Snow

When snow arrives the schoolboy cheers and grabs his sleigh, the cyclist on the other hand cries 'no' and rages against the gods. Snow, you see, is the ultimate enemy. You can get out on the bike in the wind, just grit your teeth and bare it; there are even those who love a bit of mucky weather - they are usually Belgian and ride bikes specially designed to get rid of mud easily. But snow, no. Snow means being 'stuck indoors'. There are are a number of ways to deal with this impasse - go snowballing with the kids, laugh it off and try to stay away from the treacherous pavements; book a ski-ing holiday in the Alps and throw yourself entirely into the snow theme or get the turbo out.

The turbo, for those uninitiated in such things, is a device for turning a bike into a stationary bike. In effect you turn your front room into a gym, but without the buffed up babes and nice showers. A turbo is cycling without the fun - a machine designed to make you sweat and leave nasty stains on the front room carpet. It is noisy, hard work and very little fun. I usually position it in front of the telly and watch old Tour De France videos in an attempt to feel like I am cycling against the greats - it works for about a minute!

Of course a truly dedicated turbo rider has a state of the art machine which is set up to replicate stages of legendary races, the resistance on the back making it feel like you are actually climbing Ventoux in your living room/garage/one room flat, it is linked to a pc spouting data like crazy - power in watts, heart rate, cadence but it's still a turbo.

And then there are those that hook up their turbos to the world wide web and race people from all over the globe. I am sure that there are pleasures to be gained from beating a bloke from Iceland at 3 am while all around are in their jamas but it's not for me.

When the snow finally cleared enough to ride I took the fixed out for a spin. You may wonder why I would take a bike without 'proper brakes' out on roads that still had wedges of ice still upon them but the answer is pretty simple - the fixed is fun to ride, providing a pretty constant response at all times with very little reason to get out of your seat and thus the bum stays planted and weight is kept over the back wheel, making it as stable as anything. And did I mention it's fun?

When i chat to older blokes about owning a fixed their eyes often mist up and they start to tell me about their teenage days when riding a fixed was standard for just about every lad on the block. They chat about chain inches - just how big their front cog was, how tiny their back cog was, the times they nearly killed themselves coming down hills - how they rode with neither back nor front brakes. My dad, in fact told me that he used to wait for a bus at a stop and then follow in its slipstream all the way over to Stevenage to meet his future wife (and my future mum) on his fixed. He rode a couple of inches from the back of the speeding vehicle with the conductor gesticulating wildly for him to back off as they approached a stop. He claimed a ridiculous 58x11 - a gear Chris Hoy would have been proud to use and something an ordinary cyclist would find hard to even get started, you'd need thighs that could crack walnuts - maybe age has amplified that gearing?

It's no wonder the fixed works so well in an urban environment, a low maintenance machine that is light and nippy enough to negotiate the traffic. It's faster than public transport - a twenty minute tube journey is cut to five on the bike and you see so much more - zipping back from Tokyo Fixed's new store (nice!!!) to 14 Bike Co over at Truman's Brewery would be a good 40 mins on bus/tube/walk but under 15 on the fixed (ok there was a wrong way down a one way street and a couple of gentle rolls through reds but generally in a relatively flat city like London it's surely the only way to travel)- we went past the cruisers on Old Compton Street, the shoppers on Oxford Street, the distracted academes by the BM, round past the truly batty and beautiful John Soanes Museum, straight past the pap of St Paul's and into the Gherkin heart of the City before scooting to a stop just past Huguenot weaver's houses on the edge of Brick Lane. The feeling of exhilaration from that kind of ride is a difficult buzz to beat. And they look supernice as well.

phew!!!!

If you have never seen this guy before, well, wow...

Breakfast of the Champions

Cyclists are fussy fellows. The more obsessive of them have been known to weigh each mouthful of food before cooking, write down the number of calories consumed and factor in how many hours on a turbo will rid us of it. The cycling mags are full of advice on nutrition - which supplements to take to help fast muscle twitch; new studies into the right percentage of protein in relation to carbs; how many litres of sports' gloop to drink whilst riding; the value of green tea in relation to lactic build up and countless countless other handy hints.

As the wind bites and the legs flag out there a middle aged man's mind turns to breakfast. Most start the ride with something in them. I favour a bowl of porridge and a cup of rocket fuel strength coffee. Others prefer a hastily stuffed banana, whilst other still prefer to suckle on gels with donkey spunk-like consistency . But all know that these are merely hors d'oevre to the main breakfast. The fuel that only the virtuous can truly consume.

If not all rides lead to Barling, all rides end up in front of a pot of tea and, hopefully, food. Some swear by cake and I can see its attractions - there is only one thing the English do better than cake - preferably coffee and walnut in artery hardening slabs. But, for me, I truly need something a bit more, erm...substantial.

The true home of the Leigh Riders, as we have decided to call ourselves, is The Barge(prop Jason White, one of Essex's finest cyclists himself). One of a row of cafes built into arches under a sloping road, this is the spiritual heartland for us. As we arrive, the waitress dumps an urn of tea which she regularly replenishes with nary a word of complaint and then listens to our specific dietary requirements - brown or white, poached or scrambled, can i have that with mushrooms and not tomatoes, any chance of a river of brown sauce? There's as many breakfast varieites as there are cyclists.


We sit and the steam slowly rises from us, in states of undress, the early morning denizens of the cafe slightly bemused by grown men in skin tight lycra and socks over their shoes, we devour on the Barge's finest, regardless. The talk turns ribald, the day's near misses, leg fades and moments of heroism relived. It's a time to hear arcane component talk, regale each other with opinions about the latest edition of Cycling Weekly and generally talk bollocks before we re-climb on to our bikes and slowly slink back up the hill and back to our grown up lives and families.

thanks to MF for the photos

Fixie Fun

Because it's the holidays I have a lot of time on my hands to watch all manner of nonsense on youtube. Check this out:

Fixated

Permit me a few more pictures of my latest toy:

Look at those flanges!!!

Fixed

My latest toy...

... built by the guys at 14 bike co in Truman's Brewery, just off Brick Lane http://14bikeco.wordpress.com/

Gran compe hubs

Tange headset

Sugino crank set

Nitto bar and stem

Steel frame by 14 bike - Reynolds 631

Power Grip pedals

Expect my first post about fixeds to be about how easy it is to seriously injure yourself whilst scratching your bum and forgetting to pedal!

Summer

Richard Williams, one of cycling's finest writers finished his Tour de France reports this year like this:

"With the end of the Tour de France," the novelist Paul Fournel wrote, "the summer reaches its moment of sadness: long, hot afternoons and no longer anything to get your teeth into."

For anyone with even a passing interest in cycling then Le Tour is the centrepoint of the year. 21 days of racing around one of the most beautiful countries in the world. 21 different battles. Obviously the fight for yellow grabs, quite rightly, the attention, but like a well made drama there are sub stories bubbling away. This year for us brits there were two great stories that developed as the weeks went on - would Cav get green and would Wiggins hold on for a top ten place. As it was Wiggins surpassed even the most optimistic with a fourth place, equalling Robert Millar's heroics back in the nineties. Most heroically holding on to his position as he fought his way back into contention on the lunar landscape of Ventoux - infamously the site of Tommy Simpson's demise and where the wind can knock a man sideways.

Cav didn't get green but did rack up six wins, many mutter that the race commissars purposely judged him harshly, docking valuable points for unfair practices in the home straight but the truth is that, at present, he is the fastest man in the world, and he is British!

I was pondering on the rightness of the French being custodians of the greatest race. After all the birthplace of revolution seems somehow apt. after all, don't we all try and live by the three tenets of 1789? Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite? For what gives us greater freedom than the bike itself. Unchaining us from our desks and commuter lives. Allowing us the chance to soar and dream. Climbing hills and feeling like Brad on Verbier. Surely if that isn't 'Liberte', then what is? The bike makes us free, liberates the worker from work, gives us autonomy and the opportunity to move under our own efforts. It is the instrument of the working class pedaling away from their smog filled towns and into the freedom of the open air. Graeme Fife called it 'the beautiful machine' and he is right, beautiful in its simplicity and beautiful in what it has to offer.

And what of 'Egalite'? Well, I would argue that there is no greater leveller than the bike. It is no respecter of reputations and what our workaday lives might remunerate us for. The banker can ride side by side with binman and all that matters is whether one can take their turn at the front into the wind. The phrase 'don't you know who I am?' is entirely irrelevant on the bike. Your reputation, bank balance, posh office aren't going to help you much. It's down to how much is left in your legs and whether you can convince yourself to dig that bit deeper. In our group we have City workers, carpenters, teachers, taxmen, artists and countless other ways of getting paid. Yet I believe we are all equal through the bike.

Fraternite? Those self same blokes are a brotherhood of sorts. First to offer a spare inner tube, to drop back and ride with those who have blown up. Pop round with books and mags when bones are broken. For all the rugged individualism that cycling can engender there is definitely a feeling that riding in a gang creates a sense of togetherness, a sense of fraternal friendship. We know that if one of us had a chain snap in the middle of nowhere that we have a list of names in our phones that we could rely on to turf out and get us home.

So, when they stormed the Bastille and brought down the repressive Monarchy of Louis XVIII little did the Parisians know that within just over a hundred years they would be giving birth to greatest sporting spectacle that manages to survive despite the best efforts of some of its more stupid partcicipants...but that is another story.