Hey Keith (or Al), maybe you should be looking at something like this?

I love the mudguard.

I’m back, Baby.

Packed our Adelaide place from the weekend before and all through the past week. Took ages to do.

Ash and I drove off from Adelaide Saturday afternoon and stopped overnight at Coonawarra, South Australian wine country. Finished the rest of our leg Sunday afternoon to watch the Australian Open Final.

I’ve got time off this week to settle back in and unpack things. Gotta stay at parents’ place while waiting for Carnegie house to be vacated.

Adelaide was a good place to work and we bought a great place there. However, socially it was a little sleepy.

It’s good to be back home…

I’ve just put a deposit down for the London to Paris 2008….

2008 - A Quick Glimpse

Just when you were wondering what goal to set yourself for 2008, a dramatic new route is announced for the 3 day, 600km London-Paris Cycle Tour! If you need a new challenge, try this. Every year we introduce something new. Special for 2008 it is a “Classics” style route. Ever done a 200km stage, you have - good, so now try a 230 km stage, add some Paris-Roubaix cobbles and some steep gradients and you begin to get the picture.

Sound too hard core? Every year we have riders who push the boundaries far further than they believed possible. The satisfaction of achieving the impossible with friends that you have trained with for many months is indescribable, you may not be Nicole Cook or a TdF Pro but you sure get to know that great feeling of satisfaction and achievement. You will ride in a seeded group to match your ability.

Still not sure? Imagine riding like a Pro in the Tour de France, with rolling road closures, full service and mechanical support and your every need looked after. Just concentrate on the riding. No other amateur gets to experience this.This is a chance to meet other like minded riders from all over the world. The event is extremely sociable with 4 previous years of established camaraderie you will find riders who have completed every event and come back for more!

If 600km in three days sounds easy then riding in Group 1 will be right for you. Sean Kelly and Johan Museeuw thought it was hard! Think what it’s like whilst riding flat out on the Yellow Sections (GC Classification), Sprinter Teams leading out in the Green sections and the Mountain Goats ripping the legs on the Red Sections…..and well in between its pretty social!

The Facts

• The 5th Edition of the London-Paris Cycle Tour takes place from the 26-29 June 2008
• Cost of Entry is £649 (Food, Accommodation, Support, Ferry to France). Excluded is the Eurostar Return and bike repatriation to London which can be purchased separately.
• Registration Deposit is a £99 (non refundable).
• 2007 Riders get guaranteed entry whilst places are available (Mid November).
• Registration takes place late November.

P.S. Mr Admin, I need a new category… I will be living, breathing and sleeping in prep for this ride.

As per the service status page at AussieHQ, qweop.net’s web server will be undergoing upgrade and relocation at 0900 AEST 23/01/2008. Don’t post anything on that day unless you don’t mind losing it.

Mr T didn’t have his way with me. I’m just sore from taking a few tumbles at the rock garden.

Five of us met up for the usual ride at Lysterfield. Andrew L, Matt, Keith, HYG and I made it for this ride. As always, it’s a surprise to see what bike Andrew the GT whore will pull out from his stable of GT rides. Today it was the Zaskar. I think he’d had enough of the old steel full stiffy on the previous ride - Lysterfield is a pretty bumpy course and 2 hours of no suspension probably isn’t much fun.

At some point today, Matt decided to get his belly up close and personal with his saddle. I missed the spectacle but he was looking a little sore after that. Other than that, I don’t think anyone had any stacks for a change. That is, until we hit the rock garden. I had three attempts at it and dismounted very ungracefully twice. Had enough after that end figured I’d better quit for the day while my bones were still intact. Matt had a nice run on his Rush. Video below - no sound for some reason.

So with the likely decision to enter into the L2P, I thought I’d try to get some more kays under my belt and set off riding with Hay this (Sat) morning. The destination was Hillingdon Cycle Circuit, a custom build road cycling course where there was a winter series being held.

The plan was to get there pretty much all along a bike path which ran by Grand Union Canal. It was actually interesting to see that these canals housed quite a few boats very similar to what you see in Amsterdam. Sorry, no photos as it was still rather cold in the morning and I didn’t want to stop. Having said that, I was forced to stop about 5km into the ride anyway because of a piece of glass that (ever too easily) wedged itself deep into my front tyre (another reason why I hate bike paths as well). Took my time changing the tyre as fingers were still numb, but seriously guys, I am getting better/quicker at changing tyres especially since this one is just so easy to rip off the rim!

Anyhow, Pocket Rocket gets another use (I think I want to buy a canister for the next one) and we’re on our way again. Being a shared bike/foot path, it was slow going as one would expect. About 15km into it, it started to look muddy so we left the canal/bike path and tried to find our way there via the roads. This is where we decided to take a 1.4km detour as by chance we were near Keith’s old place.

So we head towards Keith’s old ‘hood’, and Keith I hope that this is the right place:

I did notice while I was out front that there was a bike leaning against the fence and a Chinese character hanging on the front door, but it was only when I got home that I noticed that there’s a freakin huge Chinese flag hanging in the window. Maybe they have a guy in there who’s a doctor and likes to ride as well??? Spooky….

Detour over, another 10km or so more and we arrived at the circuit. We just got there before a race was starting so we managed to sneak in a few laps. Not a bad course. Has a few undulations, and a back straight that was quite windy. I think it’d be a challenge for 35mins plus 5. The Cat 4 (D grade equivalent) race soon starts and we pull over to the side to watch. This (old) lady starts chatting to us and it turns out that she was the nurse for the day as well being a coach for some of the riders. Supposedly she has about 80 riders that she coaches, with a few racing in the Cat 1/2 races yet to follow. She provided a lot of useful information, including how to get a license, where the rides/clubs were, etc. And to my surprise, she asked the organiser for me about whether my bike was ‘raceable’ to which it was a ‘yes’. Looks like I might be back next week (Although realistically I know I should prepare a bit more first as I know I’ll get dropped in 10mins in my current condition).

The ride home was relatively uneventful, except for the fact that once again I feel that I need to buy a mask as we took the main roads and every breath stank of pollution. Otherwise not a bad morning/afternoon for 60 kays!

No, not the Schwarzenegger movie. Just me goofing off on Beach Road.

Keith, my brother and I decided to get out on the road for a change, but we rode it fixed (except for Keith). It was a moderately cruisy ride on the way down. There was a slight headwind so most riders’ speeds were down a little bit. This made it easy to keep up with or pass most of the slower riders. We eventually had a small bunch of 10 or so average riders with two stronger riders happy to push along with Keith and myself. After about 20 minutes of that I thought I’d better save myself for the ride back so I settled back into the bunch for the rest of the way down to Mordi. As usual, we got the usual number of people who thought riding a fixie down Beach Road sounded hard. It’s really not hard at all. I have a medium gearing of 48×18 which allows me to ride comfortably up to 40km/h in a bunch. I probably wouldn’t push 40km/h by myself bt in a bunch it’s comfortable. At a stretch, I could probably do 45km/h for short periods, but anthing above that requires over 140rpm and I’m no good at spinning that fast.

On the way back, we had a tailwind which made for some uncomfortable riding on the fixie. With a tailwind, everyone’s speed is up and whenever anyone passes, I can’t resist speeding up for a few seconds to try keeping up. As I said before, I’m no good at high-cadence pedalling for more than a few seconds so there’s no way I can keep up with my gearing. I was goofing off a bit and doing some no-hands running man as we left Mordi and I “accidentally” passed two older gents. Probably looked like I was showing off - humblest apologies :). Anyway, they promptly passed me back a few minutes later when the speed picked up with the tailwind. It was an easy ride back with the tailwind and I didn’t really push myself hard for more than a few minutes. Just a good ride to get my road legs back.

I’m just glad I didn’t do this.

One of Zara’s recent jobs. It was done with little (or no) budget in some spare time on another job. Basically it was just a bit of mucking around with the ad agency and the production house.

Just another Lysterfield ride, nothing special except for the fact that we had nine people on this ride. We did the usual loop of Hug, Blair Witch then across to Buckle. After that we added in the competition loop so that we could spend some time at the rock garden. A few more people had a go at riding the rockface. Sandy ummmed and ahhhed for at least 10 minutes before she did it - great stuff.There’s a short section which looks relatively new at the top of the rockface where I had a little crash. I only had one and a half attempts at the rockgarden. Other than that, good fun watching others having a go at it.

Normally I wouldn’t do write ups on boring laps around Regent’s Park, but today’s ride warrants one because it was the first bunch ride I’ve done in 8 months!!

Myself and Hay, who is currently 5 shades darker than me from spending all that time under the South American sun, headed over to Regent’s Park this morning at the ridiculously early hour (for London) of 9:30am to do a few laps just to get back into the swing of things. Hay was running a little late so I rocked up first for a couple of uneventful laps and most of our ride remained that way with only the occasional cyclist being passed or passing us. We were doing a nice cruisy pace of around 25-26km/h until about our 4th lap when we had this bunch of about 5 zoom by. I happened to have been leading at this time so I flicked up a gear or two to see if Hay wanted to hang on as well. He did so thus I slotted myself nicely into the bunch with Hay wheelsucking behind, right in the middle. The pace wasn’t anything hot, but it was still around 30-31km/h which obviously felt a lot faster than what we had just been cruising at (but not really much more effort if you ask me). Anyway we kept up for about 2-3 laps after which Hay decided to call it quits which I was quite happy to do as well. As I was warming down I chatted to the guys briefly and three of them raced, with one in Cat 3 and two in Cat 2 (I assume C and B grade equivalent).

Anyway it’s sad that I’m writing about a 7 man bunch ride… bring back Beach Rd any day!

PS. Hay I hope your knee held up okay. You looked to be in pretty good form today.