Thomas Guest

Name these puppies

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-08-31

Isobel can and does lose herself in story books, devouring Jacqueline Wilson and similar. Alex is a capable reader but he prefers cartoons, comics and even catalogues. (Yes, he’ll read a Nintendo DSLite games catalogue from cover to cover and memorise everything it has to say about Super Mario.) He also invents characters for use in his own cartoon strips. Last night, when we went upstairs to tuck him in, we discovered he’d been drawing dogs.

They don’t have names yet.

I like the one with the waggly tail

but this one’s my favourite.

Constitution Hill

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-08-30

The Welsh stage of the Tour of Britain finishes in Swansea. Soon after 1pm the leading riders hurtle through the city centre along Kingsway, which is where the race will also finish, but not before they’ve taken on a couple of steep climbs. First Bryn-y-Môr, near where Dan lives, then Constitution Hill, which is where I plan to be watching.

… the leading riders will face a last few metres of flat before the road veers upwards and onto over 300 metres of steep cobbles that lead them up onto the Swansea skyline.

Hills + cobbles? Ouch!

Further research indicated that Constitution Hill featured in the Keith Allen’s sensitive, wry evocation of a Swansea youth, Twin Town. The road is now closed to traffic after too many idiots copied the Lewis twins’ driving stunt (seconds 7 to 17 of the YouTube montage above).

I rode up Constitution Hill on Thursday, on my way back home from Swansea station. The train was 45 minutes late, spoiling my plans to meet the family at Parc Abertawe in time for Toy Story 3. I needed to do something to vent my frustration. It’s a tough little climb, tougher than it looks from the bottom, especially if you’re carrying a rucksack with a 15” laptop in it, but the view from the top over Swansea bay is stunning.

Sketching skeletons at Bristol Museum

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-08-25

Skeletons have interesting lines, corners and shadows, which is why I like drawing them. Here’s a sketch of the Moa skeleton at Bristol museum, which you’ll find just around the corner from the spiky plant-eating scelidosaurus and opposite the camarasaurus leg. (Courtesy of the BBC, here’s a panorama)

Look, no wings! Moas are — were — wingless, unlike other ratites, other birds even, but what really impressed me about this specimen were its powerful legs and hips, and its chunky feet — which unfortunately stretched down below the bottom of my sketch book.

An attendant told me I was lucky, an hour ago the gallery was full of noisy kids, I wouldn’t have been able to sit there and draw. I nodded. Long day? I thought. Where better for kids to go on a wet day at the end of the summer holidays? A few weeks ago I wouldn’t have been able to sit there and draw either, not after 5pm. Late opening on Wednesdays is a recent innovation. And a year ago I wouldn’t have been able to get into the museum without queuing for three hours first.

So, I intend to fill my new sketch book, get my eye back in. Wednesdays are good. I’ve started now. Here’s a line drawing of The Wrestler, by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, which reminds me of Kettle’s Yard. Wonderful sculpture, poor picture. I’m working on it.

Gower Triathlon, 2010

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-07-24

My wetsuit is designed for warmth and durability. Getting it on and off is a struggle, and any extended swim turns into a battle with wet neoprene. Contrast this with a triathlon wetsuit, which is flexible, taut and sleek, the sort of thing a porpoise would look good in. I had no intention of spending money on a triathlon wetsuit, though. What’s the point in forking out when I might not even like triathlons? Besides, not having a proper wetsuit was a good excuse.

Michael ruined that strategy. He turned up last night with a Foor Quantum F3 racing wetsuit. It’s too small for me, it might fit you, give it a try in the bath, he said. Caveat emptor and all that. Good luck tomorrow.

It fitted. When, at last, I marched into Port Eynon bay alongside 326 similarly clad athletes, a shade after 7 o’clock this morning, it felt good. I tried a few strokes. Oh, it was good.

Unfortunately I wasn’t. Despite the suit, I found myself flailing and out of breath. No one warned me about triathlon being a contact sport. Swimmers barged, kicked and gouged. The orange buoys marking the route had seemed so close together from the shore. At sea-level I could barely make them out on the foamy horizon. And then I was trying to cut a racing line around one at the same time as a hundred others.

I finished the swim about half way down the field. I felt pretty dejected coming back up the beach. Thank goodness some people were cheering me on. I felt much better once I’d got on my bike. The rolling course suited me. I know these roads.

Riding near the centre line coming up Cefn Bryn, overtaking. A van coming down the hill. A sheep leapt from the bracken and dashed through a cluster of cyclists. The van slammed on its brakes. The sheep stopped abruptly, all four legs rigid, eyes goggling, then sprang back into the verge. It sprinted alongside the race for another couple of hundred metres before finally veering across the road and safely away.

The rain came. My shoes filled with water.

One of the things I’d been told about training for a triathlon: try running immediately after cycling, otherwise you won’t know what it feels like. Good advice! Shame I ignored it, choosing instead to find out on race day. At least I didn’t fall over. I stumbled into the transition area, racked my bike, swigged some water. Then off on the run, the best bit of which was finishing.

Here are the results.

My entry reads: 357, Thomas Guest, MV, M, 13:19, 3:16, 45:28, 20:52, 1:22:53, 30, 8

357 was my race number. MV means Male Veteran. M means Male. The agony of the swim lasted barely 13 minutes. I then spent over 3 minutes getting ready for the cycling. 45 and a half minutes on the bike was good, my best stage, and just under 21 minutes for the run and second transition isn’t too bad. I came 30th overall, and 8th out of around 100 male veterans, amazing.

Will I do another one? I like sports which involve getting from A to B. For me, the feeling you get when you can cover ground efficiently, in control, you can’t beat it. Now if I could get that feeling when swimming …

Thanks to my dad and Fynn for coming along to support me, to everyone else who cheered me on — you made a big difference, thanks — to Michael for lending me the wetsuit, and to the organisers and marshals who ran everything with efficiency and good humour.

TdF 2010, Stage 15, fear and respect

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-07-19

Yesterday I wrote about the failures and disappointments which made the opening week of this year’s tour so compelling, and complained that the action had dropped when it should have peaked, in the mountains. Having shaken off the field, Contador and Schleck seemed unable to get to grips with each other. That all changed on stage 15, though again failure and disappointment underpinned the racing. Schleck sprang away from the elite climbers on the Port de Balès, with Contador in hot pursuit. Schleck’s chain came off but the momentum of his attack continued — now carried by Contador and a few other elite riders.

We’ve already seen Schleck doesn’t have the team support Contador does; but he looked cruelly exposed on that mountain road, struggling to re-fit his chain. It took a couple of goes. He had to fend off a motorbike. He needed help from a couple of spectators to shove him back on course. By then, the leader on the road was Contador.

At last we were treated to the sight of Schleck racing uphill. He tore up the road. He nearly caught Contador, but the Spaniard was lucky to be in the perfect group for a super-fast descent. At the end of that descent, the end of the stage, Contador had the yellow jersey.

Schleck was furious. He is furious. I think he’s also wiped out, physically and emotionally. Anger fuelled his final climb up the Balès but a tankful of anger won’t get take over the Tourmalet.

In an interview afterwards Contador was asked if he was afraid of Schleck. Fear? No, he said. Respect, yes. Contador lost a lot of respect for attacking when the race leader suffered a mechanical failure. Maybe even self-respect. He was jeered on the podium. He toughed it out with the press, claiming he hadn’t known about Schleck’s chain falling off. Later on, from his hotel room, he posted a public apology on YouTube.

What if Schleck’s chain hadn’t come off? I think Contador would have caught him. Schleck was already looking back to see who was where. He needed to face forwards and give it everything. I also thought Contador would attack on the final Pyrenean stage. He’s been holding something back. I thought that he was too classy to accept winning the Tour by beating the clock in a time trial.

Now I’m not so sure he would have attacked, when defence and a decent time-trial would have sufficed. He will attack, if only to regain some respect. Sadly, I doubt Schleck has enough left.

TdF 2010, Stage 14, Pyrenees

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-07-18

The first week of the Tour is normally a prelude to the real action — someone unexpected wears yellow, sprinters stretch their legs, commentators and journalists clock up a few words, everyone looks forward to the real race. This year has seen a first week like no other. Looking back, amazingly, it’s the failures and disappointments which stand out:

Cav’s failure to contest the opening sprints
Armstrong’s poor luck and subsequent inability to follow the leaders (and now look how far he has fallen!)
Frank Schleck’s broken shoulder, meaning he won’t be there for his brother
yellow jersey Cancellara cancelling the sprint finish at the end of stage 2. How could he do that?

I could go on. If this opening week offered so much drama, what would we get when the route hit the mountains?

The story unfolds. Unimaginably, Andy Schleck beat Contador in the first Alpine stage, and in the next stage the two of them toyed with each other briefly then teamed up to demolish any wannabes. Now we’re in the Pyrenees, where the tour should be decided. Yesterday Contador and Schleck reached stalemate, again, like a joke with no punchline. Come on guys, this race deserves better!

(On the subject of Armstrong, has he really cracked, or is he trying to drop so far down the GC that he’ll be allowed a break-away stage win?)

TdF 2010, Stage 11, sprint battle

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-07-15

What battle? Understandably lost in the controversy is the fact that Mark Cavendish has roared back into the form he had last year. He leapt away from the pack and took the stage comfortably. No, the real battle was 500m from the line, fought between Cav’s lead-out man, Mark Renshaw from HTC Columbia, and Julian Dean from Garmin-Transitions. You could see it coming — there’d been barging and shoving on very a fast run-in. Everyone was wound up tight. Dean cut across Renshaw. Either Renshaw had to back down, or he had to force Dean away, or there’d be an almighty pile-up. Renshaw was furious. He lost his head. He used his head, butting Dean three times with it. Then — and this did not look good — he cut in front of Tyler Farrar, the Garmin-Transitions sprinter.

All this happened in a couple of seconds, at high speed. It did look brutal. At least no one got hurt, but the judges came down hard. Mark Renshaw has been eliminated from the Tour.

A sprint finish is all about the individual who gets to the line first, but it’s also all about the team. Cavendish always stresses his wins are team victories: the HTC Columbia train sets him up, he just has to finish the job. HTC Columbia had already lost one rider, Adam Hansen, on stage 2, evidently without too many adverse effects, but can they do without the world’s best lead-out man, Mark Renshaw? More importantly, how will Cav respond? He’s hot-headed and impetuous. I hope he doesn’t do something stupid.

TdF 2010, Stage 9, dancing climbers

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-07-13

The best climbers seem to dance up the slopes and today, on the Madeleine, two of the very best performed a wonderful pas de deux. Schleck flashed, Contador darted. The elastic between them pinged and sang. Might their rivals not take advantage of this energy-sapping flirtation? What rivals! A gruelling stage had already unravelled them. Contador and Schleck stopped playing and chased home. The race is between them now.

“If I attacked one more time I would have dropped myself,” said Andy Schleck afterwards, but he looked as if he’d just stepped out of the shower after a good night’s sleep, rather than completed a mountain stage of the world’s toughest race. Bring on the Pyrenees. Contador is too classy a rider to win the tour in a time trial. He’s getting stronger. Watch him attack!

TdF, 2010, Week One

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-07-12

So, a rest day today, after a week of quite literal thrills and spills. Yesterday provided a fitting finale.

Remember last year, that final mountain stage on Mont Ventoux? It was meant to decide the general classification but by then Contador, already in yellow, had enough of a lead to ride defensively and cover the attacks. Andy Schleck couldn’t shake him off. The stage was effectively neutralised. Yesterday, on the first Alpine stage, it looked like Schleck hadn’t stopped at the summit of Ventoux at all. There he was, still poised on Contador’s shoulder, a fresh-faced skinny executioner kitted out in white. This time Contador didn’t look so clever. Schleck may not have taken much time out of his rival but he beat him convincingly.

TdF, 2010, Stages 0 and 1

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-07-04

Chapeau, ITV4, for the live coverage, even if I can’t see myself getting to watch much of it. The prologue stage has definitely whetted the appetite. I’m pleased Cancellara won. “My body worked at 100% for exactly ten minutes,” he said. It’s almost unthinkable that another expert clock-racer, Brad Wiggins, could drop almost a minute over such a short course, but he did. I’ve read Wiggo’s In Pursuit of Glory: The Autobiography — one for the fans, I think, but one thing I did take from it was how accurately Wiggo can calibrate his form on the track. He knows how long it takes for him to ride a kilometre in a covered velodrome to within a second. A wet road in Rotterdam is less predictable, and Wiggo wanted to avoid trouble. Cancellara has more panache and his bike-handling skills are sans pareil. So he won. Can’t wait to see him attack the cobbled roads in stage 3.

Another hardened campaigner got going when the going got tough. Armstrong took a chunk out of Wiggins and other GC rivals in the prologue. He also got the first strike in against Contador (let’s not forget that he lost 22 seconds to the Spaniard over the same stage last year). I’ll bet he rattles Contador some more on the cobbles on Tuesday.

I was looking forwards to the highlights of Stage One this evening, especially when it became obvious it would end with a bunch sprint. About time to see Cavendish stretch his legs. Except it didn’t happen like that. Cav has had a rotten run-in to the Tour this year. Always volatile and unpredictable, he’s turning into very a loose cannon. He tumbled on the final bend taking out rival Oscar Freire. Last year no one got close to Cav. And this year other riders would do well to stay away from him. With Cav down the other riders had to improvise the final kilometre and they made a spectacular mess of it, staging a mass pile up instead of a mass sprint. Quelle horreur!

Owl spotting by bike

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-06-28

Matt Burns spotted a barn owl on a bike ride earlier today — the first wild owl he’s ever seen.

Barn owls hunt by stealth rather than speed. They fly silently. A well oiled bicycle moves quietly too, making it a fine mobile vantage point for wildlife spotting. Some years ago, I spent a short while working at a serviced office in Hartham Park and my daily commute included a bike ride from Chippenham railway station. Sometimes I took the Bath Road (passing the place on Rowden Hill where Eddie Cochran died in a traffic accident) but usually I took the more rural Chippenham Lane. We were only in that office a year, I think — it wasn’t a great location — but in that short time I saw a family of tawny owls learning to fly. There must have been five or six of them, arranged on branches at various levels of that tree. I saw them several days in a row, and then they were gone, flown the nest. Thanks to google street view I’ve made that journey again and I’d say this is the tree. There was less ivy on it back then.

View Larger Map

Mad March hares raced and tussled in the surrounding fields.

Mumbles Triathlon 2010

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-06-26

I enjoyed watching today’s Mumbles triathlon. Conditions were perfect: bright and warm but, at 07:00 in the morning, not yet too hot. No wind, no waves. Swansea bay looked at its best. I knew at least three people taking part but had trouble identifying them. Everyone looks much the same in a wetsuit and swimming hat. I also spotted a cyclist I see on the train. The leading swimmer went like a torpedo. He also swam the triangular route directly, cutting between a couple of boats moored offshore. Everyone else followed a curving line back to the slipway. Then it all got a bit confusing, because the event combined a short and long sprint, and I couldn’t tell who was in which event.

Triathlon - not for spectators

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-06-25

So, I’ve been to see a triathlon. Certainly the event impressed me. Equally it left me in no hurry to participate. The combination of three disciplines and punishing weather conditions exposed endurance athletes as stubborn masochists. Why would anyone do that to themselves? As Richard’s acerbic blog entry Triathlon — more boring on TV than Handball? points out, a triathlon boils down to averages and costume changes. However, as lima comments:

you people are so damn stupid. have any of you ever done a triathlon???? I doubt! So please shut the f… up!!!!

The Gower Triathlon goes right past my house. It’s a popular event, so popular, in fact, that when Mike told me about it they’d already sold out; but when I checked the website I found they’d just allocated 100 more places. I took that as a sign and signed up. Only a month to go now. I can cycle and run, and I reckon I can cycle and then run. It’s the swimming and transitions which scare me. I’m off to watch the Mumbles triathlon tomorrow morning and see how it’s done.

1997 Bath Triathlon

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-06-24

I can remember watching the 1997 Bath Triathlon. The breaking news that morning, there’d been a car crash in Paris. Diana Spencer had been injured. She’s dead, Mel said. The sky was heavy. Rain during the week had the river running fast and high. In went the wet-suited competitors. The current swept several away immediately and over the three lap course several more succumbed. The survivors clambered out, struggling to unpeel wetsuits on the move, fastening shoes and helmets with damp fingers, then off on bicycles straight up Bathwick Hill. The rain started. It was one of those summer storms when the sky tears apart. Gutters turned into streams. Rain drops hit the pavement and bounced back up again. The cyclists jammed on their brakes coming down the hill. Spoked wheels threw up plumes of spray. The shower ended abruptly. By now everything was soaked. The event should have ended but exhausted runners continued to trudge round the city centre. They didn’t look like athletes. They didn’t look like fun-runners. They looked beaten.

The Rider, Kilometer 61-67

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-04-23

The Rider is Tim Krabbé’s account of the fictional Tour de Mont Aigoual, “the sweetest, toughest race of the season”. It’s a short book weighing in at around a page for each of the race’s 137 kilometres. I’m reading it as slowly as I can.

The central character is a rider named Krabbé. The other characters make up a fictional peleton — Barthélemy, Kléber, Reilhan, etc. — and their interrelationships build with the rhythm of the stage, overtaking, falling back, regrouping. Lebusque punctures at 55km, but I’m sure he’ll be back. At 61km the first descent starts. Krabbé reflects on the downhill specialists.

In the 1977 Tour de France, the Frenchman Rouxel was the best downhill man. During a descent of the Tourmalet that year, he bridged a gap of four and a half minutes — in terms of distance, more than five kilometres!

Rouxel says: “I love going downhill. It’s like skiing. You have to stay loose the whole time, never lock your knees — they’re your shock absorbers. You have to stay down on your bike, to keep your centre of gravity as low as possible. Sure, sometimes when I’m doing ninety and both wheeels leave the ground, it gives me goose bumps too.”

Unlike Lebusque and the rest, Charles Rouxel is as real as the Tour de France. Certainly he rode the 1977 Tour, though apparently he was eliminated on stage 17 for failing to make the cut-off time. The Tourmalet featured in the second stage of the race which ran from Auch to Pau. Rouxel may well have made up time on the descent but Lucien van Impe went on to take the stage.

I understand what Rouxel has to say about technique, and I too love to go fast, but I’m no descender. There’s something terrifying about hurtling towards a bend you can’t see around. Krabbé puts it better:

I don’t have that kind of looseness. I take the curves like a wooden puppet, afraid that my centre of gravity is going to wind up in the ravine.

Chris Hutt, cycling activist, mischievous plumber

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-03-21

Terrible news. Chris Hutt has been found dead at his home @chrishutt. Bristol and cycling has lost such a special man. — @CllrJonRogers, 1:57 AM Mar 21st

Terrible news indeed. I’m shocked and saddened.

I never met Chris myself, but I subscribe to his blog and follow him on twitter. We’ve exchanged emails and tweets.

Chris styled himself as a “grumpy old man about town”, but in reality he contributed much more than moaning. At the start of the year, when the city was gripped by winter, when others complained about the council’s failure to clear the pavements of ice, he and the indomitable Jon Rogers were out shovelling.

The Bristol-Bath cycle path, the foundation of Sustrans, and ultimately the nomination of Bristol 2010 as Britain’s first cycling city — he had a part in all these things, and we will remember him with thanks for this.

What I didn’t realise is that Chris Hutt was also:

… the best plumber in the west. He plumbed in the four fountains on the [Bristol-Bath cycle] route and when the fountain on Castle Green was first installed he plumbed it so red wine came out of one side and orange out of another.

— John Grimshaw, Sustrans.

Here’s a photo of that fountain. Isobel and Alex are pretending to be the fish which decorate the frieze on its sides.

Mountain Bikes going downhill

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-03-10

In yet another great blog post, Dave Moulton discusses the evolution of the mountain bike. He starts by setting the scene:

There was a bike boom in the mid 1970s in America, this was part of the fitness movement. European road bikes, which were for the most part fully equipped racing bikes, were being imported into the US.

Sadly many of these bikes were barely used. No wonder so many classic road bikes from this period end up on ebay in mint condition. As Dave Moulton says:

The average American is keen to try different sports, but only a few will dedicate the time and effort to reach any level of expertise.

It’s true. A thoroughbred road bike is an unforgiving machine — just looking at the saddle is enough to make a grown man wince. Add skinny tyres, handlebars you need to bend over to reach, gears calibrated for hardened professionals, and you have a machine all too likely to stay in storage. You need to be fit and confident to enjoy riding a road bike.

You even more confidence to ride off-road, though. You’ll need to be fitter, too. Cefn Bryn, at the back of my house, is popular with mountain bikers. The gradients are steep. The paths are muddy, edged with gorse, and strewn with gritty nuggets of bryn stone: tough on foot, treacherous on wheels.

So why ever did the mountain bike catch on?

Dave Moulton:

My take on why the Mountain Bike took off when it did. There was a whole generation of young adults who had grown up in the 1970s with BMX bikes; they remembered how they used to perform jumps and stunts. The MTB was possibly seen as an adult version of a BMX.

Maybe. I think he’s right to associate the mountain bike’s acceptance with fun and leisure, rather than exercise. But it’s the next paragraph which rings true with me.

For the general public too, here was a bike that was easier to ride than a road bike, with its upright position and fat tires.

Right! And let’s not forget decent brakes. Those low gears, designed for use on hills, make zipping across town a snip. Urban riding is about starting, stopping, negotiating obstacles. A mountain bike performs well.

I bought my first mountain bike, a Specialized Rockhopper, in Sydney, where I worked for three months as a bike courier. It did the job admirably and performed equally well in the same role in Melbourne. It wasn’t the fastest machine to take on the great Victorian bike ride, but we never went further than 100km in a day. It was a reliable, solid bike for touring the Tasmanian hills.

The Rockhopper came back back with me to England. I ended up in Cambridge, one of the few British cities where bikes are truly popular for getting about, where it served me well until someone stole it.

A few years later, in Bristol, I acquired another mountain bike. I can’t remember what brand. I got it second hand from a colleague who was trading up to a full-suspension model: I just wanted something sturdy enough to attach a child seat. If you’re carrying a child, you want comfort and safety.

The point is: I never used my mountain bikes off-road. A classically-styled mountain bike is not the 2 wheel equivalent of the ridiculous, grid-locked 4 wheel drive. Their design is sturdy, versatile, and well-suited to general road use. Hence their enduring popularity. My children’s bikes look like mountain bikes. The bargain bikes you pick up in supermarkets look like mountain bikes.

Unfortunately, what a mountain bike looks like has changed. In an effort to persuade people to upgrade, manufacturers keep adding new features. Isobel’s bike has suspension: that’s what kids’ bikes come with now (and let’s not mention the hand bag). Combine this spongy suspension with a heavy steel frame and knobbly tyres, and you’ve got a clumsy, energy-sapping machine.

I’m convinced the current trend for fixed wheel bikes is a reaction against the over-engineering of the urban mountain bike. Some off-road features have no place in a city. A fixie is simple, nimble, direct. A fixie can be fast, too. It has direct power transmission and few moving parts. The fastest cyclist on the planet rides a fixed wheel.

The fixie won’t catch on like the mountain bike, though. Oh, I’m sure manufacturers are delighted to cash in on these stripped-down machines; they’ll hold on to the surplus cogs, derailleurs and shifters until people realise they need them. Without gears, cycling is too much work, especially for a beginner. Pushing a bike up a hill is neither cool nor fun.

I reckon Jonny has the right idea. His matt black Cannondale Bad Boy 700 comes within a whisker of being camp (you Bad boy! you), but it’s just about perfect for urban use: no suspension, sealed bearings, disc brakes, slick tyres. Its stealth finish won’t ever look dirty. And look at the range of gears!

Not everyone can afford a Cannondale, though. If manufacturers truly want to benefit from the fixie they should cross it with the mountain bike. Then we’d have something simple, safe, accessible. Something cool enough to be seen out with. Something so much fun to ride it won’t get left in the shed.

Thanks to Brenton Salo for kindly allowing me to use his cycling in the rain photo.

What goes around

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-03-04

Well done whoever reinvented the wheel by putting spokes in it! Despite my mathematical training, it’s hard to believe a such spidery arrangement of wires and air can be so strong.

Just such a wheel survived a high-speed run in with an evil pothole on the north Gower road last Tuesday. Survived? Well, it remained true enough for me to complete my journey. Something was wrong though: the front brakes were juddering.

The wheel is the original one that came with the bike. To date, I reckon it must have gone round about 7 million times, covering a total distance in excess of 15000 km. Friction from the brakes has worn the rims away. They’re concave.

The rims hadn’t escaped damage. There’s a bulge where they hit the pothole: hence the juddering. The next morning I ordered a Shimano R500 online from Merlin Cycles. Actually, I ordered a pair, front and back, which worked out about the same price as a single wheel.

Merlin Cycles is in Preston. Parcelforce collected my new wheels from them at 12:58 yesterday. By 22:22 in the evening they were at the National Hub. They arrived where I work before lunch today.

The wheels were made in the Shimano factory in Malaysia. According to Wolfram Alpha — assuming (unlikely) a direct great-circle path, and assuming (correctly) that Preston is in Lancashire — they’ve already covered a distance of 11404km, almost ⅓ of the earth’s circumference. I wonder how many times they’ve gone round?

Potholes, Ponies and other cycling hazards

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-03-02

I didn’t even see it. My bike has carbon fibre forks which are meant to absorb shocks but the impact traveled up through my arms and shoulders and shook my teeth. I heard something clatter on the road. The pump! Thrown clean off the frame.

I hit the pothole square on and at speed. If I’d caught its edge, it could well have been me on the road. I collected the pump and rode off slowly, feeling for damage. Handlebars need tilting back down. Front wheel, usable, but judders when the brakes are applied.

This happened on the final unlit stretch of my regular Tuesday morning commute from Reynoldston to Swansea railway station, where I catch the 06:28 on to Bristol. A clear sky, the full moon hanging low. I’d just passed the Three Crosses turning. In a few hundred metres I’d ride over the cattle grid which marks the end of the common. I’m all too aware this section of the North Gower road has a lunar surface. My usual tactic is to ride close to the centre line, which avoids the worst of the craters.

Towards the end of last year, making the same journey, I was hurtling down the road which goes over Cefn Bryn. My colleague Chris, who grew up in Carmarthen, knows this road as “the wobbly road”. It’s straight but not level. In a car, with a clear run, you can pretend you’re on a roller-coaster; on a bike, in the dark, the troughs and crests limit your vision. Something large and pale loomed in the middle of the road. I slammed on both brakes. In front of me a white horse stood quite still. Unperturbed by my presence, it leant forward, stretching its legs, and breathed out a cloud. I wheeled slowly round it. Next time I’ll be more careful.

The Wake’s Progress

tag@wordaligned.org (Thomas Guest) — 2010-01-22

Martin Fey’s new play, “The Wake’s Progress” premiered at the Alma Tavern Theatre on Wednesday. If I’m honest, I was there out of loyalty to Steve, who plays Sgt. Kennedy, and who rents a room to me for the two nights a week I’m in Bristol. It turns out I was lucky to get a ticket. It’s a spirited farce which mixes some traditional ingredients:

a corpse
a coffin
a nun
a porn star
a policeman
dodgy Irish accents
egregious puns
George Clooney
identical twins
mistaken identity
a golf course

I hadn’t been to the Alma Theatre before. It’s a great little venue. I walked away humming “Tie me kangaroo down sport, Tie me kangaroo down …”