Category Archives: Roadie

My wrong ‘un just goes straight up in the air and when it finally lands it doesn’t turn

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It’s clear to just about everyone that Shane Warne is as good a commentator on transport policy as I am a spin bowler (i.e. really, really poor).

So as a result of Warne we get a week or so of the same old media merry-go-round. Cyclists should pay rego, yawn. Cyclists should always ride single file, blah blah blah. It’s a battle between motorists and cyclists, etc etc

Haven’t you got anything else? And this was right in the middle of the biggest bike racing event in Australia each year, the Tour Down Under. Quite possibly a time when we might expect positive media coverage of our sport/transport.

I had the responsibility (or perhaps misfortune) to be BQ’s representative for Channel Nine on the day they were looking for comment about Warne vs cyclists. Obviously I wasn’t either succinct enough or inflammatory enough, as they used other people’s sound-bites ahead of mine.

And later that day and the next, as I pondered my responses to the Channel Nine reporter, it continued to bug me just a tiny bit. Not the fact that they didn’t use what I said, but rather that is impossible that television news coverage can ever discuss a contentious issue in a way that moves public discourse forward.

So here’s my contribution to public debate around the topic of whether cyclists should always ride single file.

OK, you might want to grab a coffee or something, because this is going to take a while. Caveat: this is a work in progress, and I’m happy to hear of corrections to my (doubtlessly dodgy) maths.

Let’s establish some terms and conditions, set the scene etc.

First, a group of cyclists riding together two-abreast is a peloton, or a bunch. These riders are almost always sports or recreational cyclists. The bunch is a labor-saving device … a group of riders can go further and faster on the same energy output than if they all rode solo. But it is rare to see people commuting to work on their bicycles riding as a bunch.

Second, let’s make it very clear that riding two abreast is absolutely legal. And further, I will contend that in most cases around the streets of city and suburban Australia, that it makes sense for pelotons to ride like this, from a safety point of view as well as energy-efficiency.

So, why do cyclists ride in a peloton? And, indeed, why does the law continue to allow this as a special case. No other vehicles are given this dispensation.

And why is this the most efficient and safe way for sports and fitness cyclists to travel?

So let’s think about our road environment. An average traffic lane is 3.5 metres wide. A bicycle and rider are about 0.6 metres wide. Safe passing requires the driver of motor vehicle give a cyclist a metre of space. An average car is 2.2 metres wide, 4WD vehicles are wider, and trucks wider still.

I am sure that you are better at maths than I am, but already you can see that for a motor vehicle to safely pass a cyclist who is riding at the left edge of the road, the motor vehicle is probably going to have to use some of the oncoming traffic lane (assuming there’s no physical median strip).

Let’s give an optimum size for our bunch of cyclists. I will say no more than 20 in the bunch.  If the bunch is bigger than that, it becomes unwieldy for those in the bunch, not even considering the traffic around them. In a large bunch, there is an effect known as the bungee effect, which means that the riders are the back of a large bunch have a more difficult ride than those at the front.

But for this article, we are considering 8 to 20 riders to be the right size for a bunch.

Have a look at our perfect group of eight riders, positioned in the left lane in my beautiful graphic (done at accidentsketch.com if you need to make your own pix of bikes on the road). At 0.6 metres wide, and with a 1 metre gap between them, they take up almost exactly the same width in a lane as a standard car.

But at 12 metres long, this perfect little bunch is about three times longer than our mythical standard car.

Now let’s put ourselves in the driver’s seat of this mythical car, on a mythical street in mythical Brisbane.

The driver comes up behind a group of riders riding single file. As we’ve already established, the driver will probably have to do an over-taking manoeuvre which includes using the on-coming lane, regardless of whether the group is single-file, or riding as a peloton (two-abreast).

And now we begin to see the advantage of the peloton, to both rider and motorist.

Even if our group of eight is riding single-file, their perceived width from the following motorist’s point of view will be substantially wider than a solo cyclist. That’s because its not practical or even possible to ride in a perfect straight line. So let’s say the single-file riders make up a perceived width of 1.2 metres, even though each of them is only 0.6m wide when the car passes them individually. Add in 1m of safe passing distance, and roughly half of our 2.2 metre wide motor vehicle is on the oncoming side of the road.

And because the single file group, even at eight riders long, is already experiencing some of the bungee cord effect, the single-filers group will be more than twice as long as a peloton. I estimate an eight-rider peloton to be 12-15 metres long. In single file, that same group will be 30-40 metres long.

So what does that mean for the driver? It means more time on the wrong side of the road.

Now, at this smaller size of group, the difference seems small. If the bunch is riding at 30 km/h in a 60 km/h zone, we are talking 5 seconds to pass a peloton vs 8 seconds to pass a single-file group.

But let’s take the example out to the 20-rider bunch. It’s 30-40 metres long in peloton form. And 60-80 metres long in single file.

Now it’s 8 seconds to pass the peloton, and about 11 seconds to get past the single filers.

And more than 10 seconds is a long time to be on the wrong side of the road. That means the driver needs longer line-of-sight to overtake the group, it means a cautious or nervous driver will sit behind a single-file group for a long time before attempting to pass.

So that’s my view on the subject. A two-abreast peloton causes less disruption on most occasions than single-file riders. But pelotons of more than 20 riders are too big, and should split themselves up, both for their own benefit and that of the drivers around them.

The maths to calculate passing times is here. Thanks to Sholto for his help.

Interested to hear what my readers think on this matter!

One word short of a great headline

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Specialized are still sponsoring Ned Overend. He’s only been with the company since 1987. How cool is that? Ned has just won the World Masters cyclocross championship. Just seems like an opportunity missed in the headline there.

If it’s not already obvious Ned Overend is an inspiration to me (and many others). Check out this interview from a couple of years ago, which includes this exchange:

Q: What gets you more fired up, dirt or road?

A: A combination of the two, actually. This is what keeps me fresh. I really enjoy cyclo-cross as well. Mountain biking on singletrack is always an amazing experience for me.

Yes. Me too, Ned.

And last year, the toughest hill climb race in the US, Mt Washington. Ned Overend (56 years old) 1st, Tinker Juarez (50 years old) 2nd.

Ned and Tinker racing NORBA, back in the 90s.

Tinker races for Cannondale, maybe for as long as Ned’s been on a Specialized. I know these are commercial arrangements, but I like what it says about both the companies involved and the racers themselves.

Essential equipment or ex-strava-gance?

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I have my own ideas about road cycling, and it is true that I am quite often out of step with the mainstream of roadie opinion.

I have never been bothered to shave my legs, for instance.  The arguments in favour of it seem to boil down to two things:

  1. Shaved legs are nicer when you get your legs massaged.
  2. Everyone else does it.

Well there’s nobody lining up to massage my legs, so I just continue on with my legs in their ‘natural’ state.

I have never bought road-type cycling shoes, because it seems to me that if you’re not racing on your road bike, at some stage in every ride you are going to get off and walk, and I much prefer being able to walk around like a normal human person. So I use mountain bike pedals and shoes, on both road and mtb. Have done so since 1991. Will probably do so for the next 20 years as well.

I used to use a bike computer, until a few years ago. But I was never all that diligent at keeping a training log, or writing down my mileage, or recording how I felt on every ride. I do know someone who has an Excel file detailing every ride they’ve done for the last 10 years. Or more.

Lots of people find the record keeping to be helpful, especially if they are training for competition, or for an event. I hear from some people that strava.com is all the rage these days. It lets you compare times with friends over particular courses.

That’s fine for all those folks. It’s just not for me.

So one day about three years ago I just stopped using a bike computer. And this is a bit odd, because I am a gadget kind of person. I love my iPhone, the best gadget there has ever been.

But even though Garmin keeps putting out brilliant bike computers, and even ones that are affordable, yet I have resisted the temptation without much difficulty. I even have access to an older Garmin bike computer … I just never use it.

I reckon that if I’m riding with the bunch, and I haven’t been dropped, then I’m going fast enough.

And if I’m riding on my own, then what does it matter whether I’m going 25 km/h or 35 km/h or 15 km/h? Either I’m riding hard or I’m taking it easy, but knowing the actual speed makes very little difference to me.

I can see the point on long rides of knowing how far you’ve ridden, especially if you’ve mapped out a route with stops planned at particular locations. Only 8 km till the bakery, that sort of thing. But that’s not enough reason for me to bother with a bike computer.

So there really remains only one performance metric, one measuring tool, that I ever use. A stopwatch. On Mt Gravatt.

And this morning I even forgot to do that.

When I am at ‘racing weight’ and in good form, the Mt Gravatt climb takes me about 7 mins 30.

If my form is just OK, then about a minute slower: 8 mins 30.

This morning, Les told me, our laps of Mt Gravatt were above 9 minutes, the last one closer to 10.

Just shows me how much improvement I have in me! Somehow I don’t think I will get there before G2I, but that’s OK too. There’s a whole year ahead, and it’s always good to have room for improvement!

A machine for turning X into Y

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Starting more than 10 years ago (doesn’t time fly!) I used to do a ride each April from Sydney to the Gold Coast, run by a Rotary club.

It was a great experience, one which helped form a whole lot of things about me as a cyclist. How to train to get fit, how to ride in a bunch, what good form/fitness feels like on a bike, how to conserve your energy to ride all day, the role of food & drink as input fuel … lots of stuff.

And I learned this information from the old hands on the ride.

One of whom was a bloke named Harry.

Harry, so the saying went, was “a machine for turning Guinness into road miles” on the bicycle.

This post isn’t about cycling’s received wisdom, passed down from grizzled veterans to callow youths. It certainly isn’t about Guinness.

It’s about coffee.

As I said at the end of last year, I’ve noted that I’m still a little bit more of a roadie than a mountain biker. One possible reason why this is true is that it’s easier.

It’s easier to jump on the road bike straight out of my front gate.

Riding a road bike is easier than riding a mountain bike. It takes less energy, less thought, less stamina, less skill, less explosive power.

(Can you tell that I drafted most of this post the morning after a massive mountain bike ride that totally kicked my arse?).

But another good reason why I ride the road bike a lot is a socio-chemical one.

The post-ride coffee. I am a machine for turning road miles into coffee. (Harry’s equation seems to be more productive, don’t you think?)

So, all other things being equal, a ride that finishes with a coffee is better than one that doesn’t.

All other things are not equal of course. They never are. The  phrase “all other things being equal” is as much of a nonsense phrase as those political favourites “at this point in time”, and “the reality is”.

I’m thinking about coffee a little bit at present, because coffee, like many other areas of discretionary spending, has traps and inefficiencies. According to my opinion, the path to the best coffee isn’t always achieved by just spending a lot of money. There are obvious parallels to other areas of my life — the question ‘which is the best bike for me?’ almost always involves a balance of spending vs benefit.

And in the Christmas-New Year period, I have a few days off at home. This is time for family gatherings, catching up with friends we don’t often see. Lots of good stuff.

But it means making more coffee at home. To lay my habits bare before the entire Interwebs (or that subset of it which reads briztreadley), I’m a 4-cups-a-day man: two before lunch, one in the afternoon sometime, one in the evening.

On a typical day, the first one might be at a cafe, post-ride. The second and third ones will be at work (mostly likely from a Lavazza coffee-pod machine), and only the last one, in the evening, will be made at home.

For this time of year, if the day is a non-riding one (it can happen, especially with our return to the stormy summers I remember from the 1970s), all four of those coffees might be made at home.

And much to Annette’s justifiable annoyance, I don’t use the espresso machine that she bought for me a couple of years ago.

I use an Aeropress. $50 worth of plastic. And it makes a great cup of coffee. Worth a try.

 

KHR-some

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I have no positive track record with New Year’s resolutions, and therefore refuse to make them. Either that or I HAVE made resolutions, but I’m keeping them to myself.

But I do set myself goals. And they are usually bike events. Along with a few of my South Bank bunch friends, I will be riding the 2012 Grafton-Inverell Cyclosportif, on February 18th. Done it before, reckon I can do it again.

So this morning was my first hard road ride in a while. The Kenmore Hills Ride (KHR). 800 metres of vertical ascent crammed into about 45km. It covers just about every steep hill in Kenmore and Brookfield.

And although I was off the back a few times, and some of the others had to wait for me, I was pretty pleased with how I went this morning. There’s enough encouragement in how I went and how I feel now to think that I can probably improve my fitness some between now and G2I. And if I can eat better I may even lose a couple of kilos doing it.


The KHR. 

P.S. The origins of the KHR are a bit blurry. I’ve always attributed it to Bob Christiansen, but this morning Legs Hewett was telling me that he thinks Lawrie Cranley deserves the ‘credit’ for designing the route. All I know is: Les has done more KHRs than anyone I know. And every single one of them hurts.

 

It wears me out …

Oh yeah, just briefly ...

As some people know, I’m on a Radiohead kick at the moment. After my feeble attempts at riding with the bunch this morning, this one’s appropriate.

Hoping to get to ‘Optimistic’ later in the week.

The Trickle-down Theory of Bicycle Economics, or How To Get Around N+1

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So I didn’t race the Great Escape Gravity Enduro, and I am bummed about that. Several lovely friends said encouraging things to me during the week, but you don’t have to be ‘deficit-focused’ to realise when you have massively stuffed up. Maybe I’ve learned something out of this, who knows.

But life goes on. And my happy news is that my oldest bike has had a make-over, and is once again a star member of the briztreadley stable.

I bought the Shogun Alpine GT sometime in the mid-late 90s. It was a touring bike in its original spec: drop bars, triple crank, Shimano STX components, cantilever brakes (that were never any good), TIG-welded steel frame made in Taiwan.

Touring bikes were hard to find at the time … the legendary Gemini World Randonneur had just stopped production a year before, and this is well before the release of the Surly Long Haul Trucker that is so popular these days. Cannondale and Trek both made tourers that were well beyond my budget at the time, but weren’t much better specced. St Kilda Cycles was the only place to buy the Shogun Alpine GT, so I ordered one over the phone/fax, and it was sent up to Flashing Pedals to be built up.

This was my main bike for about seven years, until I got the Frezoni (for my 40th).  And it covered all duties. Mostly commuting, some touring, three Sydney-to-Surfers rides and eventually some bunch rides (Bruce got me into that).

But when faster road bikes such as the Frezoni and later the Enigma came along, the Shogun was pushed to the back of the queue. For a while it was kept in repair so that Adrian could ride it on the weekly Wednesday morning kids ride that finished at McDonalds. Adrian stopped going on that ride when he was in year 10, I think, and he’s just about to turn 22.

So to save it from sitting in the shed, I had it turned into a flat-bar single speed, and it lived at the BQ office, for rides around the city.

But the turning point for the remake of the Shogun came early this year, when I picked up a set of Shimano XTR v-brakes from a bloke on the MTB Dirt forum. And put them on the Shogun.

All of a sudden I liked riding the Shogun. But I have never got hold of the single-speed thing. So I wondered how I could resurrect the Shogun without spending much money.

Inspiration came a couple of months ago, courtesy of Handsome Bicycles’ release of the XOXO.

And the resulting rebuild finally came together yesterday.

Thanks Dean for helping me with the build.

The new spec includes:

  • 1 x 9 gearing, with Campag Veloce bits, left over after the Frezoni went to 10-speed recently. Downtube shifter scavenged from The Bicycle Revolution, operating in friction mode (that’s right, no indexed gears!!)
  • Soma Moustache handlebar (thanks Epic Cycles), Tektro brake levers that pull the right amount of cable for v-brakes (thanks Mark Grulke)
  • 700 x 32 Specialized ‘cross’ tyres. I like the feel of them so far, but I haven’t been for a long ride yet. The wheels were once on my Frezoni, they are Velocity Deep V rims (legendary tough), teamed with Campag Veloce hubs.
  • Those marvellous Shimano XTR v-brakes. I know I go on about them, but they are the best brakes I’ve ever had on a road machine.

So that’s a urban-warrior, dirt-road-demon, go-anywhere-anytime, sort of bike. It’s the opposite of ‘specialised’. I am going to have fun on this machine, wherever it goes.

Capped for your safety

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The cycling cap is simultaneously the dorkiest piece of sporting equipment ever, and (sometimes) the absolute coolest.

I can’t really pull it off myself. But I know some people who can.

We organised for the 2011 South Bank kit to have a cap, but it turned out to be a bit too large for me. Bummer.

I bought some pants recently, and a cap came along for free. Nice.

A website that I read regularly has caps as merch. Better than getting a jersey, I would say. And now you can get a Richard Sachs, without waiting for years. That’s got to be worth at least $20 of those American dollars. Plus postage. So maybe $40 then.

But here’s the cap that’s top of my wishlist. Susan makes the coolest stuff, including both caps and capes. Of course I want a Brisbane one. A cap. As far capes go, I think we’re back in the “Don’t Think I Could Pull That Off” department.

And Susan does custom stuff too. First five people in the comments to say that they would wear a briztreadley.com cap (or to hit ‘Like’ on Facebook) will get a super-special discount in the unlikely event that I get myself organised into the whole merchandising thing. (I’ve been waiting for months to buy a helmetsarehot.net t-shirt. It’s the only thing I want for Christmas.)

Some folks even wear their cycling caps while cycling. For under-helmet-wear I favour a Buff in winter and a CoolCap in summer.

The cap is apré velo.

UPDATE: Looks like AnnaB, Ernesto & Floody are the recipients of the super-special on some imaginary merchandise. Well done!

Slow down, you move too fast

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I like to ride fast, sometimes. But more and more, I am enjoying riding my bike slow.

In the road bunch, usually I’m happy to go as hard as the bunch wants to go. But there is a regular exception. And that is whenever the bunch goes onto a bike path.

For me, the maximum speed on a bike path is 25 km/h. Especially one where there is potential for interaction with pedestrians.

I say there is an important principle in play in this situation. When we are on the road, cyclists (rightly) expect motorists to treat them as though we are all in this together, and as though our lives are as important as anybody else’s.

Cyclists therefore should understand the pedestrian’s perspective, when we venture onto shared off-road paths. In both situations, the more vulnerable user of the space deserves special consideration from the more dangerous user of that same space.

Buzzing past pedestrians and joggers at 35-40 km/h shows a lack of respect and empathy.

And the two places where I ride, that I think this is a real issue? The Bicentennial Bikeway (Coro Drive bikeway), and the Ted Smout Bridge (Redcliffe to Brighton).

Here’s a song to help us all chill out.

Whack that into your iPod before you start riding. Might make a difference.