Distance

It’s what I crave. Miles on rubber under wheels.

I’m not a fast rider. I can ride fast at times and I may be faster than some of the people I ride with but I’m not fast. Not in the true sense of the word anyway. I may aspire or pretend, but I’m not racer. With some hard work and improved fitness, I could become a good Cat 4 racer, maybe even become a Cat 3 but I’m not fast.

I read about people all the time, making the step up to racing and doing well. Triathletes who are fit but not racers, winning and climbing rank. Good for them.

Next year, I’ll give racing another go. Not because I have visions of glory, but because it’s fun. This year though, I’m all about distance. Going far for no particular reason but because I can.

I’ve had glimmers of it before, when I look around and others are flagging and I feel fresh. Determination and practice, that’s all it is. I’ve got plenty of the first. I know it’s inside me, I just have to try harder to coax it out.

Turbo FM

Busta's back in this track with Tiesto. Some brilliant moves in this video. If you think the dancing's good, you obviously haven't seen me throwing shapes at a family wedding....

The woman from O2 thinks I’m a pervert….

While I’m waiting for my new wireless router to arrive, my smartphone is unable to enjoy WiFi connectivity at home and so I’m restricted to the use of the 3G mobile connection. This isn’t much of a problem as mobile internet is pretty fast these days and I only really look at text based sites anyway.

I’m a big fan of the Inner Ring blog. It’s an absolute goldmine of information on the pro cycling scene and often first to come up with the latest stories. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s well worth checking out, unless you have no interest in cycling in which case you’d probably be better off finding a website that best suits your needs like www.beinganidiot.com.

Yesterday, I selected my Inner Ring bookmark on my phone to get my daily fix on the blog when I was confronted with an age restriction page from O2 (my network provider). Other sites seemed to be working ok so I was baffled and called them up.

I spoke to a very nice lady and told her of my problem and that I was having trouble visiting a sports website, in this case cycling related. She said that they had been having problems with their system and she’d received a few calls of this nature, more towards the online gambling sites. All it would require would be for her to fill out a form on my behalf and then my account would be back to normal within a couple of days. We went through the details and I thanked her for her help before she finished the call by saying, “Enjoy your cycling websites.”

Call me paranoid but I’m sure the way she said cycling was a little bit disbelieving and if it was a video call her comments would include the sign language for speech marks followed by a wink. I think she was assuming that I wanted to surf some mobile porn sites.

I’m just lucky that I didn’t tell her I was visiting Big Ring Riding next. She'd have fallen off her chair..........

Last night I was angry.

I think with the recent run of bad luck, i've had some pent up aggression. I've been couped up indoors for a couple of days too so think I was going a little stir crazy.
In this kind of situation it's best to get out for a while rather than take out my moods on the rest of the family. I wrapped up warm and put my lights on my bike for my first night ride of the year. When i'm in one of those kind of moods, there's no forward planning, just a flat out ride to wherever I feel like it. There was a fair bit of traffic on the road and with the cool air and sensation of speed that night riding brings, it all just added to the exhilaration.
I went for every gap and powered up every climb like a man possessed and then it happened, it started to rain. You'd think that my mood would get worse but a funny thing happened, I started to laugh. I was enjoying the harsh conditions, I was enjoying the suffering.
It finally dawned on me the difference between riding a bike and being a cyclist.
A bike rider will make do with the job in hand but a cyclist will embrace the conditions as if they're part and parcel of the experience.
In a way, it was a glimpse into the world of the classics rider. A world where harsh conditions and suffering go hand in hand and the real men amongst the peloton summon the strength to excel. I guess that's the difference - i'm content with being out there in it for an hour, they're not content unless they're out there for 7 hours, on cobbles.

Video killed the radio star......

For some time now there's been a raging debate over whether the UCI are right in banning radios from pro cycling. I've lost count of the number of articles i've read where riders have either been for or against the ban and the odd one where they can't seem to make their minds up (Dan Martin in this month's Pro Cycling rider diary).
So, what do I think?
I think it's a pathetic attempt for the UCI to try to recapture the "glory" days of years gone past. I think that it's easy for anyone to look back with rose tinted glasses and assume that modern technology has ruined the sport of cycling. I hear it all the time from the elder males in my family when it comes to football. "Footballers were tougher back then" or how great players from the past generation were. I'm sure Pele was an amazing footballer but he wouldn't go the distance in a modern Premiership game. Whenever I hear great things about football from yesteryear, it reminds me of the classic chant from Fantasy Football League, "Old football was shit but not as shit as Andy Cole....."
Was cycling in the past that great? It's easy to remember classic victories from Merckx but we've seen our fair share of exciting races in recent, modern times.
Once again, it just appears that the UCI are stuck in a time warp and refuse to accept the future of cycling and the technology that it brings. I just can't see the advantages of racing without radios. The only thing I see it creating is danger and confusion. If that's what the UCI want to achieve, why don't they release a herd of cows into the peloton at random intervals during a race?
All I think will happen is that the odd breakaway will stay away when the sprint teams misjudge a gap through lack of information or the road book is wrong or the poor domestiques amongst the teams will be forced into visiting the team car more often, in addition to the usual water carrying duties. Are people really naive to think that pro cyclists can't make decisions for themselves? Do we think that riders like Alberto Contador are puppets and can only attack when race directors tell them to?
When I look back to my favourite races in recent years, I can only think of one race where radios were really significant and that was the one beautifully captured in Chasing Legends where Columbia HTC ripped apart the peloton during a windswept stage in the 2009 Tour de France. Did radios ruin the stage? I think they had the opposite effect and spiced up a stalemate of a situation.
It's important to remember that cycling in the past is exactly that, it's in the past. An era when technology may not have been present but widespread doping was. Were races more exciting for those reasons rather than the technological advances that we have become accustomed to?
Is it our fault? As cycling's popularity has increased and coverage is at the best it's been for years, are we the reason that races have become less aggressive? Do we expect too much? Is cycling the victim of it's own success and has TV killed the radio star?