Teen troubles

There's nothing so amusing as listening to one teenager bag out the housework abilities of another.

For instance, T1 was whinging this week that T2 had left the house (for work) without drying the dishes. T1 whinged for a good 10 minutes about this appalling behaviour.

T1 is not working or studying at present, and is spending the bulk of their time playing video games, hanging out and watching movies before leaving shortly on an overseas jaunt.

T1 was tasked that same night with doing the dishes after dinner. At around 2300hrs, T1 was reminded about the need to wash the dishes. When I wandered into the kitchen at 0530hrs, it was clear that T1 needed to be reminded yet again about the need to wash the dishes.

Amazingly, when I got home after work, the dishes were still piled up around the sink.

If I so much as dare to mention the word "hypocrisy", T1 immediately goes on a very noisy and argumentative journey down that lengthy river known as "De Nile".

I don't get mad - I just chuckle.

Note to self: do not race guys who are training to race

You'd think at my age, I would have developed a bit of wisdom and sense.

Nah. Not a bit of it.

I was out doing some cruisy laps in a spot that attracts lots of cyclists. I split them into three groups.

1. The totally recreational types, bumbling around in dresses and just enjoying a fine morning in the sun
2. The fitness oriented recreational type - like me - doing laps at all sorts of speeds. I put myself up towards the upper end of that group
3. The racing nazis who are hunched over and going like the clappers. There weren't many of them, but by gum, they move quickly

I was cruising along happily, overtaking lots of type 1 and type 2s, when a gaggle of type 3s shot past and then sat up right in front of me, not bothering to pedal and slowing me down - all except for one bloke who kept on blasting up the road.

So I went around them and worked back up to my regular speed.

The buggers had jumped onto my wheel.

So I cranked it up.

And cranked it up

And cranked it up until we were trotting along at a nice 40km/h.

The buggers were still there. We were burning past everyone, and I was starting to feel the lactic acid build up in the legs.

As soon as we caught up with their mate who had kept on blasting up the road, they jumped off my wheel and tore past him, laughing like hyenas as they went. They clearly being doing circuits, intervals and sprints, and had simply used me as their train for the next sprint.

Bastards.

I sure slept well that night. Talk about well and truly knackered. Don't start messing around with blokes somewhere around half your age and twice your fitness.

So, what are you training for?

I get asked this question occasionally - I don't know why. It's not like I look like a victim of starvation, and weight counts for a lot in cycling.

I had to think about this. I don't have a training program. I don't do intervals or attempt to estimate my threshold power or bother with a power meter. I just ride. I'll hammer it occasionally, but not as a deliberate activity. If I hammer it, it's because I feel like burning off a bit of steam. I'm always conscious of the fact that because I commute, I need to get home in the evening, and I need to get out of bed before dawn and make it into work the following day. I don't want to totally cook myself and then find that the bus is the only option because my legs refuse to rotate.

It was different when I was a teenager and training for school sports. Our coaches would deliberately hammer us into the ground so that our muscles would rebuild stronger and stronger after each session. The same went for when I was doing gym work in my 20's - the theory (and practice) was all about overtaxing a muscle group, which would then force it to repair and strengthen. I found gym work pretty easy - I'd do a different muscle group each day, giving the one I had beaten to death the day before some time to recover before it was hammered again. In that fashion, I bulked up pretty quickly. So much so, I walked like a gorilla for some years. It was so easy - train each muscle group to failure, eat lots of protein and get plenty of rest.

I had some bad experiences in my first few years of riding to work - they generally revolved around killing myself on the way in and then suffering really badly on the way home. I'm not in this for the pain, so I feel no urge to smash myself into the ground every other day.

The interesting thing is that since November, I've been riding a hell of lot harder than normal. Harder than ever in fact. And instead of being a gibbering mess, I'm actually feeling better than I can ever remember. I must have hardened up somewhat. I guess the lesson is that there is no point in going at it soft.

Making the most of the coolish weather

I don't remember this time of year usually being this cool - or perhaps it would be better to say that I thought it would be a lot hotter at the moment. The last few weeks have not seen the maximum temp go over 30. For the last few years, when I got home from work, I'd need to lie in as cold a bath as possible for a long time to cool down. A second shower before bed to cool off some more was compulsory.  Now, I am barely sweating.

I'm making the most of this weather before it starts to get properly cold. It's a good time of the year to be doing more kilometres. When it's really cold, it's hard to get motivated to get up and get on with it. When it's hot, there is the problem of cooking yourself. Now is Goldilocks time, so I am striving to be out of the house 15-30 minutes earlier than usual so that I can ride a bit extra before work. Every little bit counts.

Speaking of which - I need to split. The clock is ticking.

Audi - the new Volvo?

Congratulations Audi - you have obviously increased your market share by appealing to the sort of morons that used to drive Volvos.

An A4 is 2006mm from wing mirror to wing mirror. You average bike lane is about half that width. That didn't stop an idiot yesterday from deciding he would attempt to over take by driving a 6 foot wide car into a 4 foot wide gap - which just so happened to have a cyclist in it.

My fingers still ache from where I bashed them on the passenger window. I scared the utter crap out of the passenger - not her fault that her husband left his brains at home. I bet she's now complaining about the angry cyclist that rapped his knuckles on her window - I wonder if she'll ever think about how scared I was at suddenly having a 1.5 tonne vehicle suddenly swerve at you without warning and try and run you off the road.

The upside is that the adrenaline rush from the near miss enabled me to post a personal best on the next section of road. The downside is that it gave me a headache from overcooking myself.

It really is a good idea to stop at red lights

I pulled up at an intersection in town this morning when the lights were red and pedestrians were crossing in all directions. I thought for a moment about going from cyclist to pedestrian mode, and rolling slowly around the corner with the pedestrian flow.

For some reason, I held back. And just at that moment, a motorbike pulled up behind me.

I was a bit surprised, as I was in a bus lane and motorbikes usually stay out of them. I puzzled over it for a few seconds, and then it dawned on me that it was a powerful but quiet bike.

Only one sort of person has that sort of bike.

I turned to my left and had a look at our reflection in a shop window - sure enough, it was a police motorbike. He was sitting there behind me, waiting for me to run the red and give me a ticket. I've seen it happen in town a few times now. I never looked back at him, trying to give him the idea that I was blissfully ignorant of his presence.

I must have a sixth sense for this sort of thing.

Making a right bollocks of it

I still love to watch this and have a laugh. Then it struck me - people usually go into these committee meetings with a set of prepared questions. Was this a spur of the moment question (a thought bubble?), or was this a carefully prepared "gotcha"?


If it was a thought bubble that went badly wrong - well, that's extremely embarrassing and many of us might think, "And there for the grace of God go I". But if it was prepared in advance with the assistance of staff.........heaven help us. That would make them thicker than a truck load of 4x2s.

Amping it up

For the last few years, I've been riding about 150km a week. That has been the most I've been able to do without collapsing in a heap at the end of every week, and being able to contribute to running a household full of kids.

Each year, I'd slowly lose weight and gain fitness - and then I'd have a month or two off due to illness, injury, holidays or a change in work or family circumstances. The weight would pile back on, since I'd still eat like I was riding every day.

Back in early December, I decided I'd try to amp it up.

For starters, I'd ride right through Christmas - that would ensure I didn't booze much (very hard to ride in summer with a hangover) and I'd balance the Christmas feasting with burning energy. That worked.

I also planned on cranking up my mileage by 33%, with a stretch target of 66%. I don't want to see the weight slowly dribbling away - I'd like to see it drop off in a hurry.

I've been able to do that too, although the extra time on the bike has cut into the blogging. Blogging for me is a luxury - it only gets done after the family is fed, the kitchen is clean, the clothes are washed, the gardening is done, the kids are read to etc etc. All that bloody housework has to be done first, and hours are finite.

The only way for me to do extra miles each week is to ride on the weekends. I used to leave the weekends alone - mainly to recover from doing 10 shortish rides during the week. The body needs some downtime. It's had less downtime this year - there have been times when I have ridden for 20 days straight - and it hasn't seemed to bother me. I was expecting that I'd be getting very stiff, sore, flat or tired, but that hasn't been a problem so far.

Now is the time to be doing this - the weather is warm and dry, so motivation is not an issue. It will be a lot harder to keep the miles up once it turns cold and wet. There is no problem with doing the base 150km each week - one has to get to and from work. The extras will be a challenge.

Discipline

I can see why a lot of successful authors say that one of the secrets to their success is discipline - the ability to sit down day after day and churn out so many thousands words.

Writing leads to more writing. Maybe not good writing - but writing of some sort.

I've been pretty slack since Christmas; a lot of the reason for that is I simply fell out of the habit of sitting down each night, opening up Blogger and bashing out some words on whatever topic happened to pop into my head that day. It's not like my brain has ceased to throw new stuff at me each and every day - I just haven't parked my bum where it needs to be and plonked away at the keyboard.

Being on the bike is no different - it's not so much how many miles are done per day as the fact that you actually put rubber to the road nearly every day and do some exercise. Something is better than nothing, and if you do it often enough, you'll quickly start doing it properly and see some improvements.

Let's see if I can get back into the swing of writing nearly every day.

Poor preparation

I went for a ride just before the end of the new year; when I got home, I did my usual thing and parked the bike without looking at it.

The next day, I faffed around and ummed and aaahed about pulling it out and giving it a degrease, wash and tune up. Then I put those thoughts away and went and had a nap.

This was followed by the new year, and I went out for a ride on day 1.

The year did not start well - as soon as I pulled the bike out, I found that I had a flat. If I'd gotten my act together the day before and done what I should have done, I would have found it and fixed it. I was not happy with changing a tube at 6 in the morning - especially when it was totally avoidable. If I was flexible enough to kick myself, I would have.

Prior preparation prevents piss poor performance.

True to form, I still haven't cleaned the bike.

King tide

I was out for a spin around the Bay during the week when I noticed the tide was right up - I read later that it was a king tide that is common at this time of the year. I rode down along the Hawthorne Canal just to see how high the water was - it was lapping right up against the lip of the canal.

A short section of Hawthorne Parade had water on it - you'd probably get wet ankles if you walked through it. I didn't look very closely, but I think this section of land is below the level of the top of the canal, so water might have come up through the drains and flooded the road.



View Larger Map

It wasn't much of a flood - maybe 50 metres long.

One short section of the footpath was also under about an inch of water - again, it was a the lowest lying point. It would be pretty simple to dump a few truckloads of dirt along here, build up the path a bit and that would be that.

Losing control

I put this up last year and questions were raised about bikes "losing control

Fifty seven (57) of the recorded bicycle crashes involved a collision between a bicycle and another vehicle, predominantly cars. The most common types of crashes recorded were:
A motor vehicle side swiping a bicycle (12);
A motor vehicle emerging from a driveway or footpath impacting with a bicycle (10);
A bicycle and another vehicle impacting from adjacent directions at intersections (9);
A bicycle and another vehicle impacting from opposite direction (7);
A bicycle colliding with a vehicle door being opened (7); and
A bicycle losing control on a carriageway (4).

I've lost control a few times and crashed off the bike - both occasions required basic medical attention in the form of me walking into a clinic and getting bits of road scrubbed out of my arms and legs, followed by a few weeks of wearing shorts and short sleeved shirts to work whilst the open scabs dried out and healed. Tough Maori nurses, big tubs of undiluted Dettol and harsh scrubbing pads are not a pleasant combination.

The first one happened on a wet day as I crossed a set of tram tracks. It was my first experience of crossing wet tram tracks, and it was unforgettable. Instead of crossing them at a 90 degree angle, I crossed them at around 45 degrees and wasn't sitting bolt upright in the saddle. The front wheel went straight out from underneath me and I splattered on the road in an ungainly heap. There wasn't a car or tram in sight.

The second involved going around a corner and running over a bit of rubbish with the front wheel. Again, the front wheel went out from underneath me, and I slid down a concrete ramp shedding bits of skin along the way. I was on a shared bike/footpath at the time, so there were definitely no cars involved.

I've had plenty of close calls over the years thanks to hitting patches of oil, blowing tyres on broken glass or sliding on loose scree on the road surface. The scree can be in the form of gravel or nuts and stuff dropped by trees. One moment, you're burning down the road, and then you suddenly feel the front or back end move sideways in a little hop or slide. There are corners where I know gravel can often be found, and I take them carefully - I don't want to be leaning over at speed when the front wheel loses traction and goes sideways. I'm not too bothered with a rear wheel slide - I can handle them and am fairly good at recovering from them. However, front wheel slides give me the willies, and I'm amazed I haven't come a cropper more often.

Resolutions, or lack thereof

I gave up on making resolutions on New Year's Eve at least 20 years ago. It was pretty clear that most people talked a lot about doing something different, but it never came to anything. The only reason that I could think of as to why people made resolutions is that it gave them something to talk about during interminably boring NYE parties.

I have made a few changes to my life over the years which have generally stuck, and none of them have been made within sight of NYE.

So I have survived another year without making even the slightest hint of a resolution for the new year. I did make one small resolution back before Christmas - that was to ride for pleasure over the holidays. That was a resolution I could stick with, and I have.

Spring cleaning has knobs on it

Christmas break? Ha! Not for us unfortunately. Someone (not me) got the bright idea of scrubbing the place up whilst we had a bit of time on our hands. So much for things like lazing on the beach and going for long rides.

One thing I noticed when we were doing Junior's room is just how much stuff he has. He owns maybe 3-4 times more things at his age than I did at mine. Not only in volume, but in value. He's bought a fair bit of it himself, and I was wondering why he has been able to do that.

Then I realised he doesn't own the great money-sucker that was a must-have when I was growing up. A car. If you're not running one, the savings can be very considerable, and that allows for the purchase of an amazing array of goodies.

Why no car?

Public transport around here isn't too bad, and a lot of his friends live within walking distance. Plus he's got us to drive him around, and if you're driving, you can't be drinking.

Makes you think.

Interesting crash stats

I just happened to be perusing the bike plan of a neighbouring council when I found this paragraph:

Fifty seven (57) of the recorded bicycle crashes involved a collision between a bicycle and another vehicle, predominantly cars. The most common types of crashes recorded were:
A motor vehicle side swiping a bicycle (12);
A motor vehicle emerging from a driveway or footpath impacting with a bicycle (10);
A bicycle and another vehicle impacting from adjacent directions at intersections (9);
A bicycle and another vehicle impacting from opposite direction (7);
A bicycle colliding with a vehicle door being opened (7); and
A bicycle losing control on a carriageway (4).
There were no recorded fatalities during this period.
The above crash types give some indication to the main issues that cyclists experience in the Leichhardt LGA with side swiping (left turn across straight through cyclists), driveway exiting and intersection crashes the most prominent.

This data is now 6 or 7 years old, but it matches with more recent UK research that suggests that motorists are at fault in the majority of bike crashes. In this sample, cyclists are clearly at fault in 4 out of 57 crashes - or 7%. The rest are the sort of stuff I narrowly avoid every month - motorists not paying attention when opening doors; motorists in a hurry overtaking cyclists and then immediately turning left in front of them (or into them); motorists turning across oncoming traffic choosing to not give way and hitting cyclists coming in the opposite direction, or screw ups at intersections when motorists go through roundabouts, stop signs or give way signs without giving way to a cyclist that has right of way.

Very silly people

Thank goodness the holidays are here and I don't have to ride into town for a while. I've seen more than enough silly people roaming the streets over the last week to last me a life time.

For starters, there was the very silly cyclist who decided to run a red light. I was going one way, he was going the other - and I could see that sitting right behind him as he approached the lights was a motorcycle cop. He didn't notice. I thought he was going to stop for the red - and I imagine the cop did too as he was gobsmacked when the cyclist in front of him just tooled straight through the red. It took him about 5 seconds to blink away his surprise and find his lights and siren.

Then there were all the silly pedestrians. They weren't doing silly walks, but they were walking (or running) in silly places. Like running across the road right in front of me as I was bearing down on them at high speed. After a few close encounters with the moronic kind, I gave up trying to ride quickly through town and throttled back and took it easy. There is a form of madness that infects people at this time of year and it causes them to do silly stuff they would not ordinarily do. I'm just glad I survived through it.

And didn't get a ticket.

Mobile phones will be the death of me

I'm heading home. My (very) short warm up is done. I now have a bike lane to ride in, and it's time to crank the pedals a bit harder and lift the pace. The only thing stopping me is a car in front which is speeding up and slowing down and swerving far enough to the left to cut into the bike lane a few times. I hold back, wary about passing a driver that can't hold a straight line or a steady speed. I'm doing 33km/h and am itching to boost it to the next level.

Then I think, "Screw it", and I stomp on the pedals.

Half a second later, I am grabbing the brake levers for all they are worth. The back wheel locks up. I feel the rear slide slightly to the right - but I have it under control. My sole aim is to avoid smacking into the back of the car - the driver has suddenly braked and done a hard left-hand-down and pulled up in the bike lane. It's a no parking zone - what the hell are they doing? No indicator. No warning. No checking the mirrors or looking over the shoulder. Just a rapid tossing of the car in my direction. Having a bike lane is nice, but the only thing separating me from 1.5 tons of metal is a faded unbroken single white line. It's days like this that I wish for a bit of a concrete barrier. Clearly, the painted "line of death" isn't keeping the cars out.

I pull up. The car has stopped as well. I look over my shoulder for cars behind us, then slowly pedal along the driver's side.

The driver has one hand and both eyes on her phone. It's down by her right leg in the "you can't see my phone" position. I guess she got a text message that she just had to stop to reply to. And no, she wasn't a teenager - she was about my age.

I resisted the urge to yank open her door, give her an earful of observations about her driving skills, parentage and sexual habits before ramming the phone up her date, and slowly pedal off. The pulse rate is a elevated a bit, but not that much. I'm getting too used to this. Once, it would have scared the poo out of me and I would have been left shaking and very stressed. Now, I congratulate myself on my calmness and not punching the living daylights out of the driver.

And then I floor it. The adrenaline gives me wings. I am going 40km/h before I know it, and not a single car passes me over the next section of road before the traffic lights. I am flying - doing my best to put a lot of distance between me and that moron. I don't want to run into her again today.

Overdoing it a bit

I certainly haven't been overdoing the blogging of late, but I think I might have overdone the cycling a bit (which would have led to a lack of blogging).

I haven't been doing more kilometres per day - but I have just had a short break after riding 3 weeks straight. Due to a few things happening, I ended up having to ride every day. Twice a day. The rides might be relatively short (15km each way generally), but the impact of doing 15km two times per day for 21 days in a row adds up after a bit - especially since I do a good chunk of those 15km fairly hard. If the air is calm and the road is flat and the traffic allows and the legs and lungs are up to it, I'll tonk along at a nice 37km/h for as far as I can. I'm pretty happy to have reached that cruising speed over slabs of my commute - you don't get passed often at that pace.

I'm not getting any younger, so the lack of recovery between rides takes its toll after a while. In week three, I was almost falling asleep face down in my food at the dinner table, and I crashed on the couch at the slightest opportunity. I found that when I got home, I had to stay on my feet if I wanted to stay awake. Constant movement and activity were the only things keeping my away from the Land of Nod.

Which made it pretty hard to blog. If I had tried to blog, most entries would have looked like this:

savuklnacgklj238946 12368907897756(*%&*

That's what you get when your nose and forehead impact with the keyboard.

I had the weekend off. I can actually sit here and type without falling almost instantly into unconsciousness. That's a weird feeling.

No one does this to me when I'm in my 4WD

There's an intersection that I go through twice a day on my bike where driver behaviour is at its worst. I'm going straight ahead, but most drivers coming towards me are turning right. That means I have right of way. The intersection has lights, which I have not bothered to draw as this taxed my drawing skills to the max. When I go through this intersection in my car, drivers turning right stay behind the line and don't nudge their way out into my travel path. 

When I'm on the bike, it's a different story. Buses wait for me. Trucks wait for me. Plenty of car drivers wait for me, but there are also quite a lot that decide that since I look skinny (ha ha), I don't need much road space, so they creep out into the intersection and block half my lane. I have to swerve to the left to get around them. I should point out that due to the physical makeup of this intersection, I can actually get across it faster than most cars from a standing start (there's a big, deep fuck-up front bumper/sump removing gutter that they have to crawl over - but it slows me down not at all). So the cars are not pushing out because I am taking my time getting across the intersection. If there is a car behind me, they'll stay put. They only emerge from their burrow when I'm on my own on my side of the intersection.

Then there are the tradies - the fuckers in utes - who decide that they aren't going to give way to a cyclist, and they plant it when the lights go green and just tear across without any regard for me. I'm pretty good at spotting these clowns whilst I'm sitting at a red light, so I haven't been skittled yet - but the close calls have been legion.

As I said in the heading - no one dares do this to me when I travel the same route in my 4WD. Some drivers clearly do it because they know they can push cyclists around with their cars and generally get away with it. I really don't want to get clobbered by them because I reckon that if I am run down, they'll do a runner.

There's no nice way to put it - they're just cunts.

Tyre pressure

Most of my driving has been done in fairly heavy vehicles with normal profile tyres - as in a 75 profile. When a tyre starts to go flat, it's pretty obvious with a heavy car and a high profile bit of rubber. The sidewall bulge sticks out like dog's balls, braking performance suffers, steering can be heavy and you can even feel a wobble through the wheel or the seat.

I got the shock of my life yesterday when I took a little car to the petrol station for a top up. There was an air filling station in front of my spot, so after filling up, I drove over and checked the tyres.

They were 1/3 to 1/2 around where they should have been. I couldn't believe it - the tyres showed no visual sign of being underinflated, and they're only a few months old. When driving around, the handling of the car gave no indication of flattish tyres - I'm not sure why that should be the case. Light car? Good suspension? Well built tyres? I know instantly when the pressure is getting low on the other car - it provides good feedback - plus walking around the car and eyeballing the tyres is a dead giveaway.

As soon as I got home, I ordered some of these. They cost me less than five bucks delivered. I don't know how good they'll be, but I'm going to give them a crack.