The lyrics are something like we drift deeper – life goes on – we drift deeper – into the sound – travelling somewhere – could be anywhere. There’s coldness in the air but I don’t care – so bring it on. Embrace me – surround me – as the rush comes. This song seems appropriate, both in tempo and feeling to tonight’s spinning session.

I’d felt energised this afternoon after finishing writing a lesson plan and presentation for my teaching cycling skills course. Travelling to spinning was fast and furious, despite an encounter with a BMXer. I don’t get the point of a stupid little bike with no gears and no lights, jumping on and off pavements and scaring the wotsits out of pedestrians. Open road, smooth tarmac and enough lights so the 4WWs have no excuse is the best way. If you have to go off-road, do it on a proper mountain bike!

As I arrived at spin-central, some wee nob-ends were hanging around. One threw some gravel at me. It turns out they (probably) had thrown stuff at the windows, so that class was delayed while clearing up occurred. Also, the spinners had found a cat that had been run over – there was much upset. (Hug to ——- [I don’t want to embarrass her]. Can’t be nice seeing something you care about knocked about.) However, I didn’t know about this until afterwards.

The session had Andy’s usual music (unsubtle hint to Andy: please give me a track-listing!), with warm-up, jumps, hills, running, etc no different (as far as I can tell) from the last few weeks. And yet I was able to give it a lot more than usual, even running. (This has been problematic for me because my right shoulder won’t take my body-weight. I’ve now found a way of putting my weight on my forearms which allows something similar to running.) I’m not fit, I’m not fast and my leg-strength is nothing compared to some of the spinners. (They include full-on triathletes and major roadents.) However, for me, this was one of the best sessions – keeping going, putting more into it, running on the pedals until it seemed there was nothing left, sitting for a moment and finding there was more after all!

Even cycling home via Ferry Road and Orchard Brae (where I normally have to unclip from Lev Davidovitch Bikestein’s pedals in case I start to fall) seemed OK, despite the cold night. I even had the energy to do the washing-up!

Huge thanks to the spinners, to Elly for the funky new shirt and hugs again to anyone who was upset by the fate of the wee fur-ball, the news and whatever other crap happened today.

And if anyone doesn’t know what I’m on about, look here (website) or here (Facebook). Or better still, come to one of the beginner classes and discover for yourself the hugely enjoyable semi-masochistic mayhem of cycling to fine music in perfect safety and with some of the most supportive people it’s been my pleasure to know!

Today was the start of a new season at LifesCycle, so to celebrate appropriately they’d set up 4 back-to-back rides. (Well, there were 15-minute changeover gaps between them…). The rides were

• Frankie goes to NZ – with Martin*, Josh and Alan
  This ride will launch you into an afternoon of Spinning fun and hard work with great sounds and energy throughout from the LifesCycle big guns.
• Into the Mountains – Hugh and Team
  An hour of thumping beats with Hugh and Richard ….taking you into the lifesCycle mountains. Attacks and surges bringing everybody up the steep slopes together.
• Ethno World Ride – Izzy, Jeannie and the Tribal Team
  Think jungle, world and ethnic fusion in a tribal beats based ride for all. Great sound, motivating beats and a great filmscape to continue your fantastic journey with LifesCycle
• Comfortably Numb – Andy Hunter
  And to finish, bringing it all home with the best of Pink Floyd in sounds, visuals and motivation.

*Martin pulled his back just before the big day and so couldn’t ride.

I had fantacised about doing all four rides but Elly and I came to our senses and opted for the final two.

Izzy and Jeannie led the class through a ‘typical’ Tarahumara day. Early in the morning, they were up and running while we warmed up on our bikes and then tried to catch up and keep up with them, through jungle, rough terrain, up a canyon-wall path and on up to tonight’s mountain-top campsite. The Tarahumara runners were always ahead of us, despite them being on foot and us being on fast mountain bikes. However, this was [for us] a good thing: after all the jumps and sprints, the Tarahumara had sorted the campsite, put up the shelters and cooked a meal for us cycle-bound slowcoaches! The last push up to the campsite was filled with shouts of encouragement from Jeannie and Izzy, exhortation effortlessly moving from voice to voice. [Out of character: how on earth does anyone have the energy to even whisper when putting so much effort into cycling?] Lots of whoops and yells, digging the last of our energy from our reserves so we could make it up the mountain and then collapse into the shelters the Tarahumara had prepared.

Time for a quick banana or two, a change of shirt, fantasy about naughty things and we’re off again! Old favourites (including a mad mix of Another brick in the wall, part 2 into a storming dance track [I think it’s by the Pink Boyz] and the ever-wonderful emotion-churning of Comfortably Numb), combined with a reggae mix of One of these days, culminating in the love-space-opera-rock mayhem of Echoes – a audio-visual trip through the career of Messrs Barrett, Gilmour, Mason, Waters and Wright. All of this the background to jumps, sprints, runs, dripping sweat, emotions flying out through the legs, into the pedals and emptying us mere mortals!

I think this was one of the quickest hours I’ve ever experienced. After cycling home, I sat in a drained trance. I think this is the appeal of spinning. What else would get a slob like me who naturally sits in front of a mac (almost always with graphics-tablet stylus in one one hand, mug of tea in the other), working his flab and making his clothes absolutely sodden?

I’ve been doing Cycling Scotland’s Cycle Trainer course. Great experience for learning how to teach, and it’s improving my own road skills. Assuming I pass the course, I’ll be qualified to teach your children. You have been warned!

Here’s cyclemeter maps of getting there and back:

• Going there yesterday
• Coming back yesterday
• Coming back today

In Worcester for mum’s birthday (yesterday). Some cycling was involved…

15 September

Broadheath to Malvern
part of the return journey
Sprint from digs to Worcester: average 18·84 mph over 2·24 miles
Returning in pitch black
31·38 miles

16 September

Visiting Ian’s new house
10·25 miles

17 September

Worcester to Worcester station, again fully laden
4·66 miles

Total 41·63 miles

We’ve just done the ‘Pedal for Scotland’ Glasgow to Edinburgh run. It’s just under 48 miles, and we did it in 4 hours 16 minutes of pedalling. I’m going to call that 4 hours because of the many stops and delays. So that’s an average of 12 mph as far as I’m concerned.

I’m happy to count the two miles from our hotel near the SECC to the start at Glasgow Green and another couple of miles getting home from the finish-point at Murrayfield. So I think that’s 52 miles: Elly and Fidel’s first over-50 mile trip and I’m sure it’s not the last. It’s a big event and very well marshalled. I do have a couple of gripes:

• We were at the start area for 8am but queued for ages to actually start.
• People were started in groups of around 40, with no sorting by speed. I’d have preferred the event to have been arranged so that the people likely to take the shortest times were started first. Starting people ‘first come first served’ had several disadvantages:
  • Riders became bunched and boxed in behind slower riders ahead of them.
  • This led to impatient riders breaking out of the lanes set aside for them, and to at least one crash en route. (This rider wasn’t wearing a helmet so I don’t have that much sympathy.)
  • Big queues at feeding stations and to restart after feeding stations.
  • A big bunch at a hill about 5 miles into the ride: everyone was told to dismount and walk.
  • On other hills, less competent riders stopping suddenly as they found they couldn’t achieve these hills – causing emergency stops and other panics behind them. Not fun for those of us using SPDs or toe-cages.
  • My right knee is slightly sore from lots of stopping and starting.
• A couple of miles of road where all the tarmac had been removed.

But these are minor, tiny gripes. The event was very well organised, marshalled and signed. I’m sincerely grateful to the many people involved in organising and staffing it. This gratitude naturally extends to all the sponsors apart from the Sun newspaper (do I need to say why?) and a private hospital. (I’m happy to explain why elsewhere.)

For most of the ride, Radio Bruce was playing the Manics’ Sleepflower. Radio Elly was a bit more genteel. I’m also pleased that jPhone lasted from leaving the hotel. (Here’s one solution to that problem: very unsubtle hint.) It was also very pleasing to catch up with yesterday. And finally I repeat how proud I am that Elly did this ride, powering up hills, using her momentum, even overtaking while going uphill, being stable enough to be passed energy bars without stopping, not being upset by roadents overtaking her, and showing she is a cyclist.

Photos are © someone else, so please don’t pinch them.

Passing through Murrayfield	Close-up

By the way, the post title is a slight knock at the main sponsors, purveyors of cow milk. But I’m sure you guessed that already. Can any vegan company replace them? Are there any other vegan cyclists out there?

I appear to have been published, sort of. The initial paragraph seems fair enough in that I’ve done the grunt-work while Spartakan has provided the brains.

After a pleasant day and evening, I realised I’d not been on Lev for several days, let along donned the lycra. So I invited Elly to join me in a ‘midnight miles’ run (from Servants’s Quarters, along the A8 to Edinburgh Airport and back).

Here’s the usual cyclemeter map. Please note that our path goes both sides of Gogar Roundabout. Elly was under the impression that I eschew all cycle-paths on such runs. However, previously I’ve taken the right turn at the Edinburgh Marriott hotel onto Maybury Road, then jumped onto the cycle-path at Turnhouse Road and followed it anti-clockwise around this roundabout. I’ve then crossed the A8 at the RBS bridge and got back onto the A8 as soon as possible after that.

Elly wasn’t keen to risk the lumps and bumps and so suggested staying on the A8, using the underpass to stay on the shortest, fastest route. I’d not heard her – we still need to obtain some in-helmet comms devices so we ended up going around Gogar Roundabout the way a car would.

I’m incredibly proud of her being a ‘cyclo-path’ – I would never have dreamed going this way. She and Fidel are just such a match! So next time, I or we will use the underpass. There are two lanes each way and the motorised traffic is only (supposed to be) doign 40pmh there. It passes us a lot faster on other parts of the A8 and that’s usually no problem.

Thanks to the rankin’ Dr E, my camel has been sterilised!

So yesterday Elly, I and some other friends went to Glentress (near Peebles) for a session on their purpose-built mountain-biking runs. The friend who organised this has been here several times, while the others often combine mountain-biking with their love of hillwalking, cycling to get to routes that otherwise would take all day to even reach. I’d not mountain-biked before but I suspect this won’t be the last time.

I have to say at the start that it’s an insane sport. You get utterly filthy from mud splattering your arse and even all over your face and it’s hard going uphill along rocky, muddy worn paths with tight hairpins and no sense of getting miles of smooth tarmac under your belt. But it’s delightfully insane! The exhilaration of Can I get up this step or will I put my foot down again? and Am I going to fall over now? are nothing to the madness of doing maybe 20mph down tight slopes with jumps and cambered curves so that you can be leaning right over. It’s maybe like speedway or what velodrome cycling would be, but with extra mud, irregularities and no need to fix your feet to the pedals. (That way lies multiple fractures.)

Here’s a map of the routes. We cycled up from the trail-head to the Buzzard’s Nest car park, then did a few circuits of the green (‘easy’) route to the west of the map. This was exciting enough for some of us, but others (including me) went on some of the blue  (‘moderate’) routes. We cycled through points 11 to 16 on the map, then did ‘blue velvet’ a few times. (You go from 16 to 27 to 28, then loop back to point 27 along a forest road to do the madness again.) After that, I think we did ‘berm baby berm’ and ‘cardie hill’ (so called because it affects the innards, not your apparel) a couple of times, then descended ‘falla brae’, ‘good game’ and ‘the admiral’ back to the trail-head.

The high-point of insanity is point 7: here the blue route is a metal bridge over the upward route to Buzzard’s Nest. You only know it’s there a couple of seconds before you hit it, because it’s hidden by curves in the route and the berms you’ve been going up, over and down. So you ascend a couple of feet onto the bridge’s short horizontal surface and then realise, with no time to stop, that the drop the other side is more like 20 feet of metal and then a further drop on track. The only way is to keep going (because braking means you’ll skid, fall, bounce, splat and break things) and hang on until you’ve on the track and can begin to brake enough to make the tight curve you’re now approaching. But you can’t brake too here either much otherwise you’ll come off ignominiously and probably painfully.

The blue routes were enough for me (for now at least) – for the red (‘difficult’) and black (‘severe’), you need a lot of experience, a very expensive mountain bike with suspension at both ends (I was on a hired bike I named ‘mudlark’) and nether-regions with no pain sensors.

Anyway, here’s some pix:

• Elly halfway to the Buzzard’s Nest
• Bruce on a gentle corner 
• Bruce splashing
• Bruce at the end 

There are more pictures, but I don’t yet have permission to make these public.

Hugh thanks to Ms W for organising this and the slap-up feed thereafter, to X and Y for photos and inspiring madness and to Elly for transport and bravery – and to Glentress for providing such fun!

Lev Davidovitch Bikestein, Marianne the cuddly pig and I have done our longest journey together. Here’s the cyclemeter map for the first 60 miles. Here’s my guess at the last bit. So that’s 72·5 miles, plus cycling from Edinburgh’s west end to Ocean Terminal and back.

I know I did the first 60 miles in 4 hours 37 minutes of pedalling, hence averaging 13·0 mph. I believe I arrived at Ocean Terminal at 15:20, thus taking 65 minutes to do 12·5 miles (11·5 mph). So let’s call that 5 hours 43 minutes of pedalling and hence 12·7 mph for the whole course. I’d intended to do the 70 mile route in at most 6 hours (11·7 mph) but hoped to do it in around 5 hours (14 mph). I heard later that the really fit folk did it in 3·5 hours (20 mph). That’s some comfort, as is remembering that until today I didn’t know for sure that I could do this event.

I can blame some of the slowness for the last section on traffic (cars blocking narrow roads on the way through Cramond) and humans and dogs along the promenade. I can blame my overall slowness on

1. Me – I’m just slow!
2. Lev being a sturdy touring bike, not a carbon-fibre sprint-beast
3. the amount of stuff I was carrying:
   1. jPhone 4 on Lev’s handlebars
   2. hip pouch containing wallet, keys and other usual impedimenta
   3. frame-bag containing 3 chocolate energy-bars, spare inner tube and a tube of pain-cream
   4. under-saddle bag containing tire levers, chain-breaker, multi-tool, oil, polythene gloves, adjustable spanner, wet-wipes and a swiss army knife.
   5. pannier containing Marianne the cuddly pig, spare batteries for lights, tour-de-forth t-shirt, toilet roll, 5 flapjacks, fleece jumper, overtrousers, jPhone 3GS, autumn cycling jacket, bad-weather gloves and an extra bottle of water!

Here’s some wibbling about the day:
I met the spinners and spinnerettes (Lifecyclers) around 8:10 at the registration tent in Ocean Terminal. Here’s Lev and I just before the start. It turned out all but I were doing the sportive version (same route but setting off first, and racing). So I felt a bit alone and unsure of the route. This wasn’t the organisers’ fault: we had been given details but I can’t memorise such things. Fortunately, there were marshalls at most of the turns. I tried ‘latching on’ to a rider with a distinctive top but she left me for dust up a hill towards the first refreshment stop at Craigie’s Farm.

I didn’t stop there but carried on towards and over the Forth Road Bridge and along Fife’s south coast to Culross. I did stop here briefly to eat a banana and use the toilet. I also met up with Martin, a spinner. His bike’s left gear shifter had died, leaving him the choice of big or small front gear. Despite this, and him using his lowest rear gear, he still set what for me was a blistering pace!

We missed the official route slightly and found ourselves at Kincardine Bridge, so we cycled through Kincardine to the start of the Clackmannanshire bridge. Here, some friends were waiting. (They’d cycled from Stirling just to wave hello!) They’ve sent this photo. After this the route meandered through countryside and then some hard roads (and more traffic-jams) to South Queensferry. After a banana-stop here, I followed what I believe was the marked route along NCN route 76 to Hopetoun House. Don’t do this – it’s full of potholes and cobbled sections. Very nasty, especially as by now my knees and backside were quite sore indeed! I believe others took a road-route as far as Hopetoun.

I stopped tracking at 60 miles because jPhone 4 was about to give out. I tried tracking the rest of the way with jPhone 3GS but his GPS reception is poor. (He claims I only did 3 miles!) Coming out of the Hopetoun estate, I must have missed a sign: I realised I was cycling away from Edinburgh when I saw the hill up to Craigie’s farm again! So I whipped Lev through 180° and started back towards the A90 cyclepath. After this, I just plodded on, dreaming of stopping, while avoiding human and 4-wheeled traffic and traffic jams.

I chatted with folk for a while and then headed home through the increasing rain. (I encountered yet more rubbish driving: if I’ve not signalled left and am not in a lane marked ‘left turn only’, I’m going straight on. So don’t overtake just before the corner and then force me to take evasive action, git in the white saloon!) The end had been very welcome but I felt a bit sad when I got home – I had stopped 3 times for bananas (although I was pleased that I’d been able to reach the energy-bars in the frame bag without stopping), I’d not been able to track the entire route and I’d not achieved my pipe-dream time.
Huge thanks to

• all the folk who sponsored me: £195 so far for Mercy Corps
• Martin for keeping me going
• Lev Davidovitch for not breaking down. (I saw a couple of broken bikes along the way.)
• Lev’s ‘marathon plus’ tires for getting no punctures, despite potholes, kerbs and cobbled stretches
• the organisers for providing this masochistic fun time!
• the folk at Lifescycle who are so fun and yet professional and dedicated and who let me know about this event.

I’m a bit sore in the unmentionables but I still feel alive enough to cycle to a party tonight! (Update – I even danced for an hour or so!) And blow me but I’m looking forward to the next event, and carrying far less kit!