I like to ride aerobars facing slightly upwards. The Speed concept bars allow a small degree of angle. I would like more, but this is about as far as it will go.
However, when keeping aerobars at this angle, seems to place great stress on one of the bolts.
Over time the bolt shears and breaks off.
My new time trial bike (Trek Speed Concept 9) arrived at Beeline this week. Ironically, just as my time trial season is coming to an end. Anyway it looks nice. Which is the most important thing in a new bike.
Trek Speed Concept 9
Bike with draft box
I bought the bike through Project One. You order the bike online (or through Trek dealer) and it gets delivered to bike shop. The great thing about Project One is that you can choose any combination of equipment. This enabled me to keep costs lower by choosing cheap training wheels. I also like to be able to choose the colour of the frame. You can spend quite a bit of time, switching equipment on the website
Another great thing about Project One is that it gets delivered to a good bike shop and experienced mechanics can put it together. The staff at Beeline bikes Oxford have been helpful in getting the bike on the road. Project One combines the best of the internet buying with also using a good bike shop. The best of both worlds really. Definitely adds to the experience to get a bike through a bike shop with enthusiastic workers to look after bike.
Trek Speed Concept at Project One
The main disadvantage of Project One is the time taken for bike to arrive. I ordered in May. It arrived end of July. I kept waiting to have enough money in the bank before ordering, but if I’d known how long it would take, I could have ordered earlier.
Also, it has proved bad timing on my part. My time trial season is effectively over (I might do one 25 mile TT just to use bike). I should have waited for new model to come out in Autumn and got bike for start of 2015. When buying a bike, it’s always worth planning the best time of the year to buy it.
This is what you pay your money for. Nice neat lines, everything hidden away. Super aero.
Neat front section. Really clean. Though annoyingly the plastic cover doesn’t fit 100% flush with the fork.
Smooth rear view (the black plastic bit for draft box can be removed) The lines of the frame are immaculate.
First impressions are good. Pretty stable at high speed. Seems to cut through the wind pretty well. Though disappointingly if you want to go fast, you still have to pedal very hard. It is difficult to make quantitative judgements about how much time it saves from last bike (Trek Equinox SSL) Even when I race it will be difficult. I was more impressed by the electronic gears than new frame. Electronic gears are pretty cool and easy to see the difference. Marginal aero gains, hard to judge. But, it definitely looks Aero!
I’m up in Yorkshire, so have been taking the opportunity to cycle up some ‘proper’ hills. I can’t do as much as I would like. Rather like an old man, I seem to take a few days recovery after any effort with ongoing issues. Still, something is better than nothing. After watching the Tour de Yorkshire on tv, I couldn’t resist visiting Lofthouse and Trapping Hill. (I’m not really keen on all this Franglais stuff – Cote d’flipping steep hill sounds a bit weird). Trapping hill brings back memories of my first bike rides, aged 14 – when I went camping at How Steen Gorge and being amazed at how difficult Trapping Hill and Greenhow Hill were.
Trapping Hill isn’t quite as invincible as it felt as a newbie cyclist aged 14. When I visited on Saturday, tather fortuitously there was a tailwind up the climb, and the road had been newly repaved. If this smooth road was due to the Tour de Yorkshire effect, I hope it becomes a three-week grand tour. With a three-week Tour we could even afford to have stages across the border in Lancashire.
I enjoyed watching the Tour de Yorkshire – recognising roads often cycled on, huge crowds, familiar climbs and quite a few local riders I have raced against at different times. People say the crowds are as big as Liege-Bastogne-Liege but the last time I watched Liege-Bastogne-Liege, I didn’t see any crowds on the scale of Yorkshire.
I spent more time watching Tour de Yorkshire than the Tour de France. On Saturday I enjoyed seeing Lizzie Deignan and Anne van der Breggen fly up the Cote du Lofthouse, that was a good race. The third stage on Sunday was great because it went past my old school Bradford Grammar, up Hollins Hill and past Menston all the way to Burnsall. Yesterday, there was tremendous interest in the page on Shibden Wall – the 21% cobbled climb.
Watching tv, I thought the Peleton weren’t going at full flight on Shibden Wall – perhaps not but when I saw the times on Strava I knew that looks can be deceptive – it was still pretty quick. I have ridden it once and now want to go back and have another go.
In the end, after 10,000 ft of climbing, it was a good finale to the race with Serge Pauwels hanging onto a slender advantage and taking the first win of his pro career.
I took some shots of my tv, but it doesn’t do justice to some of the crowds in the road.
Shibden Wall
At the moment, it seems all my cycling friends are going off on epic cycle tours around the British Isles. PJ is live blogging from his solo tour from around the abandoned medieval hamlets of Leicestershire and the like.
“Once you get out of the towns and cities, weaving a stitched line along the OS map, it’s quite startling how English everything becomes. The rural landscape, imaginative, physical, demographic and imaginative, is very much middle England, punctuated by the flag of St George, villages in thrall to a vision of the past that is at once bucolic, refreshing, but clearly at odds with the more modern subjectivity of the city dweller.”
When I went racing around England, I found a similar observation, in places such as Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire – you came across all these villages which were quintessentially English in a way you felt only existed in 1950s Mrs Marple films. For me, cycling around the countryside was the best education there was more to England than Bradford and the inside of Oxford pubs.
However, no matter how impressive consecutive days of 91 miles may sound, there’s always someone with a bigger ride. My team-mate Vilas Silverton writes an entertaining account of a 400km ride in the middle of March. – An early season 400km All night Audax rides in freezing winter seem to attract a particular breed of rider. A rider who revels in sleeping in bus shelters with the height of luxury being popping into a petrol station to ‘borrow’ a few plastic bags to try and keep warm. Silverton sets the scene for a frosty night ride.
John Woodburn, who sadly passed away April 15, 2017, was a multiple national cycling champion whose long-running career included several place to place records.
In 1961, Woodburn became the first person to win national 25 mile champion riding a geared bike. In 1982, at 45 years of age, he also set the cycling record for the 847 miles journey from Lands End to John O Groats. His time was one day, 21 hours, 3 minutes and 16 seconds. (average speed 18.828mph)
In addition, Woodburn’s career included:
Personal reminiscences
I met John Woodburn at my second ever open time trial in 2005. At the time, I had no idea who he was or anything about his lengthy and wide-ranging palmeres.
Recently, I wrote that an attraction of cycling was taking random roads and hoping for the best. The British countryside can encourage an adventurous spirit – if nothing else you can enjoy a new view, new road – even if you later do a u-turn. But, it’s not always the Yorkshire Dales or the Cotswolds – I also spend four weeks a year in Queens, New York. I’ve written about cycling in New York before – rarely with any degree of praise or recommendation. To cut a long story short, it’s a tough place to cycle – you rarely see cyclists on the road and for good reason too. As a result, I ride defensively and with unerring routine. I basically have two rides, which never go beyond 30 miles.
One ride is to cycle two miles south to Kissena Boulevard outdoor velodrome. Here I cycle around in 250-metre circles for an hour before I can’t take it anymore – and then cycle the two miles back home. I don’t have a power meter in New York, so just try to make sure I keep an average of over 20mph for the velodrome riding. It’s a bit more fun if there are other cyclists there too. Last week a random cyclist latched onto my wheel for quite a few laps. It encouraged me to very slowly raise the pace from 20 to 21mph then 22mph. After about 10 minutes I reached 25 mph and suddenly my wheel sucker friend went pop and lost contact. I didn’t mind, in fact, I was grateful that he gave me the motivation to ride harder than usual. It was a surprisingly good feeling to just ride someone off your wheel by imperceptibly raising the pace. It also reminds you how hard it can be to motivate yourself when cycling on your own.
Last weekend, I spent three days with no bicycle in Germany and my leg problems got worse. When I got back I actually had to take another day off the bike, at that rate I was despairing of ever seeing an end in sight.
But, at the same time, I was hopeful that I could just ride through and keep going. This weekend I’ve been up in Yorkshire, and it’s been great for a few reasons. The weather is excellent. Yorkshire in spring with the sun out takes some beating. But, at least this weekend, the more I cycle the less I’m getting bothered by old injuries and niggles. Saturday I made a visit to Pateley Bridge for one of my favourite climbs – Greenhow Hill. All told it was 50 miles and just short of 2,000m of climbing. After an easy day going to Grassington, (an easy day in the Yorkshire Dales can still mean 1,000m of climbing) I went south-west towards Silsden and some steep hills around there. This year I’ve done relatively little in terms of volume of training (compared to previous years), But, in the past week, I’ve started to feel in good shape. The top end fitness has come back quite quickly. It is also a psychological boost to get the summer bike out of the loft.
From Sutton-in-Craven, I went up Ellers Road – a tough climb of 1.4 miles at 10%, with a particularly difficult beginning. It’s a very good test. I also found a new climb just to the south of Ellers Road. It is a climb called ‘Dick Lane’ or the ‘Cote de Dick’ if it gets in the Tour de Yorkshire. It is a very nice climb, 1.4 miles at 7% (and unlike its near neighbour Ellers Road – never too steep.) It is a smooth gradient, decent road surface and outstanding views across the valley to the left. I’ve been cycling in Yorkshire for 25 years but it’s still surprising how you can come across a new climb less than 15 miles from your house.
Wonder Wheels is the autobiography of British cyclist Eileen Sheridan. Originally published in 1956, it was republished in 2009 by Mercian Manuals.
Eileen Sheridan was a female cyclist who turned professional in the 1950s and successfully broke all 21 long distance time trial records – including a new record for Land’s End to John o’ Groats.
This is an excellent cycling book and gives an insight into the spirit of amateur time trials and the ‘golden age’ of British cycling in the 1940s and 1950s. Sheridan’s autobiography is fairly short, but it conveys her love of cycling, intrepid determination and cheerful disposition.
Like many people in that era, Sheridan got into cycling after becoming a leisure cyclist – joining a local club, taking part in touring rides and then graduating to racing. It was on these long club rides that she started to surprise both herself and other male cyclists with her unexpected capacity for maintaining high speed on these long rides through the Warwickshire countryside and beyond.
At the moment, there is a good degree of nostalgia about the 1950s, a nostalgia which can be misplaced. But, reading Sheridan’s book you do get a glimpse of a simpler time, where the joy of cycling and the Corinthian ethos of club life were well embedded. It’s hard not to read without an appreciation for the old style Sunday Club Run and touring – even if it is hard to relate to the austerity of the age.
After outperforming many male club members on long rides, Sheridan was encouraged to enter her first time trial – a club 10 mile TT. She almost wasn’t allowed to start (failing to meet strict the RTTC rules about all black clothes) Fortunately, a club mate lent her a regulation black jacket. And despite the oversize jacket billowing in the wind, Sheridan won her first time trial. From there, she made rapid progress becoming 25 mile and 50 mile champion in 1950. She won the newly created Best All Rounder 1950/1951; set a new record at 12 hours and was given the prestigious Birdlike Memorial Prize in 1950.
This weekend I’m up north. This was during a cycle from Pateley Bridge towards Grassington. A good 50 mile ride with quite a few hills. Furthest I’ve cycled for quite a time. The ride was good.
The top of Guise Edge gives a good view; you don’t always spend too much time appreciating this in the hill climb season.
The back road between Bolton Abbey and Ilkley.
Cyclist.
A good cycling road.
The Yorkshire Dales at Easter is great, especially when the weather was good like on Sunday. March/early April is lambing time. This lamb seemed quite interested in my bicycle, though his parents more suspicious.