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Turns out you can’t reply to your own posts, anyway,
https://www.lfgss.com/comments/17200222/

Short-term plan: fixed brakless risers

hehehe

Just taken delivery of Bike Bureau, it's an impressive bit of kit
List last updated Jan '23...
39 x Sue
15 x Priscilla
13 x Andrea
12 x Debby
11 x Janet
12 x Christine
10 x Emma
10x Margareta
6 x Susan
6 x Kelly
2 x Zaneta
1 x Debi
1 x Gill
1 x Vicky
1 x Sharon
1 x Keely
1 x Jolita

This is so hilariously depressing lmao

My new Audax Special in Reynolds 853
Colour matched to an Almasty Single Hop Nelson Sauvin beer can lol (- no special reason, I had a very strong idea of the colour in my mind then one night saw this can in my local that was just exactly right)
Campagnolo Record cranks on a Phil Wood bottom bracket - the chainstays are spaced for bigger tyres and mudguards and the Record BB is too narrow.
Sturmey Archer hubs and freewheel on HplusSon Archetype rims
Velo Orange "medium" drop brakes, Nitto "Noodle" bars, "Pearl" stem and "Crystal" seatpost, and my longstanding Ti Brooks Swallow

Single-speed "to get it up and running", though it's been almost a year since I collected the frame.

Medium-term plan: early 00's Campag groupset.
Short-term plan: fixed brakless risers

Feel weirdly somewhat psyched out by the Fenland Friends ride report :s I've never done an X-rated event that's longer than 24 hours and think my main issue will be not stopping&eating enough in the way I would if there were traditional "cafe controls"; perhaps unnecessarily worried about leaving my bike unattended; at the same time, is it really necessary to stop at EVERY wetherspoons, mcdonalds and petrol station you pass on the route?? Maybe..

I'm riding out from Colchester so a nice early start for me, coincidentally after having to get up at ~5 tomorrow morning to get to Oxford for a job interview; should be fun.

Just feel a bit stupid and underprepared about it all tbh

Gee, if only we could look at the context in which he said it and figure it out one way or the other! O to have that luxury!

The usage is "people who showed up to a speech by the Palestinian ambassador under the pretext of being pro-Israel". Now, does that sound like one usage, or the other?

Like, he's not even saying "Zionists don't understand English irony". He's saying "these people in the audience of this speech don't understand English irony". Fucking bizarre that everyone has latched on to it as tho it's the first of these despite how blindingly obvious it is that it's the second

Replace "Zionists" with "members of the Labour Friends of Israel"/ name of other zionist political group? Doesn't take a great deal of comprehension to see that that's exactly the sense in which he means it and it's a frankly ludicrous reach to conclude he's characterising Zionists in general as a group, let alone Jewish people in general. He's referring to the specific complaints of specific people who were presumably at a speech by the Palestinian ambassador under the pretext of being pro-Israel - hence "the zionists in the audience"= "those people who showed up to the speech by the Palestinian ambassador specifically under the pretext of being pro-Israel" – and saying that their specific complaints about the speech showed a lack of understanding of irony. It's an absolute piss-take that anyone is managing to read anything else into this.

Wait are there stricter conditions for DIYs than for organised events then? I've never considered doing a DIY but that surprises me.

In my view an audax is just riding your bike a long way for the sake of riding your bike a long way. Don't mind whether there are controls with cake and mechanics on hand, whether you're riding on the wheel of a dozen Swedes, whatever. The difference between an audax and a race is not how spread out the participants are but that the aim of a race is to win. The 24hr TT is an interesting anomaly! The fact that it was a validated long distance ride before there was a UK-based long distance ride validator I suppose means it has a place in the history of UK audaxing.

As far as self-sufficiency goes - which, sure, is a key part of the audax idea, I guess I think of it in terms of self-sufficiency on the bike, i.e. carrying with you what you need to keep moving forwards. The rules for the self-sufficiency ultra race things obviously need to be much stricter than what I think is needed for a ride to be an 'audax'.

I mean people take all kinds of different standpoints on stuff like this and I'm not hugely invested in it either way. I just hadn't heard about DIYs being more strict.

In other news, I'm planning on ECEing the Mildenhall Festival 200 next saturday (from Colchester) to try and build up some condition for the Fenland Friends - having not done >=100 miles yet this year :s

In one of the effusively advertised "5-star audax hotels" along the route

^ so frustrating – fans&riders have been saying the same thing for so long – what are the factors that are impeding progress on this?? I genuinely don't get it

(eta – the 'flattening out' of women's parcours vs men's)

relentless pedalling

Do u even fixed?

Dunno how similar the route is to LEL but that's the kind of thing I'm expecting. "East Anglian hills" and all that

Have just signed up for Fenland Friends 600 with a view to entering PBP next year. Haven't done a long ride for.. years.. so should be interesting :D

^^this is only 2 squares off 15x15, surely worth doing? (together with the rest, I mean)

as my aim for the year, if I started doing these more regularly, was under 24 minutes.

ftfy

J2/1 is the course I did my first 10 on :) 26.19 on 86" fixed

gear up a bit

definitely this!! (cycling shoes&pedals will go a long way as well!)

Ahh all this first-time fixed TT chat is taking me back! Obviously the advice to just go out and do a 10 is dead right; then you get all the fun of "what gear do I need to put on to do x speed at the same cadence" etc. ad infinitum. -- If I could gear up from 49x15 to 49x14 but keep the same cadence I'd make 25mph -- doesn't just happen that easily unfortunately! I personally like the idea of trying to get as far as I can on a 'non-aero' set-up then hopefully get free gains further down the line.

Also I totally second the comment about being surprised at how fast you go in a TT compared to your usual average speed -- if you're happy doing 18mph in general road riding I reckon you'll have no problem beating 20mph.

I do struggle to comprehend the >30mph stuff! Chris Boardman did a 17:54 fixed so there are no excuses!

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/may/02/lizzie-deignan-female-cyclists-are-still-a-long-way-behind-the-men

Deignan looking for new team! Boels presumably not happy they weren't kept in the loop re. her pregnancy

Deignan had a “mixed” response when announcing her pregnancy. Boels-Dolmans were “a little bit surprised”, she said. She did not tell them she was trying to conceive and hid debilitating morning sickness from them for the first 12 weeks when she couldn’t ride her bike “and couldn’t even look at a vegetable”.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/may/02/athletics-olympic-champion-asbel-kiprop-tests-positive-drug-epo-kenyan

Hmm this is interesting to think about seeing as hills are pretty much a speciality of mine (5"10, 10 stone..) Thinking about my approach to climbing, the first obvious but unhelpful tip is:

don't

slow right down, change to my bottom gear and go very slowly

Like my experience when climbing is of a continual engagement with "how hard do I need to 'attack' this to keep up forward momentum". This is something I developed from riding on fixed: you become hyper-aware of increases in gradient, knowing "when I get to that bit 5 yards ahead I'm going to have to up the levels": it's a process of gauging your reserves and what effort is needed to keep the gear turning. So - maybe give "rolling" terrain a go on fixed - in my experience 72" will get you over anything that's not either a mountain or a potential hill-climb course. This will force you to 'htfu' and hopefully get you out of the above-quoted habit.

Then the idea would be when geared you see the hill as an obstacle to be defeated by applying increased effort to rather than bailing out and notching down through the gears. At the risk of contradicting myself, I wouldn't recommend over-geared climbing when you have the option of gears (at least for climbing training rather than e.g. for strength training): it just makes the bike/your legs feel inefficient and reinforces the "hills are difficult" mentality, whereas once you've been up some steep stuff fixed you'd want to feel like gears/the option of maintaining your preferred/optimal cadence is an extra boost to your effort.

Then in my admittedly limited experience climbing geared, that gauging of the upcoming steepness of the hill is replaced by "what cadence feels like I'm putting out my best effort". I suppose this is something like "let the hill come to you": keep putting out an optimal sustainable effort and use the change of ratios to even out changes in gradient. Weirdly for me this means I now don't notice when the hill gets steeper - I've got to the top of some stuff that would be do-or-die on 72" without noticing anything extreme about it - it was just a matter of "this [remaining] distance at this effort"

Don't know if this is helpful or not; I'm one of those people who like hills, to me they're a satisfying challenge to try and defeat with the maximum panache, rather than an interminable slog

PM'd re mavics

Would just like to relate that I had the most hilarious cycling-related experience of my life so far trying to fit a set of Challenger Strada Biancas. I mean I had read they were bad, but nothing could quite have prepared me for the actuality. They come out the box looking like no-one's ever told them they're supposed to be a bicycle tyre, it's genuinely some funny fucking shit. Turns out reading the instructions really helps mind you (push bead as far into the middle of the well as you go along)

That was vm my line of thinking

Well I mean, I only spent the price of the frame on the frame.. the rest went ..... on the other components........

So this is the outcome of the conversation here, I've sort of gone high/low on various aspects so it's probably ended up somewhere in the middle.

Canyon Ultimate framesets (with conventional braking) weren't available until Feb '18 so I flipped and went for the Ribble Audax, it's quite appropriate in a way as it is the idea I'd had of what my road bike would be when I finally got it, and saved me £1400 into the bargain.

Saw no reason not to go all out and overspec it: Potenza for the lols and Magic wheels (Cosmic Pro Carbon) – found them for a good price at ACycles (who can be a bit unreliable judging by internet reviews but I had no problems) where they also had an offer on a Prologo Scratch - don't know why but this is the saddle I've always wanted - just an aesthetic thing I suppose.

That took me up to £1700 so I decided to budget on the rest. Found a -17deg Easton EA70 stem for that all-important zero rise, then Ritchey Comp bars (38cm) and seatpost - the bar/stem mismatch is annoying but I couldn't find the 17deg/38cm combination otherwise

Will be built up over the course of next week, white bartape obv. Might not get much riding for the next few months but I've always wanted to give road-racing a go and this will be the first geared skinny-tyred bike I've ever owned so my first chance to actually get into it!

Comments/flaming/photographic criticism welcomed :)

[can't work out how to post the picture in the main body :/]

Yeah I was kind of getting that impression.. :\ In that case, what are people's best tips for doing that? Like, if you wanted a road racing bike with Campagnolo for less than 3k, what would you go for? I just feel kinda swamped/out of my depth & can't tell what does or does not represent good value :s