About a month ago, I realised that decent distance-cycling days would be few and far between for the rest of this year, so if I wanted to achieve my ambition of cycling to Glasgow and back the same day I’d need to get on with it.  After two days of torrential rain towards the end of last week, yesterday looked clear enough to attempt this 88-mile jaunt.

So after seeing Elly off to her piano lesson and a prolonged Bruce-faff, I loaded up Lev Davidovitch Bikestein and left the warmth of Servants’ Quarters. After about a minute of walking Lev up to the road, I realised I needed to wear another layer, grabbed the winter jacket from Lev’s pannier and pondered going back for another layer. However, I’d faffed enough for today and so just set off along my my almost traditional route A8 and A89 westwards. I have no idea why the cyclemeter map shows me going through the Apex European hotel on Haymarket Terrace – I promise you I didn’t!

The wind was in my face as I left Edinburgh. I was almost glad of this – if there has to be wind, I prefer it to be helping me in the later, more tired stages of any ride. However, I felt slow and clunky as I passed through Corstorphine and on to the outskirts of Edinburgh. I wimped out of staying on the road and using Gogar roundabout’s high-speed underpass, taking the cycle path that starts at Maybury Road and lead over the RBS squinty bridge at Gogarburn. However, as soon as possible, Lev and I rejoined the road. As I continue to opine, the A8 is a dual carriageway but has no ‘no bike’ signs so it’s legal for us to be there and there should be plenty of room for bikes and cars to co-exist.

This route also gave me an opportunity to try out different approaches to entry and exit lanes. The textbook for my ‘teaching cycle-skills’ course recommends pulling into an exit lane, then signalling right and pulling out again to reduce exposure. I think this is insane: you’ll be moving across the path of 4WWs who aren’t expecting this, then rejoining the main carriageway from an even more unexpected direction. I think this is just begging to become strawberry jam and another SMIDSY statistic. Instead, I’d recommend just dropping the hammer and sprinting, in the primary road position,  in the main carriageway until you’ve safely passed the exit lane. If necessary, you can wait before the start of the exit lane for a suitable gap in the traffic.

I agree more with the textbook’s recommendation for passing entry-lanes. Drivers on the main carriageway should be looking out for traffic coming out of entry lanes, while 4WWs coming up an entry lane may not see (or may just not care) a bike on the main carriageway. I guess this is especially true of entry-lanes from airports, where the drivers are likely to be jet-lagged and tired from a couple of weeks of chemical stimulation in Ibiza. Indeed during my return to Edinburgh, I did have to slow to avoid being hit by some speed-freak knob-end 4WW who didn’t know the meaning of the give-way road markings.

This danger passed, Newbridge roundabout posed no problems apart from the wind and rain. I reached Broxburn after just over an hour of cycling. As ever, I cursed whoever who decided that 20-meter slabs of concrete, separated by 4-inch gaps across the carriageway were a good idea. Even more idiot was filling these gaps with frogspawn or whatever: the filling is long gone and regular groin-bashing bumps are the result. Not a good thing when cycling uphill into the wind.

Uphall was the usual uphill struggle, followed by a continued uphill drag through Dechmont. After this began the part I’d most dreaded, the horrible tarmac on the A89 between Dechmont and the Tesco depot at Livingstone. To a 4WW driver, the tarmac might look smooth. However, to a cyclist it’s not – it’s speed-sappingly rough. By the end of this stretch, the wind, cold and bum-bashing tarmac had my tinter and right testicle in severe pain. Despite this, Lev and I carried on towards out first ‘scheduled’ stopping point at Bathgate station. This was 18 miles in 1 hour 46 minutes: an average of 10·2 mph. Also my feet were freezing – light ‘summer’ cycling shoes aren’t enough for Scottish wind and rain so today (Sunday) I bought some neoprene overshoes. By the way, Endura are a Scottish company (based in Livingston).

A quick energy bar and half a banana later, Lev and I pushed on through the wind towards the gloom of western West Lothian and eastern North Lanarkshire. There was a traffic jam in Armadale but this was a revelation – a polite driver warned me he was about to pull out to reverse into a parking space, so that I should get in front of him to avoid being splatted. The pull up from Blackridge station into the town was painfully slow – I was considering giving up. However, realising I’d taken under 3 hours to reach Caldercruix (average speed 11·1 mph) and hadn’t noticed the transition to North Lanarkshire was heartening. The next few miles to Airdrie passed without event. I took another short break at Airdrie station and then pushed on. By now, the weather was lifting and the road was dropping – I achieved 14mph in the 5 miles between Coatbridge and Shettleston. After this, the few miles from Glasgow’s eastern ghettos to the city centre went smoothly – the only hold-ups were traffic-lights. My total cycling time to Queen Street was around 4 hours, hence average speed of 11mph. (I’m not too pleased with that.)

At Queen Street I stopped to munch a bag of fries and down a diet coke – a pleasant change from the cold water from my camelbak. Thanks to the left-luggage folk at Queen Street for looking after Lev while I found a tiled tree. I also replaced the batteries in a couple of Lev’s lights and realised that one of Lev’s rear lights was missing. The internet told me that there was a bike shop north of Queen Street station. It didn’t tell me that the staff at Dales Cycles would be friendly and helpful – thanks indeed folks for warnings and hints on how to handle some of the junctions in Airdrie. So Lev was fitted with two orange skullies and now has lots of lights.

By now it was 4:30, so I knew I’d be cycling the last 15-20 miles in the dark. I don’t mind night-cycling – in fact it can be preferable because there’s less traffic and 4WWs have no excuse to miss Lev’s multiple bright-flashing LEDs. Also, the rain held off and the wind was now behind me. Despite feeling much faster, the return journey still took just under 4 hours cycling-time. I had brief breaks in Blackridge (mainly to ease my bruised backside) and Bathgate. Apart from the long drag up and out of Airdrie, the return journey from felt mostly downhill. I wasn’t able to enjoy as much as I’d hoped the descent from Dechmont via Uphall to Broxburn because by now my lower thighs were stiffening up. The rain came back with a vengeance just as I got back into Edinburgh but went away fairly quickly.

I got home at 8:46, so my total trip time for the 88 miles was 9 hours and 43 minutes. However, actual pedalling time was under 8 hours. The ever-wonderful Elly was waiting with a tofu stir-fry and a big mug of tea – I can’t tell you how much I appreciated these! Thanks also to the spinning folk – without their help there’s no way I’d have been fit enough to do an 88 mile trip. I was proud to wear a Lifescycle top [link to image on Facebook] – shame it was too cold to keep it uncovered.

And so now I have my challenges for 2013:

• cycle from Edinburgh to Ardrossan (under 80 miles but I think the stretches through Ayrshire will be hilly, windy and tough)
• take part in a >100-mile event, ideally a sportive (although I might need to get a lightweight road-beast for that, and there’s no way I can currently afford one)
• do the Edinburgh-Glasgow-Edinburgh cycle non-stop, ideally averaging 15 mph or more.

Timings
These are based on some texts I sent.

Door-to-door average speed was 10·0 mph.

Door-to-door average speed was 11·1 mph.

How to carry too much stuff

• jPhone 4
• frame bag containing a porridge bar and a number of Organica vegan energy bars
• under-saddle bag containing
  1. multi-tool
  2. chain-tool
  3. inner-tube patches, glue and sandpaper
  4. combination hex spanners, cone spanner and spoke key
  5. oil
  6. mini-pump
  7. small adjustable spanner
  8. tyre levers
  9. wet-wipes
  10. polythene gloves

  (Items 1 to 4 came with the bag. It also came with light plastic tyre levers but they’re not strong enough to move Lev’s heavy-duty tyres, so I carry old-school metal levers.)

• pannier containing over-trousers, two spare inner tubes, two bananas, jPhone 4GS, USB battery pack for recharging the phones, winter jacket and gloves, pain-cream, arnica cream and 6 spare batteries for Lev’s many lights.

Illumination

• handlebar drops: skullies
• head-tube: skully and knog
• pannier rack: knog, skully, skully, knog

It’s taken me the better part of three hours (time when I really should have been sleeping) to persuade Iggy to not boot into Windows 7.

You may recall that Iggy is a 2009 Mac Pro with 4 hard disks:

1. boot disk (actually a 512GB SSD) with MacOS 10.7.5 (‘Lion’), apps and data
2. 1TB hard disk partitioned into two volumes
   1. TimeMachine back-up of boot disk
   2. CCC clone of MacOS 10.6.I_forget (‘SnowLeopard’) in case I ever get truly sick of the iOS features in Lion
3. 640GB hard disk with nightly CCC clone of boot disk, just in case I stuff that up – the plan is I can boot from the CCC clone, clone it back to the boot disk and all should be well. (It has worked!)
4. 170GB hard disk containing various VirtualBox virtual machines.

I also have a MacBook Air called MIA, which can boot into either MacOS 10.8..2 (‘Mountain Lion’) or Windows 7 – thanks to the magic of BootCamp. It seems I’m likely to need Win7 and Office 2010 because the current module requires a lot of grubbing in MS Access. While the Win7 VM on Iggy works well, it doesn’t make full use of Iggy’s firepower. A virtual machine is, very roughly speaking, just a program running on top of a host OS, competing with all other programs for RAM, processor time, etc. BootCamp should have allowed me to run Win7 natively, just as it does on MIA.

Because I didn’t want to risk Iggy’s boot SSD, I chose to install windows on a 60GB partition on disk 4. Installation seemed to go smoothly, at least as far as installing MS Security Essentials. However, installation of MS Office failed, so I thought I should can the Windows stuff for the night, reboot Iggy in MacOS for his nightly CCC clones and other housekeeping and go to bed.

Imagine my joy when Iggy stubbornly kept rebooting into Windows, each time installing a fresh set of updates. Even when the update process appeared to have finished, Iggy seemed stuck in Redmond. Using the BootCamp control panel to tell Iggy to restart in MacOS didn’t work, nor did holding down alt at restart to get a choice of boot devices – Iggy just hung until force-restarted. Booting into mac safe mode and single-user mode didn’t work – more hanging. Booting into firewire target mode: nada. (All these were tried several times, with the keyboard plugged into different USB ports.) Pulling out the HD with windows got me occasionally the message that there was ‘no boot device’ but mostly just more hanging. Removing and reinstalling the BootCamp software from windows didn’t help either – and I had to spend a lot of time finding how to do that. Booting from Lion and SnowLeopard USB installers: yet more hanging. I was beginning to run out of hemp by this stage.

I was convinced that the other HDs were OK – using a naked hard drive adaptor (every hardware munchkin should have one) I could boot MIA from Iggy’s normal boot SSD, the CCC clone thereof and the CCC clone of SnowLeopard. (Incidentally, this was proof of how much faster SSDs are than hard disks: under a minute to boot from SSD, several minutes to boot from HD). Also all the disks appeared in Iggy’s incarnation of Windows as they should have done.

I began to fear that some bit of firmware within Iggy (probably the EFI gubbins) was hosed so that it could no longer recognise Mac boot partitions, and began reading up on that. I don’t advise going anywhere near this subject unless you’re a seriously masochistic hardware munchkin. I soon realised I didn’t want to try anything – everything I read advised ‘if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t even begin because it WILL go wrong and you WILL end up crying’ or words to that effect.

I began to realise that the external CD/DVD drive I use with MIA wasn’t showing up in Windows when plugged into Iggy – presumably due to lack of drivers. However it struck me I’d not tried anything using Iggy’s built-in optical drive. I popped a SnowLeopard installer DVD into that drive and, as it should have, it appeared in Windows and gave me the options of sharing Iggy’s optical drive to MIA or reinstalling (again) BootCamp drivers. What I’d forgotten, in my gibbering-wreckness, was that I should be able to boot Iggy from this DVD.

While all the other variations of ‘hold down this key to boot that way’ hadn’t worked, holding down the C key to boot from the optical drive worked, but only after what felt like hours of optical-drive grunting noises. At long last, the prelude to installing MacOS screen appeared. As soon as I could, I legitimately got out of the installation prelude and hence to the ‘choose your startup disk’, chose the normal boot disk and restarted Iggy, yet again cursing myself for trying this Windows-on-Iggy’s-bare-metal approach. Iggy properly booted into Lion and appears to be working fine. I’ve dumped the Windows partition and will stick with the VMs – they just work and can be dumped and reinstalled with no loss to anything else.

Here endeth the tale of woe, at least until I find that I’ve truly hosed something else.

This is a track Andy frequently uses to finish the warm-up section of his rides. Totally storming, with standing surges to the chorus.

If you can’t dance to this, you are six feet under.

This is the artiste’s site.

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.