Puncturised

I got a puncture on Tuesday night. Luckily, I was doing laps of a circuit around the local area, which I do so that it is not too far from home in the event of well, a puncture. Because of this, I ride light with no spare tube in my pocket or pump on the frame.

I went a round a sharp corner, which is pretty much a U-turn and found myself sliding sideways down the slope at the back wheel so I pulled-over and there it was. The good thing was, I was at the actual farthest point from my apartment, about 4km, so I hoisted the frame onto my shoulder and started off on the trudge home. After about 300m, I thought 'bollocks' and decided to call it in and wait for the support car to arrive.

Later, I checked-out types of punctures on Sheldon Brown's website and it seems that had a twin-hole 'snake bite' type, which is apparantly typical of an under-inflated tyre hitting a stone. So I learned something new yesterday.

Afterwards, I made some hotdogs.

New shirt to the test

Luckily, Atsushi’s weather report did not forecast rain on Friday so I joined him and John for a ride again. This week another of John’s friends was there, too. We will call him Dr. Mitsura PHD, general practitioner of medicine. So if any of us was ever going to crash badly, that was the night to do it (except for Mitsura, of course).

This Friday was the night of pseudo-classification outfits- I showed up in my brand spanking new second-hand maillot jaune, which I picked-up for 945 yen.

Sporting a rather lovely white and red polka dot cap, was Atsushi. Unlike me, he justified his with a fine display of uphill riding to cement his position as king of the mountains.

John, on the other hand, proved himself to be to be king of the socks.

On the left we can see the bike line-up. The picture is not clear, obviously but I think that, more importantly, it captures something of the the mood of the ride, time and place.

We can also see a close-up of Atsushi's machine here. Note the black leather pedophile-style gloves, which he mistakenly thinks resemble sniper ones. Perhaps we can find him some that are a little more 'him'.

Anyway, we had a good old session, got to shout at a few dickheads (ie- people who are not us) and Mitsura, ironically the only one of us not wearing a helmet, clocked in a whopping 43.2 kmph on the final sprint to take the glory and cause all the excited girls to gasp “And he’s a doctor?!”.

Worrying moment

Thanks to the internet, I was able to watch stage 15 of the TdF live on ITV with my dear ol' mum, despite being on the opposite ends of the globe.
My mum was really into it but I was a bit concerned when she was cheering on the riders during the commercial break. She had apparantly mistaken a Halfords advert for the race coverage.

Part of me would love to leave such a wonderful ahh-such-a-sweet-little-mumma anecdote there but it was shortly after that that we realised that my 'live' stream was about 30 seconds behind the terrestrial broadcast. So it turned out that my mum was not as dozy a fool as was temporarily suspected.
For now.

Below: Le Tour and le Halfords commercial... but which is which?

Enter The Friday Night Ride

I do not want to give out info about other people so I will hide their identities by using the common names John and Atsushi.
John and Atsushi are quite close so when they invited me to join them on their weekly Friday night ride, I was relieved that they were talking about cycling.

They have been riding this course together once a week for about 2.5 years now so to expect distrust towards me as an outsider was natural. They had a slight tiff at the beginning of the evening and Atsushi threathened to boycott the ride due to potential 'rain' (that never arrived) so I wondered if it was just bitchiness aimed at my presence or whether he was refering to the inevitable tears that would be present during their kiss-and-make-up-embrace.

Anyway, we rode the circuit several times and I will see if I can nick the map of it from John's blog at some point. John is a fairly big bloke and Atsushi pretty small so from the view of riding behind them, it looked like some old Lord chasing down his unwilling houseboy. Naturally, this also caused me to get the Benny Hill theme tune stuck in my head.

The Lord has been into riding for a few years now and has embraced cycling's cultural aspects, such as garish, tight shirts and a healthy disdain for trendy fixed-gear bikes and those who stradle them. It comes as a surprise then that he actually rides a bright yellow fixie himself. But it is different, he says, it is a track bike, he says and he did not get it because a magazine told him it was cool, he says (which, of course, is all true). Oh, yeah, and we must not call the bike yellow, either.

Anyway, I went over again on the Friday just gone but this time it really was rain-stopped-play so we just drunk beer, talked bollocks and watched the TdF instead. The rain was severe, too- I think we counted, at minimum, 7 or 8 rain drops hit our skin. Come to think of it, that may have been the splashback from John taking a leak against his front wall.

Buses, sideways

If I was cycling in London or thereabouts, and a car slowed right down and sat on my arse even though there was a ton of space, I would naturally assume that there was a fair chance that some dickhead gazza was going to roll his window down and impress his mates by throwing something at me.
Here, however, people who want to deliberately be dickheads just floor it past you getting as close as they possibly can or just pretend that they did not see you or some other stupid passive-aggressive crap.

Generally, when people do the sit-on-your-arse thing here, it is because they are nervous of passing a cyclist. Let me point out that, generally, there is nervous, very nervous, then there is fantastically nervous, and at the top of the scale there is Japanese nervous.

It is very common to have an unconfident driver straddling you when, in another place on another day, buses would be safely wheel-spinning and skidding sideways through the same size space. Tanks have also been known to do the same thing, and sometimes trucks, too.

I often fantasise that they are actually trying their best to get past me but cannot keep-up with my advanced maneuvering. I look back and think things like "Yeah? Is that all you got, baby?" and I feel like that bloke in the first scene of Quicksilver when he races the taxi with Kevin Bacon in.

Thankfully, when I get out into the windy Kanagawa countryside, I can get off of the main roads and then I only have chainsaw-swinging farmers to contend with.

Cavendish Fever at La Tour

So the 'Manx Missile', Mark Cavendish, followed up his stage 2 win in Brignoles by taking another comfortable sprint finish in La Grand-Motte to still hang on to the Maillot Vert after stage 3.

My mate asked me a few months back what 'Manx' meant. I told him that it was someone from Manchester. He disputed this by pointing out that Cavendish is from the Isle of Man so I had to tell him more firmly that he was wrong. Within seconds we were in a schoolboy roll-up, red-faced and headlocked and I proved I was right by pinning his arms with my knees. "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" he screamed.

Anyway, a quick Wiki search later and I rediscovered some lost knowledge that 'Manx' does indeed refer to that which hails from the Isle of Man.
Anyway, the next time I saw him, I let my mate know that I could not believe that he did not even know that!

(Below) Stage 2 finale: Monaco>>Brignoles



(Below) Stage 3 finale: Marseilles>>La Grande-Motte

London to Brighton 2009

So I just randomly noticed that the British Heart Foundation's annual London to Brighton bicycle ride (not race) took place yesterday, apparantly.
27,000 bicycles covering a 54 mile route for chaah-ridy and it seems that the wacksters were out in force, as expected.

I forgot that this thing even happened and I suppose it is a bit of an event and a day-out for pissed-up, drugged-up day-trippers and families in UK's gay/ hedonism capital.
By the time the stragglers roll in after about 6 hours, there are a lot of people with rashed groins and sore butts around that beach... (here it comes)... and that is not even including the cyclists.

Well, it looks like the sun was shining on the day so I guess that it was a good laugh for those who took part, dressed-up in their splendid wacked-out attire or just went along to get plastered and laugh at others' misfortunes.
Apparantly, the Barnum-inspired Sir Wacky 'He's a Joker' McWackster (above left) raised over nine-pound-fifty all by himself- that is a penny for each time he honked his horn on the ride.
And it seems that, since its inception in 1980, the total raised is over 46 million nicker, too, which is almost as much as the West Pier rentboys. For chaaah-riddy, nonetheless.