Newcastle

Cycling in to my client’s office this morning, I had two near misses - both situations that I could have almost certainly avoided by riding more assertively, and holding my line. In the first, I was approaching roundabout, where the lane nearest the kerb splits into two - the left (3 in the picture) is...
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. . . or a complete Muppet. I was booked to go into Newcastle this evening for a networking thing, and so headed off on my Sturdy Commuting Bike into a gusty headwind - late as usual, so I had to work really hard to get to the thing on time. I made it -...
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The training schedule had me down for a 45/10 brick this morning, so last night I was early to bed and raring to go when the alarm went off at just after six. My ride earlier in the week had left me a little sore in the . . . um . . . undercarriage...
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My swimming buddy Simon, couldn’t make it last night, so I decided to go for a ride instead. It was one of those ups & downs rides, with the highs provided by favourable wind on the way home, and the lows from eejits in a car. Let’s deal with the lows first. About six miles...
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Yesterday the weather was forecast to be mostly good, and I had a meeting scheduled with a client that my SatNav said was only 36 miles away by bike. Hmmm . . . with fuel prices now at £1.30 a litre (that’s $9.60 for a US gallon) (So all you in the USA...
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After the mayhem of Daughter’s birthday party yesterday, I ended up drinking a little more than intended over dinner with my parents last night. So the plans for an early O’clock ride went right out the window, and I ended up not leaving the house ’till almost two O’clock. Not due to a hangover,...
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My little video about the cycle lane in Gateshead has gone mainstream. The Newcastle Journal ran it today as their front cover story, with the main details taking up most of page 3! Naturally they wanted pictures to go with the story (my good looks sell papers? Something like that, I’m sure), and naturally I...
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There’ve been a couple of posts in the last few days about short, stupid, pointless cycle lanes - Bike Hugger has one, and so does Slate V (seen on the excellent Bicycle Diaries). The trouble is that both of these examples were from the USA, and as we know, everything’s bigger in America. The...
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A couple of years ago, just after I’d bought my sturdy commuting bike, I was riding along Newcastle’s Quayside with my friend The Irishman. We cycled along the empty bus lane, and at the end were going to continue along the pavement, which is wide & generally used as a mixed bicycle / pedestrian...
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Not too much to say about the North Tyneside Easter Sunday 10K, except that it was the toughest race I’ve ever completed! The  weather from Saturday had only slightly abated, and by the start of the race, the temperature on the sea front was a balmy 0ºC, with a pleasant 22-25mph headwind. My race went...
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