Blogs

As years go 2011 was a pretty monumental one in our house... and when I say house, I mean houses.

A change in role at work, a move of home and then within four weeks our first baby. All within 12 months and one week of getting married... bullets have left guns slower than that but throughout all of the chaos and settling in, I still maintained a bit of fitness and enjoyment on my bike.

Who could have imagined that we would ever be talking about improving braking on a road bike. Why bother? Last time I checked going slowly wasn’t the aim of the game. But it is coming, without doubt. Disc brakes on the road will be the buzz groupset development of Eurobike 2012 aka 2013 for the market. Fact.

A start in the pre-dawn and a stretch of the legs to meet up with the rest of the bunch. This one to remember a friend, taken from us so much too early, seven years to the day. Two of his old bikes make the start. A push up a hill if you're riding one: that's the rule.

The decision to ride fixed makes me nervous. But I have fresh bar tape. How hard can it be?

Early miles are lumpy, winding throught the villages and chatting. Past Chew Valley lake we string out, preparing for the climb. The Mendips loom. The 69" gear will be hard to turn.

First of all – let me wish everyone reading this a Happy New Year. It's the 2nd of January as I write this and I must apologise for not posting in a while. I've been very busy preparing for the upcoming Paracycling Track World Championships, and this has seen me away at training camps for a lot of the past 2 months. And when back at home, my time has been split between the track, the gym, the roads, trying to maintain some form of a social life and various other commitments. It feels like it's all go, all the time these days!

So, I have a Wattbike to train on for the next three months. Cool. Now I just need to get down to some hard work in the saddle.

Do you know much about the Wattbike? The clues are in the name, really. It’s a static bike that accurately measures your power output. Those are the essentials. I spent half an hour or so going through the key features with Wattbike’s Steve Marshall and now the plan is for me to use it regularly between now and March. The weather has been bad lately; I’m glad it’s here.

No-one who follows cycling will forget where they were when they heard of Wouter Weylandt’s death after that crash on the descent of the Passo del Becco, some 17 kilometres from the finish of Stage 3 of the Giro d’Italia.

In my case, the worst fears were confirmed when I phoned the office as I sat on a plane about to taxi away from the departure gate at Milan’s Malpensa airport, on my way home after spending a few days at the race.

Every time I have challenged the Mayor about cycle safety recently, he has lectured me about “your duty as an honest politician to tell people the truth that cycling is actually getting safer, when you consider the number of people on the roads”. I was happy to do so, as I often did when the previous mayor's Road Safety Ambassador.