Close shaves

Same dilemma, different year. There's always a day when the sun comes out and the temperature rises unexpectedly, and the thoughts of young, and old, cyclists turn to -- shorts. Yep, it's time to expose the legs again -- in the miniscule window between freezing winter and damp summer. But that means getting the razor out. And can I really be bothered to shave my legs this early in the season? Decisions, decisions. And it'll be snowing again by Sunday.

Back to the future

Great morning with my future London to Paris ridemates - 80km at a steady pace around the Surrey Hills.

Although the L2P has a 21st Century sportive air about it, the ride was like a time-machine back 20 years to the last time I went on a proper, old-school club run.

The same language ("Car up!" "Car back!" "Squeeze in!"), the same steady warm-up before the mad dash for home, and the same characters -- it's as though central casting decree that every group of Sunday morning roadies must have, in no particular order: the bunch engine; the joker; the nutcase who wants to drop the hammer before you even leave the car park; the equipment bore; the bloke who goes on and on about heart rate and lactate thresholds and then gets dropped on the first hill; the old bloke who sits in and never does a turn on the front (err...that was me actually); the fat one who goes surprisingly fast and the eejit who couldn't hold a line if his life depended on it, which come to think of it, it does.

Around 60k, I developed what a young lady in the group referred to as "exercise-induced Tourette's" -- swearing liberally every time the road went upwards.

Our club runs used to finish at a greasy spoon in Wembley, today we all gathered for top class coffee and fiendishly expensive pastries at Carluccio's. 

My amazing technicolour Sidi's were much admired -- one woman even asked if I'd had them specially made -- and I learned a few things along the way.  Most important, I can still hold a wheel, I'm not as slow up hills as I thought I was, but I need to practice my descending as a matter of urgency.

Roll with it

I should have known I was in for a rough time when the man in the local bike shop smiled in a slightly sinister way.

"What have you got on that, anyway?"

"66 inches"

"You should be fine -- there's nothing really nasty, it's more...rolling"

As Jim Royle would say - "Rolling my Assos".

In Yorkshire for the week, at the old family home of Mrs Flandrian.  I'd taken the Tempo up, hoping for at least one run out in the countryside. 

Mrs F was pretty clueless about good cycling routes, so I turned to the man in the LBS -- a nice place, with the traditional mix of shoppers, cheap mtb's, kids' bikes and a couple of decent race frames.

He advised me to head for the Howardian Hills, a tourist-board-invented description of the countryside north of York.

Thick fog greeted me as I rolled out of the drive and headed north -- wet enough to make my jersey uncomfortably damp, but not enough to make it worth putting a rain jacket on until it was too late.

The fog and rain combined with the agricultural run-off from the fields to make it a pretty grim few hours, but oddly enjoyable in a Lance-Armstrong-I'll-be-grateful-for-this-when-summer-comes way.

But some of those Howardian Hills are surprisingly steep and long, and my lack of preparedness was sadly exposed.

80k tomorrow with the London to Paris team, at what they call a "gentle winter pace". We'll see.

Crunch time

Horrible realisation  that there's only about sixteen weekends left before I ride from London to Paris in aid of the Geoff Thomas Foundation.  I'd better start some serious training instead of faffing about in cafes drinking espresso and eating cake.  Robert Millar used to say the two most important elements of training were rest and proper food -- I'm good at those bits, it's the turning pedals round I struggle with.

Freezing cold this morning, hoar frost across the grass and patches of ice on the roads.   At least the fixed keeps you warm after the initial shock of the cold air.  I'm getting used to the 66 inches now -- it's not as easy up hills as I'd hoped, nor as spin-crazy down hill as I'd feared, but it definitely feels looser and smoother than the old 68. 

I've abandoned the idea of riding London to Paris on fixed, in my present level of fatnesss it would be a step too far.  Hope to get the new Schwalbe's on the road bike for the first of the London to Paris Sunday training rides next week -- when my true state of unreadiness may be revealed.

Tale of two companies

As crunch turns to recession and then to depression, brand loyalty and customer service become even more important. 

For some companies at least. Contrast my two experiences over the past few days.

I need a laptop projector for my work.  After a few hours online research, I settled on a lightweight Dell, and ordered it from the company website on Saturday afternoon.  Oddly, I heard nothing more -- no acknowledgement of the order, zip.  On Monday, I came out of a meeting to find three missed calls on my mobile phone from an unknown number, and an e-mail from Dell saying they couldn't process my order because they couldn't get in touch with me to verify some details.  So I phoned their call centre and spent  20 minutes trying to convince their operator that I was who I said I was.  Their software still had me listed at my old address (I moved a year ago), and my website was also apparently registered to a US address  (It's not, they were looking at the same company name but .com not co.uk).   Eventually, they accepted that I wasn't an impostor, and agreed to progress the order.  Except they didn't.  Their site still listed my order as cancelled and no new order number was forthcoming. And neither did they give me any explanation.  And  their phone number was never answered. When I sent an inquiring e-mail,  I was told that the only person who could deal with my problem worked from 0400-1300 GMT for "business reasons".

On Sunday, I ordered three undervests from Prendas -- two for my son, one for me.  I got an e-mail thanking me for my order and another, later, saying it had been posted.  Tuesday morning, the vests arrived, with a handwritten note on a postcard inside the package.

So -- one of the companies, I cancelled the order and will never, ever use them again. The other company -- I've already ordered something else from their website. Guess which one's which?

Stir Crazy

Sometimes things just don't work out.  Last week, I finally took delivery of my gorgeous new, blue, retrosexual Condor.

Regular readers ("Hello" both of you and "Moshi, Moshi" to my many Japanese followers) will remember that my original fixed Tempo developed a nasty crack in the seat tube -- the result of a manufacturing fault which affected a whole batch of Condor's steel offerings.  To their credit, Condor lent me a spare frame while a permanent replacement was on order.  

This took a while. I like to think that it was because the frame was lovingly handbuilt by an eighty-year old Italian craftsman with a blowtorch and a stick of silver, who did a couple of welds each morning before heading home to spend the rest of the day eating lunch, drinking grappa and chasing the local girls around his kitchen.  I suspect it may be just inefficiency.

But when it arrived last week, all niggles were forgotten.  This year's Tempo's come in a glorious deep metallic blue, with a timeless old-school livery which wouldn't  look out of place at the head of a fifties club run. 

The arrival of this stunning piece of retro-loveliness, however, coincided with a ridiculously busy period of work and the biggest snowfalls in London for nearly 20 years.  So the Condor has sat in my basement workshop glaring balefully at my increasingly fat, unexercised frame.

Most of the snow's now gone -- and I'm hoping that tomorrow morning may bring a chance to ride it in anger. And get some of this flab off.