Thursday 24 April 2014

My obsession

Strava has become an obsession.  Let's just add it to the list of obsessive black and white but completely harmless to anyone but me behaviours.

I don't understand.  Let me explain.  The Strava Spring Classics challenge popped up onto the dashboard at the end of March.  It suggested that during the forthcoming 40 days folk take on the challenge of riding the arbitrary distance of 1266 km.  This apparently in a world of clever statistics adds up to the distance ridden by a theoretical rider who takes part in all the so called Spring Classics; the one day epic events in Europe at this time of year.  They are a glorious, spectacular and beautiful dance, these one day races which specialise in routes of particular "interest".  This can mean cobbles.

So in the spirit of something, of exploration, of solidarity, of curiosity, of rising to the challenge, I signed up.  After a very short time, I did the maths.  It would mean averaging 32km per day on the bike.  Hmm.  Not a problem, I reckoned.  If I added bits into my daily commute and did that four days a week and used the weekends for longer rides, it seemed do-able.  But there wasn't much room for slippage.  And slippage there has been.

I am now staring at a 400kilometre target to make up in ten days.  That would mean 40k a day, and no rest days.  Yet today I did just 10k and tomorrow I can't see a way of getting a ride in.  Oh.  I'm in a bit of trouble now. I think it means every commute next week is going to need to mount up to 50k.

I have, however, a new bike which is making it easier.  It's a cyclocross bike so it's quicker on the tarmac than a mountain bike but also allows me to take routes the road bike doesn't love. Hard packed grit, gravel, mud, tree roots, rocks, tow paths, linear routes, and it's been quite a joy to explore.  There's a way home from work which is 30k of off road fun as I ride alongside canals and through bluebell woods.  It's not all bad, really it's not.

Brought to you by you're my obsession, who do you want me to be?

Saturday 5 April 2014

Rough Stuff

My club do an annual or possibly so it seems a three times a summer road ride where people bring out their play bikes and their weird toys and we hit the trails, the bridleways and the cobbles.  I went on this today and took the hybrid, an odd choice, it would seem, judging by the 80% turnout of cyclocross bikes along with a smattering of road bikes, hard tails and as incongruous as my own, a full suss.

It was just so much fun.  Abolishing the required lycra, giddily sporting rucksacks, baggy clothing, all the things you wouldn't normally see on our oh so serious image conscious rides.  The hybrid is a fairly heavy beast compared to some, and it was oddly interesting to see how it handled life in grupetto of road and cyclocross bikes.  It wasn't bad.  Once it got up to speed it wasn't bad. It made me work hard to regain the group should I lose it (ever corner, must look at that ...), but once I was back on then everything was fine, warp speed maintained.  I worked hard, and the bike worked hard.  By the end of the ride (well, in honesty at the cafe stop) a bit of experimentation led me to the assessment that my back brake had given up making any effort at all.  It maybe slowed me a little but I suspect that unless on an uphill it would never in a million years stop me.  A few years ago that sort of behaviour would have me worried and panicing.  Nowadays I just take it in my stride, figure out how to manage a combination of slight slowing from the back along with judicious use of the front brake, and mostly it worked out.

I have, now, however, ordered a new bike.  A cyclocross bike.  It's steel and it has disc brakes.  That'll show 'em I think.

And to close with a phrase used by one of the old wizened skinny dudes in my group.  I know where I am, but not where I'm going.  I kind of like that.

Tuesday 1 April 2014

City's Backsides

I ride and I ride in the words of the master that is Iggy Pop.

I took part in a charitable endeavour.  Actually, I felt a bit of a fraud.  The Sport Relief Manchester Cycle was a 50 mile trundle through the flatlands of the city and out into Cheshire wastes (sorry, should that be plains do you think?).  It was not overly onerous and it felt wrong to ask my nearest and dearest to give me money to do the thing I enjoy doing.  Riding my bike.

I tried to make it seem like a torturous ordeal.  For example, I added mileage by riding 5 miles to the start and 5 miles back again when I'd finished.  I did it wearing a half hearted attempt at a fancy dress costume, but it did involve a shortie cape.  And I did it despite the hideous weather conditions with stinging hail whipping into my face, and visibility so horrid that I did ride with lights on in the middle of the day.  But it still felt like a fraudulent endeavour because I was still simply riding my bike, pretty much like I do every weekend.

Anyway, for charity, as it were, I paid a £35 entry fee and I sponsored myself half the target amount to hide my embarrassment in asking mates to give me money.

In a selfish world, it too added mileage.  I like a bit of mileage.  I've always been a bit of a numbers obsessive since the first ever bike computer I owned which was about £2.99 from a local supermarket. Magnet on the wheel, wire to the handlebars and seemingly a battery which lasted for ever.  I used to get home from every commute and update a spreadsheet; how many miles had I done, what was my average speed, what was my fastest speed, how long had the journey taken.  I like tangible proof of what I'm doing and some kind of motivation to try to get a little bit fitter, to go a little bit faster, all in all, to be better.  Nothing wrong with striving to be better after all.

The numbers obsession gets worse and worse as technology provides more options.  When I first started bike commuting I didn't even own a mobile phone.  Now the phone tells me just what I've done, and shows me the same stretches of road and the speeds achieved day by day by day.  It's an obsessive's dream come true.  Or nightmare come true.

In true form, I have a mileage target and am obsessively planning and monitoring.  40 days, 1200 kilometres to achieve.  It's a Strava thing.  I know that there are 33 days to go of the challenge.  I know we are 17% of the way through the days, and I know that my mileage (kilometreage sounds wrong) is at 17% of the total, and I know it's that way because I planned that it should be so.  It's like providing a squirrel with a pile of acorns and expecting it to just take what it needs, but instead, of course, one by one it removes each acorn from the pile and one by one places these in its own carefully selected storage place.  It can't just leave the pile be.  They are there to be taken.  So are the miles.  The piles of miles.

Still, hopefully it's making me fitter and hopefully it'll make me thinner too.  I live in hope.