This video appeared on Cyclelicio.us a few days ago. It shows that you’re far, far "safer" to take the lane on a dual carriageway than to ride along the hard shoulder. In so doing, the overtaking traffic gives you a much wider berth than if you’ve already marginalised yourself to the edge of the road:
There are several roads a little like that near here - The Coast Road, the A19 south of the Tyne Tunnel, the Spine Road to Ashington, etc. And I’ve pretty much decided that none of them is safe for cyclists. Few roads in the UK have actual hard shoulders (a kerb in town, or a ditch out of town seem to be the norm), except motorways. The speed limit on those is 70mph, and even if it weren’t ilegal to ride your bike along these roads, you’d be nuts to try.
Back to the point though. If you ride in the "Oh I’m sorry for daring to be on the road" position at the edge of a road with fast moving traffic, then you’re out of the direct line of sight. Drivers will either squeeze past without leaving their lane, or you run the risk that because you’re not right in front of them , they just won’t see you. This might not result in a direct hit, but a wing mirror across the buttocks at 60mph can still be pretty lethal.
If you assert yourself and take the lane (as a tax-payer, it’s your right after all), then you run the risk that drivers’ perception of speed is severely warped. Most of us are really bad at judging how fast we’re approaching a narrow, near-stationary object, and before the driver’s brain has had time to calculate the approach speed and relative vectors of their own and your motion, they’re driving over your rear wheel. This assumes of course that the driver is paying attention to the road ahead, and not fiddling with the stereo, shouting at the kids in the back, sending a really important text message, closing some really really important deal on the phone, or freaking out at the cup of scalding coffee they’ve just tipped into their lap. If any of these things are going on, then they won’t even see you before they hit you.
So you’re pretty much damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The only way to win these kinds of games is to choose not to play. No, I don’t mean take the car instead, I mean find an alternative route to cycle. In the UK, these are invariably a little less direct than the nice straight routes that are built for Important Motorists. But as a result they’re also a lot less convenient for motorists, and so tend to be quieter. Sometimes you can even hear the birds singing.
Of course, if we had a sensible government, maybe we’d end up with something like this, shown by David Hembrow in the Netherlands:
This is the pattern for my swimming for the next ten weeks - Monday is a technique session with lots of TI drills, and Wednesday is endurance, adding 100m a week to get me close to full race distance in time for taper.
So today I was doing drills.
Yawn.
Actually, if you interpserse them with some lengths of full stroke, where you can feel the difference whatever you’ve been practicing makes to your swimming, it’s almost fun.
There were some new people in the pool this morning though. And like newbies everywhere, they hadn’t quite figured out where they fitted. So on one of my full-stroke lengths, I made a diversion to swim around Side-Stroke-Very-Slow Man, and found myself following a different black line along the bottom of the pool. The trouble was that I hadn’t realised this, and swam straight into the feet of a woman who was doing some kickboard work.
Funny thing is that I think it hurt her feet more than my face. And I can now confirm that the Aquasphere Vista goggles are indeed ideally suited for open-water swims with mass starts - they didn’t leak at all.
It must have been a roller-coaster of a New Year. Because it completely slipped my mind that 1st January 2010 was the tenth anniversary of both my parents giving up smoking.
Well done to the pair of you - I’m SO proud of your achievement!
I did this a couple of years ago when I was training for a 1/2 Ironman - after EVERY bike session, go for a short run. Obviously there were some full-on brick sessions as well, but this bike+short run was a weekly thing for me.
Strangely enough, I find that I run really well off the bike - this 7min/mile pace felt like a slow, easy jog!
The roads were still pretty wet though, and my road bike is still clamped into the turbo trainer in the study, so I did this on my fixed-wheel training / commuting bike, Byron, which is equiped with luxuries like full mudguards, a front mudflap, a rear buddy-flap, a lovely Brooks saddle, and a voluminous Carradice saddle bag (containing D-lock, waterproofs, toolkit, spare tubes, 2nd water bottle, etc).
Turns out that without gears, those hills are "character building". Or maybe the weight of all these extras on the bike had something to do with that?
It started raining pretty hard when I was about five miles from home. But I didn’t care - I was just so happy to be outside.
Actually it was quite a fun run - apart from treading in unexpected puddles in those areas where the streetlights don’t shine. Oh, and the freezing cold that grabbed me as soon as I stopped running.
The pace wasn’t exactly stellar, but I wasn’t actually trying to push it too hard - just keep going without any stops for the whole ten miles.
So my plan was to cycle into work on Thursday. But two things prevented this - another freezing night that left the [largely untreated roads and completely untreated cycle routes] slippier than I’d trust, and more critically, a complete inability to wake up to the alarm.
zzzzzzzzz.
So I treated myself (and the neighbours) to my own private spin class after work. The downside was the obvious lack of a view, but this was compensated for by being able to choose my own music. AC/DC, some Aerosmith, a little Muse, the opening track from Exile on Main Street, The Blockheads, The Wonderstuff, Joy Division, and this little ditty:
take a last decision and the cars to move it
past information
tunnel vision and the scars to prove it
everybody got a reservation
far beyond the black horizon
beyond the things you know
everybody got a destination
everybody got a place to go
take a walk downtown to where the victims go
take your shadow to the end to the very last window
everybody got friends got shot upside and over down the line
everybody got assignations
I got mine
take a one way ticket to the main attraction
cut a hole between the ground and sky
take a railway track to a chain reaction
cross my heart and take a ride
far beyond the black horizon
beyond the things you know
everybody got a destination
everybody got a place to go
Your starter for ten is to name that tune, without using Google (or any other search engine for that matter).
… that sea looks quite choppy, with a lot of people for me to get in the way of. I’d better hang back at the start or I’m going to get well and truly swum over!
… those climbs in the first half of the bike course look pretty brutal. Also interesting to note that everyone in the vid was riding on regular drops + tri-bars. Not a bull-horn base bar in sight!
… finishing in daylight looks better than finishing after dark. I’ll settle for either though!
And the other breaking news is that five months before race day, Ironman France is full ! So, Tall Robbie, it sounds like you got let off this one!
Another day where my motivation was low . . . but I ground on through anyway.
To begin with, there was the whole thing of getting out of bed - after an early night, I’d had nearly nine hours’ sleep, but the bed was sooo warm, and the bedroom freezing cold.
Then there was the drive into Ashington - I passed a recently flipped car, with the driver standing next to it looking pretty shaken. I wasn’t the first there, but stopped anyway to make sure that no-one was still in the car.
Then the pool. I’m now less than 21 weeks from my date with destiny, and from here on in it gets serious. Wednesdays’ are for endurance swimming - my plan is to start here at 2000m, and add 100m to the session each week, to take me up to the full race distance in time for taper.
So I had 2000m to do. My target race pace is 2:30/100m, which’ll give me about a 1:40 split on the swim. So I set my watch on a 2:30 countdown and set off. It was really tempting to bale out after the 15th rep though - my logic was
Hey - that’s a mile . That’s a long way to swim!
But I knew that wasn’t what I had in my plan, so I stayed in and did my last 5 sets. The result was that I’ve been walking round feeling smug all day, and my confidence in swimming has gone up a couple of octaves.
It was actually pretty easy - my only problem was not undershooting the time by too far. A 10-15 second recovery after each 100m was fine, but any more would have changed the workout too much - it’s a 3800m swim on race day, not 38 x 100m with a huge rest after each!
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