A Small Ball Of Grrrr....

I love my Ragley Ti, it's mad in a totally uncivilised way. It wants to go - up, down, round, straight off things, straight over stuff, it wants to go fast.

Normally that's fine. Normally that's the best thing in the world. But after four weeks of kicking myself senseless in a structured way, on a long, steady, chatty,  autumnal - June is the new autumn you know - Peak District semi-epic, it simply isn't.

Try to ride it steady and restrained and mellow and it sulks and grumps like a hung-over dad woken on a Sunday morning by bright-eyed kiddies who want to go play in the park before breakfast.

It grumbles.

It hates meandering along the sort of rocky trails it normally skims over in a blaze of shiny aggression. It blunders up short climbs it'd normally dismiss with a blur of pedals and a high-pitched whir of sun-lit, ecstatic, take-off ebullience.

It sulks.

It still looks after you. Even when you're slow and tired, that slack head angle makes steep downs a breeze. And every so often it hints at smooth, blurry, speed.

But mostly it just sulks.

Said sorry to it. Washed the grit off its shiny titanium tubes. Gave it a virtual hug and put it back in the bike cave where it undoubtedly spent the night grumbling to the other bikes: 'He wasn't trying, the useless git. Just sat there waiting for me to do the work. I need a new rider, a proper one...'

Until next time, when normal service will be resumed. Sorry Rags...

Smooth please.

Local ride last night, local trails for local people. Legs still slightly wooden from the weekend. Slackened Pace feeling heavy, slow and unfamiliar - missed the Ragley for its lightness, precision and bright-eyed speed everywhere.

Anyway, brain wondering around the periphery of the landscape. Hip-hopping along distant ridges and hidden cloughs. Half-wishing I was riding on my own. Remembering why I grate with certain types of group rides, the alpha male stuff.

Thinking. Just how messy and ungainly people look when they're trying too hard to go fast. Thrashing and desperate and frenzied. And I'm not claiming immunity there, I've done it too, I think we all have.

But right now I'm trying to ride smooth and loose and neat. Speed but relaxed, economic speed. Sustainable speed. It just feels nicer. Like running your hand over sanded wood rather than a splintery plank.

Bits of people...

I bought Cycling Plus out of curiosity, it doesn't have any emotional ditches hidden inside and well, I was curious. And it was kind of okay. I read Rob Penn's article about building his ultimate bike, the one that's also a BBC television programme and a book, the one where he goes around the world speccing out the parts he reckons are the best then building them onto a Rourke frame.

It made me think. Not that it would be so amazing to travel around cherry-picking parts from Campag and Chris King and obscure Italian componentry brands, but that it would be infinitely better to build a bike made from parts created by people you love. It's a good idea in theory I guess, but problematic in that you'd have to pragmatically build a series of relationships with people who made every part of a bike - saddles, bars, frames, wheels, spokes... It's a big ask. And to be honest, somewhat unrealistic.

But it made me think about other stuff. About things and love and the reverberations of stuff that sits in your house, in your life. Things that other people left behind. Books, pictures, music, the funny Ecuadorian thing on top of the VCR, the bar tape on my road bike, the strange selection of penguins that pop up all over the house, the little pot the garlic sits in, the plant on top of the bookshelf, the comedy fridge magnet, the Chrismas pudding tea pot and the odd French coffee mug with the hare on the side. And the tea-pot, the little one.

They're all little bits of people. Little triggers for memories. Freeze frame segments of points in life. And I guess somewhere out in the world, little bits of me are floating in other people's lives.

My gormless battle against the forces of evil...

Like the Buzzcocks said:

"Turn up early in time for our date

But then you turn up late

Something goes wrong again.

Need a drink go to the pub

But the bugger's shut

Something goes wrong again

Something goes wrong again

And again and again and again again and...

Something goes wrong again.

Ah something goes wrong again

Something goes wrong again

Something goes wrong again..."

You get the idea. But the question is, where do you cut your losses. Where do you say, that's enough and look for help. Talking bike maintenance, not life, though they have their similarities. Funny how simple faults in both escalate into WWIII. So, just for the sake of argument and illustration, it starts with a worn bottom bracket in a Cotic Road Rat, maybe a cheap Isis one that's been thrashed senseless for, oh I dunno, 18 months or so.

And the grease that it slicked through its threads has long since gone. With the result that the bottom bracket and the frame have built up a touchingly intimate relationship. You know the stuff, they are so close that they don't know where one starts and the other ends. Sweet.

 Before...

So it begins. With moderate persuasion. And nothing moves. So it's out with the Plus Gas, the world's most elusive fluid, and an overnight soaking. But still nothing budges. Maybe this is the point where a sensible person says, enough and resorts to, 'professional help'. But not this idiot. Bolt the extractor in place and use a lever, a very long lever, the upright from a bike stand, erm, maybe. Not that I'd know of course.

And that sick feeling when what ought to be the bottom bracket succumbing to ungentle persuasion actually turns out to be the steel tool stripping the alloy splines from the bottom bracket. Ooops. And then you notice that the insert on the other side, that you thought was slightly truncated, has in fact sheered and two thirds of it is still screwed into the frame.

At which point anyone with half a brain would seek professional help. But, I'm quite stupid and stubborn and somehow the external bit of the bottom bracket ends up getting sawn off and chiselled. Ooops. Not a good idea. Not even sure where it came from.

And this is the defining moment, where it is, of course, too embarassing to slink off, tail between legs, to a professional mechanic and explain, haltingly,  just how it is that your frame is clinging stubbornly to the stunted, battered remnants of a bottom bracket, with no obvious way of getting it out.

But of course, that's the nub of it. Going past the point where your mistake is redeemable. Jumping off the edge. The moment familiar to anyone who's ever dismantled a transistor radio. Or a toaster. Or a VCR player. Or an STI shifter. Or an iBook for that matter. When you know, at a gut level, that if you undo those screws, it will never go back together again. But you can't stop. You have to break it. To see how it works. Or just because.

Step away from the seized bottom bracket. And think. Hard. Furrowing your brow will concentrate thought waves more thoroughly.

Anything is preferable to the humiliation of turning up at your local bike shop with a frame in which the bottom bracket is not just seized solid, but all means of turning it have been perversely removed by an idiot. You could like and say your mum / mate / the dog did it, but that's not going to cut it. They will know instinctively you are solely responsible and, as soon as the door closes behind you, the workshop will reverberate to howls of scornful laughter.

So... competing solutions. Hacksawing through a hardened steel axle - exactly how much holiday do I have left again? Then the revelation that if caustic soda can remove stuck alloy seatposts from steel frames, then maybe it can do the same - ah, good God, Keanu Reeves is a flat-faced wooden excuse for an actor, sorry, random channel hopping - to an alloy-cupped bottom bracket in a steel frame.

Nasty stuff. Chemical gloves and goggles, plasticene cups and seals to hold it all in place. The careful pouring and re-pouring for three days, watching bubbles rising and the solution turning a filthy grey. And refresh. Then one morning, the liquid's gone. Enough aluminium dissolved to let it through. Disebelief. Rinse, chisel, hammer, bang, and it's out, mostly. Paper-thin, alkali-ravaged aluminium and the mangled remnants of something that used to be and now isn't quite.

 Something that used to be...

A thorough rinse to remove the residue, which amazingly didn't kill the paintwork, then in with a new bottom bracket complete with copious amounts of copperslip. And a deep sigh of relief, because now no-one need ever know just how stupid I really am. And really, I am quite, quite stupid. But there you go. I guess most of us have done something similarly dim and maybe even got away with it sometimes.

 Caustic soda'd...

Next time, I'll know when to stop. Er, right...

Packing Frenzy

Off to the Lakes for the weekend with friends. Which is ace. It's a two-axe trip, because with luck and a bit of thaw/freeze something solo-able and high and scenic might be in nick. Cue mental HD visions of thunking axe placements in glorious neve and white, icy space beneath my feet.

But between the inception and the execution falls the shadow,  in the form of the darkness that is a packing frenzy. Funny how the 'Fancy a weekend in the Lakes' - 'Yes, brilliant!' exchange takes seconds, yet the practical preparation can expand to fill all available time and space to the point where it blots out the tingle of anticipation.

And 'Have I packed the sleeping bag liner?' 'Do I need a harness?' 'Which crampons for easy gullies?'  'Do I need to eat at all?' 'Is that gas canister half empty or half full?' thoughts spin around the room like frantic bluebottles.

And funny too how, if you don't look it in the eye, kind of sneak up on it while it's not looking, it suddenly shrinks and whimpers down into manageable proportions. And you can smack it over the head with a handy duffle, remember that your camping stuff is actually carefully and neatly stowed away ready to use and suddenly you wonder what on earth you were worried about.

Except thatdidn't quite work, so I'm getting an early night, getting up at the crack of pre-dawn and driving north first thing tomorrow. So now I can have a beer with my packing. Result.

Folding Tyres...

I've been folding tyres, well, that's what they're for. It even says it on the packaging 'folding tyre'. So I've been folding them, about 27 or 28 of them in a therapeutic sort of way - well, more rolling them up, then sticking a ring of chopped-off downhill tube around them. It was the only way to stop them getting out and taking over the kitchen in a sort of anarchic rubbery invasion.

Worryingly I seem to have more tyres than, say, for the sake of argument, socks, which can't be right, can it? Still, it stops you thinking.

In the beginning... and yes, it's a joke.

I guess that since this is my first ever blog post, I should start by telling you a little about myself. First off, I'm not actually a dog. I gave some consideration to a species swap operation, but in the end, the difficulty of sourcing canine-compatible cycling kit called a halt to the operation at the eleventh hour.

So I remain a human being with the mind of a dog and a badly wired one at that. Generally that's not helpful in life, but for my purposes, it's not such a bad thing. And here's why. I am, by my own admission, just an average, normal mountain biker, but my aim, is by this time next year, to be fit and fast enough to represent Great Britain at the 2012 Olympics.

That may sound ambitious, but I am faster than most of my mates already and I have some really quick tyres in the cupboard that my mate gave me, which I can get out for races and an old training plan by a professional coach who used to train some of Britain's top mountain bike racers.

And, to give myself a head start, I've had not one, but two rest days, which means I'm starting super fresh and super committed. I'm going to start off with some phosphate sprints and report back later, by the end of the week, I should be substantially faster. Just watch this space.