motorists as I do.

Starting the clock on the odometer

I've never done this before - taken a reading on the bike computer at the start of the year. I really have no idea how many kilometres I do per year - I know I've been through 3 bike computers (they die of drowning after a while, thanks to riding in the rain) and each bike computer had at least one battery change. At each changeover, I have never bothered to keep track of the distance at that point.

This is not a new year's resolution - it's simply that I thought about it before getting on the bike this morning. I start the year at 8341km - let's see where it finishes.

New shoes

After pretty much utterly anihalating my old riding shoes, I finally worked up the courage recently to buy a new pair. I have been insanely hesitant to do so, mainly because of the ridiculous width of my feet. The old pair were the widest I could find, yet they still caused my little toe to disappear off the nerve network after about 25km of riding. Over the last two years, I have been through a good half dozen bike shops, looked at what seems to be every pair of shoes on the market, and been put off by the worry that I'll splash out $300 on a pair of clogs that don't fit.

But things finally got to the point where I had to bite the bullet and get a new pair. The soles on the old ones had started peeling off from the heel, and they were starting to look like they wouldn't see out the month without a catastrophic sole peeling episode halfway home.

So I bought a new pair. And I left them in the box for a week whilst I bedded in the new bike computer and worried about the chinstrap on my new helmet.

Then the day dawned when I finally worked up the courage to try them on.

Fuck! - they are so comfortable, they make the old lot seem like an iron maiden. What was I thinking?

Shoe shopping - the bane of straight men everywhere.

Curse you, Trek

I did a bit of bike shopping on the weekend. Ended up parting with the better part of $700 to replace stuff that is just plain worn out.

One of the items that went on the scrap heap was my bike computer. It ingested some rain recently, and has not been the same since. I allowed it to clock up 11,000km, and then got a new one.

The old one was a Sigma Sport model that cost me about $90 around 4 years ago. It had all the functions that I thought I could ever want, until the guy in the shop pointed me at an $80 Trek model that did all the same functions, but also added a cadence function and a thermometer. Funny that - two functions I have always dearly wanted, but never wanted to pay $500 for a computer that offered them.

Amazing how much prices for this sort of stuff have plunged in just 4 years. Back then, adding a cadence meter shot the price of a bike computer into the stratosphere. Now, they are as common as mud. You can still pay a lot for a really fancy bike computer, but at the cheap end, you get a huge amount of bang for your buck.

The problems started when I went to install it.

When I bought my last bike computer, I got the shop to fit it. They did a very neat job - much neater than I could have done as it turns out in retrospect.

Fitting the computer meant fiddling around with a variety of bits. I had to strap a cradle onto the handlebars - a pretty simple thing to do with two cable ties, except that I put it on upside down and managed to miss the rubber pad that is supposed to sit under the cradle to stop it slipping around on the handlebars.

Good thing I have a ready supply of cable ties in the shed.

Then I had to attach a magnet to a spoke, and then run a cable with a sensor on it down the fork to a spot just opposite the magnet - that's how speed is determined. The sensor counts the number of times the magnet goes past, and by knowing the wheel diameter, is able to compute things like speed and elapsed distance.

Except that I put the magnet on the front wheel (where the old one was) and this one required me to put it on the back wheel. The stupid bloody instructions say nothing about putting it on the back wheel. I presume they were written by an idiot who doesn't know his arse from his front, or who has never had experience with fitting other types of bike computers.

The way I discovered I had put it on the wrong wheel was when I spun the wheel and instead of getting a speed reading, I got a cadence reading. I had strapped the wrong sensor up next to that magnet.

So I had to cut off another bunch of cable ties and start again. Like I said, good thing I have 200 cable ties in the shed.

I finally worked out how to run the cable down to the back of the bike, and how to position the cadence sensor and the wheel sensor. That only took about an hour. The instructions said to attach the sensor to the "chain stay". What the fuck is the chain stay? I am not a bike mechanic. I know what a wheel looks like, and I know where to sit, and that greasy, mucky thing that goes around and around is the chain. But the chain stay?

That required me to go and spend $30 on a bike maintenance book, because the instructions were a steaming pile of shit in this regard. It may surprise the manufacturers and designers of bike bits, but some of their customers have no fucking idea what all the thingys on their bikes are.

Then I had to cable tie another magnet to a crank. I know what a crank is. It's the thing that creaks as I pedal. When I was a kid, I used to have a really bad habit of skinning my ankles on the crank. I still have scars on the inside of both ankles from removing a slab of skin again and again and again.

I managed to fit that magnet without too many problems - it only required a couple of cable ties. At that point, I thought about taking the bike for a shakedown run, but I was too mentally buggered from stuffing around all afternoon with cable ties and a pair of clippers (to remove all the wrongly positioned cable ties).

So the next morning, I hop on the bike for my ride to work.

I immediately find that the cable tie that is holding the magnet to the crank is rubbing against my shoe. It's not rubbing that badly - not enough to wear through it on the trip to work, or enough to give me a blister on my foot, but enough to be irritating.

Should have done that shakedown ride.

Good thing I have lots of cable ties in the shed (about 150 now). As soon as I got home, I had to cut that tie and restrap the magnet with a repositioned cable tie.

The Trek bike computer ships with 2 spare cable ties. They should ship it with 20 spares instead. Or have a big warning on the packet - "Get this fitted by your bike shop".

Down at heel

I think my cycling shoes have finally come to the end of their life. They've given me a good 11,000 km, so I can't complain too much. I just need to find a pair that is no less comfortable than these were.



I can feel an expensive day coming on tomorrow. The helmet has had it, and the bike computer went all wierd on me in the rain this week. If I get away with only dropping $600 in my favourite bike shop, I will have done well. I fear it could be much worse than that....

Still, that's not much more than two new tyres for the car, so one should not complain too loudly about the odd purchase of new kit. Speaking of which, I might need some new suit pants. The current ones are getting rather loose around the waist.

Eau de sump

Phew, what a day for riding. Maybe I should shut my trap and not blog about the joys of riding in the rain. It's not the rain that's the problem - it's the fucking twerps in their Cayenne's that think they can drive up suburban streets at 100mph because "it's a Porsche". God, how I wanted to see one wrapped around a power pole tonight. Preferably on fire.

Here's how I ended up when I got to work.

Everything was wet. My sunglasses kept fogging, so I rode by memory. My calves were covered in mud, my shoes were full of water, I had a greasy stripe right up the middle of my back and I was half drowned from swallowing rain all the way in to town.

It was great.

Getting home was more of the same, except that my light battery gave out before I had left the CBD (never a good look) and I was reduced to licking the lenses of my sunglasses in an attempt to stop them fogging (it works with diving goggles).

The only changes I make when it rains are to carry a fresh pair of white socks (so that I can put on dry socks for the ride home) and to wrap my socks and jocks for the day in a plastic shopping bag (which is another reason why I like plastic shopping bags. Nothing worse than starting the day at work with wet jocks).

One problem with getting wet is that the gear never dries out properly in the locker room at work. The dampness is not a problem - it's lycra, so it doesn't feel horrible when wet, but it does pong. When I got in the lift tonight, I could have sworn that a tramp had been pissing on my clothes. I really felt like an insane, homeless bike rider.

For tomorrow, I am going to experiment with some anti-fog stuff that I have for the car. It will probably eat the plastic lenses of my sunglasses. Ah well, it's time for a new pair anyway.

I should explain - I have an aversion to contacts, so I have sunglasses that have clip on lenses on the inside. They are great 95% of the time, but they do have a tendency to fog, possibly due to the outer and inner lens being in close proximity. Moisture, such as steam from my sweaty face, gets into the gap and precipitates as fog. I hate that. I hate getting big, fat raindrops in the eyeballs at 40kmh even more, so I somehow have to put up with the sunglasses.

As for the Eau de Sump, that's what the water flicking off my front wheel tastes like. If you think about it, the water running off the roads is full of all the nasty gunk from the bottom of your car, especially the engine and gearbox, plus lots of crap from your car tyes. By the time I get home, I feel like I have had a bath with a litre of sump oil and a shredded tyre. Even though I spent an hour getting drenched in the pissing rain tonight, I got home and scrubbed every pore extra hard in the shower. It's the one time when I go in for the big facial exfoliation and all that guff. I prefer my face to smell like dafodils or peaches rather than Valvoline.

Does your bum hurt much?

I get asked that question a lot. Everyone that doesn't ride a bike seems to think that riding a bike gives you a sore bum.

Those are the same people that haven't ridden a bike in 10 years, pull the old rust heap out of the shed, pump up the tyres and go for a jaunt around the park.

The next day, their bum hurts.

So they think, "Sod this for a joke" and go back to sitting in front of the TV.

I'd say that the cause of the pain is the unexpected exercise, not the bike seat. I have been taking Monkey to the pool of late. The day after the first time we did some 'throw Monkey into the air' exercises, my shoulders ached like buggery. Which is not surprising, as it has been a long time since I have lifted any weight repeatedly above shoulder level.

Now, I can throw him up in the air with wild abandon and suffer no pain the following day.

That said, I do get a bit of pain towards the end of the week. It's not "bum pain" as such. It's just tired, worn out legs. I always have to remember to take it easy on Monday and Tuesday so that I don't feel like a wrung out dishrag come Friday. Of course I forgot that rule this week in a fit of madness when I chased a very fit young bloke up the approaches to the Anzac Bridge. I went up that slope in his wake at around 50% faster than normal, and boy, did I pay for it that afternoon.

I know that the only way to improve is to continually stretch yourself - the body can't be allowed to get into a routine as far as exercise is concerned. Chasing wiry young bucks is a great way to push myself out of my comfort zone, but bugger me, it gets harder as you get older.

Towels

Tomorrow is a very important day in the bike commuting calendar - it is towel changeover day. This is not a national day celebrated by bike commuters everywhere - it is simply the day when I have remembered to take a fresh towel into work.

Towel changeover day should have happened 3 weeks ago, so as you can imagine, the current inhabitant of the locker room at work is getting a bit manky. However, it is better to have a manky towel than no towel at all - which is something that I discovered to my cost last year. I had to dry myself with a pair of socks.

The lesson from that episode is to never bring the manky towel home until you have taken a fresh towel into work. I thought I'd just bring the manky towel home, and I'd automatically remember to take a fresh one in the day after.

Um, wrong.

The moment I threw the towel into the washing basket and set foot in the back door, all thoughts of soft, fluffy towels were completely forgotten about.

I have also figured out that if I am to take a fresh towel in, I have to pre-load it into my backpack the night before. That's because my morning routine is so rigid, and I am so dopey in the morning, I will never remember to pack one at 6am. If I was able to remember to pack one at 6am, I would have had a fresh towel at work 3 weeks ago.

So I have just packed a towel.

One trick about having a towel in a shared locker room is to have an old, ragged towel that looks like it was last used for cleaning a wildebeest. There are 12 lockers in our locker room, but about 50 people seem to use the room. That means that towels are hanging everywhere, and there is a big sign in a prominent position that reminds people to not use a towel that belongs to someone else. I am not overly thrilled by the idea of a co-worker using my towel without me knowing about it, but I am not so hung up on it that if I discovered such an act, that I'd take the towel out onto the footpath and set it on fire. That said, if you really want to avoid having your towel used more than once a day, don't have a gorgeous, fluffy towel that screams "use me". Have a scratchy old thing with the fringe hanging off that says "put me out of my misery and throw me out".

The sad thing is that I have a reasonably large collection of such towels.

Upsold

I almost forgot - when I bought my new pedals yesterday, the salesman upsold me on some tube patches. I needed some additional patches for my patching kit, and they normally cost bugger all. However, he sold me on some glueless patches, which cost $6.

Woo-hoo, big upsell, given that the pedals cost $129. Still, I was gratified to see that he cared enough about selling to upsell me on the most trivial item, even at 2 minutes past opening time, when he was still munching on his breakfast (an apple). Nice to see someone doing their job.

End of a pedal

I was about halfway home last night when I got stuck at a red light. Which can be nice, as an occasional breather is sometimes required on Sydney's hills. As I took off from the lights, I heard a metallic tinkle - the kind of tinkle that I have heard before - and was not surprised when my cleat no longer clipped into my right pedal. The poor old pedal had finally worn out, and a crucial bit of tin had snapped off.

To give you some idea of the wear and tear that a bike can suffer from repeated use, I have taken these close ups of the pedal. Not the crater that has been worn on the side of this one - there should be no crater there. This is the result of me unclipping about 10,000 times, and the cleat rubbing against the metal as it unclips to one side. Amazing that it should wear down this much.



Here are the two pedals side by side. The one on the left has a nice gouge, and the other has none. That's because I am a "right foot stander", which means I unclip my right foot 99.9999% of the time when I have to pull up at a traffic light or stop sign.



Now some people might laugh at that - the thought of a cyclist actually stopping at a stop sign or red light, but some of us obey the road rules most of the time. This pedal proves it.

I now have a shiny new pair of Shimano pedals, and they are wonderous indeed because I one can clip in on either the top or bottom. In fact they really don't have a top or bottom. The Wellgo pedals that I am getting rid of did have a top and bottom, and what it meant is that everytime I took off, I had to flip the pedal right side up with my toe, and then search for the cleat hole. Doing the flipping took a lot of practice, which is all wasted now. Ah well, such is life. One learns a skill, and then finds that technology has made it redundant.

Discovering that there are double sided pedals out there was a revelation to me though. It's like I had been watching black and white TV all my life, and suddenly found that colour has been available for 30 years. I wonder which hole I have had my head stuck in for the last 4 years.

Books vs new bike shoes

I never buy cycling magazines. Except for the one that I bought last week, because I had nothing to read at lunch, and I had already read all four daily papers that are common in these here parts, and I can't bear the thought of sitting in a Japanese restaurant staring at the soy sauce label whilst one waits for ones sushi to arrive.

In one way, it was $10 well spent, because I found out that two shoe makers have introduced models that are wider than normal. I put a big corner fold-over on that page, because I have one foot that is an "E" width and the other is "EE". They are not long, but they are as wide as those bread paddle things that bakers use to plonk bread into ovens. In other words, I have fat feet. I can only wear two types of running shoe - New Balance and Brooks, because they are the only two to make a fat foot shoe. I can only wear two brands of ski boot, as only two make an extra wide toe box, and even then I had to get my current pair melted and stretched in order to stop my toes from going numb and falling off in the snow.

Buying nice, black leather work shoes is a chore that I will not go into, as it would bore both of us to death.

So imagine my delight when I found that Shimano and some other mob that I have never heard of have fat shoes. I took that information on board, and today visited my bike shop to see if they had any available.

The very nice shop bloke showed me the Shimano range, which started at about $169 and then went up and up and up to about triple that. I explained that I didn't care whether I got a road shoe with a stiff sole or not, and I didn't want ratchets instead of velcro to tighten the straps - first and foremost, I wanted a fat shoe, and I could worry about the other features after that.

As I stood there checking out the $169 shoes, he did something on his PC and came back with the bad news.

"Shimano have fat shoes in stock, but they only make fat shoes in two models - the 2nd most expensive, and the most expensive".

I had a choice of a $340 shoe or a $400 shoe.

I was not mentally prepared for that, so I thanked him and left. If he had offered me a $250 shoe, I probably would have bought it.

Bugger.

So I drowned my sorrows by going on a book buying spree at the bookshop across the road. I have about 20 books on an Amazon wish list, and I have been inching towards buying the lot as a late Christmas present to me. I have them on a wish list as I doubted that most of them would ever appear in a book shop here in Sydney. Good books have a bad habit of never making it to Australia.

So, what is in these two bags of goodies?



I gave up many years ago trying to count how many books I own. I now measure them by the foot. I just measured the contents of these two bags - they contain nearly a foot of books.

And no, I am not going to weigh them. They are not icecream.



I started reading "It's your time you're wasting" this afternoon, and Frank Chalk would probably be delighted to know that I am already 46 pages into it. In that time, I have done some gardening, made dinner, done some laundry and the washing up, compiled a shopping list, done some monkey-watching and even blogged a bit. In all, I reckon I had 15 free minutes to read those 46 pages. If you are reading this Frank, I managed to read that much that quickly because I am 40, and went to a very strict and very good school. Discipline was tight and tough, and the teachers were not afraid to wield the cane. If I had the choice between not being caned and finishing school as a loser, or being caned occasionally and finishing near the top of the state in a few subjects, then I'll take a few welts on the bum from time to time.

This is an excellent book. Paul and Tony, if you are reading this, get yourself a copy (both are ex-teaching friends of mine). Anita, who is still teaching, will probably laugh her head of at it.



Since I stacked the largest books at the bottom of the pile, "Wasting Police Time" will be next. I've always enjoyed his blog, so the book should be good. The only book similar to these that I could not get was "Blood, sweat and tea", and it is still on my Amazon wish list. When I buy that box of books from the US, "Blood" will be in it.

Frankly, I was amazed to find these two books in a Sydney book shop. I doubted they would ever make it out here. What's going on that Australians want to buy books buy English bloggers?



Had to buy this one - I love Robert Harris's books. This is third on my list.



I read about this one in The Spectator. It's by James Delingpole, and I enjoy reading his columns in the speccie. I hope that "Coward on the beach" is up to scratch. Again, I cannot explain why this book found space on an Australian bookshelf, but I'm glad it did.



I've read reviews about "Spitfire: portrait of a legend" in both the Spectator and The Economist, and just had to buy it as soon as I saw it sitting there on the "new releases" table.



I picked this up in another bookshop before Christmas, flicked through it and put it back as if I bought this book, I would have bought 10 more, and I didn't want to be carting them home in my backpack. So I jumped at the opportunity today to buy it.



Bjorn Lomburg - do you realise how hard it is to find his books? The woman serving me almost picked this up with tongs, and I am sure she wanted to hold her nose at the same time. Trendy book sellers seem to hate handling his stuff, but since it sells, I guess they have no choice.



I read some reviews of "The day of battle" that were quite good. I was hoping that they'd also have a copy of the new book about the defeat of Japan - can't remember what's it's called. Ah well, one fat book on WWII will have to do.



This one caught my eye - "Band of Brigands", about the first men in tanks. I like books that have an engineering/mechanical component to them, and the story of how the tanks were actually built and deployed, and tactics developed, is one that grabbed me.



And that was it. I doubt I could have carried anymore.

Oh, and they cost more than the $340 Shimano shoes. I can put up with my slightly cramped current bike shoes for a few more months - or at least the time it takes me to read through this lot.

I have also issued strict instructions to J that this unread pile is to remain an unread pile in a prominent position where I can easily find it and access it. I don't want the books filed away in one of the bookcases where I'll never find it again - or where I'll find it next time we move and go, "Why have I never read this book?"