Just another WordPress weblog

Sitting here at the isle of wight Garlic Festival watching a really terrible band singing a terible song where the chorus is ” These are the best days of our life”

I don’t know much about bands and that but I suspect that when you start out on the road of wild rock and roll you’re not hoping that you’ll one day end up headlining a Garlic Festival.

Oh well Alvin Stardust is on at four

I received the handlebar mount for my GPS yesterday and today got to test it out. It turns out my daily route is 10.1 miles. After a quick look around the web I found the site Everytrail.com that lets you upload your trip’s GPX file gives you some snazzy info about the speed and elevation changes over the journey all on top of a google map. I can even embed it here:

Week Day Cycle

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

Just slide the arrow along the bar and you can see me speeding down Mousehole Lane and grinding slowly up Burgess Road

EDIT

DOH! Does’t work in Livejournal, click through to my wordpress site to see it in action

As expected the inoculations weren’t very nice. The people at the surgery were great but whatever way you do it getting a couple of jabs in the thigh at the age of 9 weeks isn’t going to be anything but painful. Here’s the little chapper before:

And here just after

Poor wee chap, if either of us could have done this for him we would have. He soon settled down and within a couple of hours was back to his smiling best. Another set in a month’s time and it’s Suzey’s turn to hold him this time

Hoorah! Got some new inner tubes and fixed my bike yesterday which put me in good spirits today to cracked my 10 mile cherry. Here’s the route I took early this morning:

It didn’t help having to cycle through a fair bit of drizzle and a hangover. I really can’t do lots of beer any more. Last night out with Tony and Karl was excellent fun but as I get older the morning after consequences are getting more severe. It was pretty funny that Karl’s taken up cycling too, he’s further into it than me and did the London / Brighton in June. Fish suggested doing that next year and I could well be up for it.

In the meantime I’m now aiming for 15 miles by the end of next week. To help me stay enthusiastic I’ve now got a cateye cycling computer and ordered handlebar mount for the Garmin GPS Suzey got me last year That’s an excellent intersection of biking and nerding right there and should mean I can upload routes into google maps sometime soon.

In other news it may not be a great day today; the boy gets his inoculations later this afternoon and from what we understand it can be pretty grim for the litter fella. We’ve the calpol on standby but neither of us are relishing seeing him go through this. We’ve been told by a couple of people that once settled it’s not unusual for the baby to do a 12 hour stretch of sleep after but getting them settled can be pretty distressing. Fingers crossed for 2pm.

Today I should be blogging about how I’d managed a 10 mile run on the bike. I’d managed 9.1 miles yesterday in one non stop ride and it was pretty easy so today I was up for doing at least 10. Alongside that entry there should also be some fetching photos taken from the top of Itchen Bridge. Unfortunately instead there’s this:

A couple of miles and I drove over a rusty nail. Being a bit of an amateur at this I had no puncture repair kit or a spare innertube so it meant a two mile walk with the bike back home. Still got some exercise but wasn’t best pleased. Also not great is that I took my camera along and now it’s stopped being recognised by my computer when it’s plugged in. I think some of the bumping in the bag on the back of the bike broke it a bit Bummer. Off to the cycle shop tomorrow at 9 to buy the stuff I need to fix it.

Great run today and a couple of milestones for me. All of the rides so far have had a pretty long stop in the middle, usually to read the papers and stuff some Maccy Dees down my gob. Today there was only a minor stop at the Tesco Metro on the way back to pick up some bread and milk and all McDonalds got from me was a grunted expletive as I cycled past. Also good is I extended out the distance I’m cycling with new route:

This one is 6.8 miles and as is true of any route in Southampton has its fair share of hills on which makes for a nice mix of coasting and huffing and puffing. I felt really good after and it’s amazing to look back on only just over a week ago Mousehole Lane had me pushing my bike up it on foot while coughing out a lung. Now it’s really easy

My aim now is to try and get to 10 miles in the next fortnight or so. To help chart that goal I’m probably going to get a cycling computer this weekend.

Any suggestions what would be a good one?

I’m quite happy with this. The goal was to cycle every day I could and gently push up how far I went each time. I skipped one day last week, not by choice but because I had to be on a train at 7:15am and didn’t want to arrive at THE VERY IMPORTANT MEETING with all my clothes have gone through the rinse cycle of excessive sweating. For the steel calved seasoned biyclist who’re reading this my pride in the distances I’ve been travelling will certainly elicit a bit of a guffaw. I started going to the local Tescos with a round trip of around 2 miles. No sniggering now, the hill there is pretty steep. Next step up was the Subway in Portswood, total cycling 4 miles. This morning I’ve stepped up to the McDonalds in Swaythling which now takes me up to 5 miles. It’s a hard 5 miles as I’m not exactly fit but each day it’s getting better.

The steep Mousehole Lane isn’t scary any more. The SLOW sign that once looked constraining from the car still comes off as highly sarcastic but I can now get to the top without roadside huffing and puffing which is good. The astute reader will have clocked that my destinations aren’t as healthy as the ride itself (Subway, Maccy Dees) but I’m primarily up for this for a bit of aerobic exercise rather than weight loss. Anyway without stopping at Subway I wouldn’t have seen this LIAR:

Sitting a couple of tables away it was impossible to ignore her load phone conversation which started “Hiya! Yeah I’m in Oxford!”. We weren’t in Oxford, we were in Portswood, 65 miles from Oxford. Then: “yeah, well I got up early this morning and went to Hedge End to get the bus. But I was too early for the buses so I walked to Oxford. Yeah! I know. It is a long way, nice walk though”. Man, if you’re going to do some lying doing it very loudly in public seems an odd choice to me, especially if you’re going to choose such poor quality lies as that. Say you’ve got super powers or you just found out your dad is really Mr T. Lying about walking to Oxford just seems to display a shocking poverty of aspiration.

I am constantly surprised by how I am still easily impressed by technology and have such a ludicrously polly annaish view of it.

So it’s giving me a bit of a schoolboy thrill to make this post via the iPhone Wordpess application. And that i just downloaded it via 3g on nuneaton station platform. And posting this from a cab. It’s quite nice being so easily amused, you spend a lot of time with a big grin on your face. That is all

Hoorah! Picked up the bike this morning and here it is:

The little beauty. From the shop in Shirley I managed the 3.7m ride home in 27 mins which isn’t bad for the first time. Just before home there’s a rather nasty hill and it beat me and I had to huff and puff on the pavement for a short time before getting back into it. Hopefully the raodside huffing and puffing should decrease as I get a bit more used to cycling again.

Modern bikes are ace. I used to have a fairly fancy Peugeuot racer in my teens which at the time was a nifty and expensive bike. These days it’d be a pretty hefty clunker. Switch gear changing is a lot easier than the really imprecise levers in the olden days. Pretty pleased with it all in all

Well I will from Monday. Yesterday I visited The Hub Works, the cycle shop in Shirley where Suze got her last bike. I’d been really impressed with the service she’d got, her previous bike had been stolen the insurers had issued a check for a fixed amount that was already made out to The Hub Works.

In this sort of situation there’s no incentive for the shop to cut any sort of deal, you’re a captive customer who can’t spend their cash any where else. Despite that the guy we dealt with, who turned out to be the manager, really went the extra mile to give Suzey the best deal he could by shaving a decent % of a bunch of accessories. He lost some money short term but it was the first place I went to to get a bike and yesterday go this little beauty:

It’s a Trek 75fx. I had a quite go round the block on it and despite the 20 years that’s passed since last having a go it all came back to me like er… riding a bike. They’re adding the rack and lights I picked up and I should be able to get it sometime Monday.