John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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42 comments
I must have big legs!
Just noticed they also have a toolkit on there.
Are they any good?
Only asking as stepson keeps on nicking my tools!!
Aussie consumer affairs shows views on watch 'water resistance'
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HsouCYTu7Rk
I bought one of the Pro series jerseys last time and it was a nice fit - it lasted about 3 months and then the zip broke and then the reflective stripes began falling off and then the rear pocket gave way leaving my pump and spare inner bouncing down the road.
None of my DHB or Castelli stuffs ever let me down, so I shan't try saving money again cause you have to pay for quality.
It will do the job, just be careful around traffic lights and security barriers in shops as this will cause the speed reading to spike hugely. I had one on my bike and was waiting for a friend outside a shop and was doing 33mph whilst stationary.
Forgot to mention, it tracks my local ten mile tt's perfectly, reminds me constantly I must improve.
The tool kit I bought a couple of years back was so so quality, some stuff great, some not so, but provided a good cheap base having now replaced a couple of things.
I notice on that Special Buys page they're selling something called SPF15/SPF30 Clear Spray. Can anyone tell me which part of the bike you're supposed to apply it to...?
cream.jpg
Apply directly to the engine on warm days to prevent mechanical problems later.
Sure it isn't a Park or similar but mine does the job fine and seems very well built, plus it has a 3 year warranty so if it does break it will be fixed/replaced!
Got my daughter one in the hope I'll get my Polar RC3 back off her and it seems a decent bit of kit. It either is the same watch or a direct copy right down to the charging/sync connector. Or possibly an over run of production of the Runtastic ones as it looks identical, right down to the very loud pink colour of the one darling daughter has. It uses GPS Master like the Ultrasport but I'll give it a try with the runtastic sync app once it has some data on it.The GPSMaster software will export gpx files so you can import it to your favourite website no problem.
Well the Runtastic connect app sees there is a watch there but says "invalid watch connected" so I guess the Aldi one is just missing a line of code in the connection process that says "hello I am a Runtastic watch serial number XXXXXX".
Slight problem installing the GPSMaster software on my Mac as for some reason it installs with permissions set so no one can access the folder containing the application, not very useful! Easy enough to fix once I'd worked out what was happening (right click the folder and select 'get info' unlock the get info panel by clicking the padlock icon at the bottom and entering your admin ID and password then change the no one to everyone RW) but a little sloppy of Aldi's developers!
GPS Master is a bit old fashioned looking but downloads the data fine and exports gpx files so dead easy to read the data into whatever website or software you like best.
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