samuri.co.uk

Bike:Humuhumu

Distance:31 mile

Commute. Just realised it was Friday the 13th, oh yeah. Possibly the worst ride ever . Especially coming home. Pouring it down, proper crazy bonkers rain. Couldn;t see a thing, at all, on the entire ride. Offroad was a joke, kept banging into things, pointless wiping my glasses, they just got covered in water 2 seconds later. After a while I realised it was going to get me injured so I went on the road, and then realised riding on unlit roads, that I don;t know with cars dazzling me constantly, was going to get me killed.

Got pissed off with cockend drivers cutting me up. One guy overtook approaching a full junction, cut in harsh like, almost clipped my front wheel and then parked half over the white line. His actions said he knew I was there. So I came alongside him, stopped next to the drivers door and he hit the lock. Good, he know’s what he;’s done and he’s now scared. I wipe the drivers window and peer in. He’s staring straight ahead, steering wheel firmly gripped. I push his wing mirror back, no response from dickhead so I ride off. What a knob. No more incidents of note but I did stick to the road, offroad would have been mayhem.

Proper dripping wet when I got home. Sick of getting pissed on I can tell you.

Bike:Humuhumu
Distance:31 miles

Commute. Is there any chance I could go out for a ride please and not get completely drenched? Even when I went to the velodrome I got soaked running to the door. Today was no different, obviously. Coming in it was just a light shower, sunny all day and then the instant I got my leg opver the bike to come home, BANG! Jet wash from the sky, seriously heavy rain. Just bonkers. Couldn’t see shit, everyone driving like bellends on the road sections, not much fun at all. Water poured out of my shoes when I took them off at home. Nice. Still wet for the next morning too, double nice.

Bike: Van Tuyl
DIstance: 25 miles

I bloody well love riding at the track! Tuesday nights seem to be the best, the A+B SQT sessions. Definately a fair bit quicker on the whole than the Thursday night sessions, quieter too. Still a bit slow at times though. I was anticipating a fairly quick pace when we were just strolling round in a pack but it’s still just below recovery.  Still, some reasonably quick lads there tonight although not as quick as they think in some cases, and very surprised at how quickly and how often people drop out and roll to a halt. They look fit, but don’t appear to be so.

Couple of sprinters here tonight too in great big 100″ gears. They train with us a bit, stop for a rest, wait for the break and then wind it up around the top of the track, drop down the banking and hammer it round 100m at absolutely flat out balls out crazy pace. Very impressive when you see them cane it round at 45mph.

Bike:Vela
Distance:42 miles

Wet and cold but apart from that, fairly uneventful. Shit weekfor riding too. 102 miles in total. Which I suppose isn’t terrible considering I spent a few days down the smoke. Shifted about a ton of rubble by hand today too, three trips to the tip with a full boot. Fecking builders. I got pissed off with the crap lying around and just did it myself. We really just need this leak sorting out now and the tiling finished and we’re done. Apart from the back garden that is.

Bike:Litespeed
Distance: 29 miles

After a night of pretty much zero sleep, (Friday night typically being the only night of the week I am guaranteed a good nights sleep because I have a few beers Friday night and at the moment don’t have to get up early because the velodrome is closed to the public – but this night was different. The wife’s brother decided to keep phoning us with the last one being at 3:30 in the morning, then the dog decided tonight would be a good night to crap on the floor and then scratch on our door to let us know – happily I might add), so I was up at 6am….after no sleep.

Did the washing up, tidied up the floor of the conservatory for the tiler to start with a clean slate(sic), looked outside, raining really hard. I waited a bit, still raining…. Aaah fuck it, lets go.

Drenched in 5 minutes. Plus the amount of fuckwits on the road! So close and so fast, in pouring rain! A woman in a mini with all the windows steamed up came very close to t-boning me out of a coop car park. She got some carefully crafted hand signals, which just made her laugh…round her first chocolate bar of the day, one of 17 no doubt.

Rest of the ride was very wet, pinched flatted in a grand canyon of a hole on the road in Abram so fixed it and came home. Throat was burning, has been all day now. Very tired now, but not sleepy. Bummer.

Tiler has laid about 30 tiles down of the most expensive tiles on the planet. They look good so far, but the conservatory roof is still leaking, builder has STILL not finished all his jobs. Getting awfully pissed off with this conservatory build now.

I presume that middle aged men such as myself all go through a similar thing. They reach a point in their lives and just get extremely frustrated that due to a variety of influences on their lives, they’ve not achieved what they wanted to and realise that there’s no way it’s going to happen now.

Take me for example, I’m 42 or something. I’m fitter than i’ve ever been in my life before although i’m not going to win any races even though I want to.  i’ll never be able to beat the young lads in short races now and I’m probably too far behind to ever beat any of the serious vets in longer ones. I *may* have a chance in short races against vets and I’ll be trialling this theory in the next 6 months but I;ve seen these guys go. Some may be old but that doesn’t stop them being fast. It’s *highly* unlikely that I’ll place anywhere memorable, other than last.

But I was watching TV tonight and I just sat there for about 15 minutes thinking about packing EVERYTHING in and doing something else entirely. You spend your entire life building a career, a reputation, pension, savings, house with a conservatory  , and yet it can all be lost in an instant. I think the objective is to be *comfortable* in your later years, not live on a dodgy estate where you’re afraid to go out and generally have a happy end of life. But I realised that all that is pointless if you live like I do to get there.

I want to ride in the Andes, I want to cycle for 300 miles a day, every day for two weeks until I get from one end of Asia to the other. I want to have sex with girls of different nationalities and creeds. I want to win stuff and lose more than I already have, I just want to get out of what i’m doing now and do something I want to like writing., photography, riding or moving around a lot. trouble is I’m too crap at these things to get paid for it,  bummer. I can either try and steal some money (and trust me, I’d not last long in a hard prison with bubba and clint) and live the life of riley or swallow my principles, ditch the noble techie job and work in a ruthless field for ten years to get enough money in to stop working in my early 50′s and start doing stuff.

christ what a moaning twat. i’m almost already in my fifties now it seems. my biggest problem is knowing what to do next. The major problem with this situation is that I tend to just leap at the first thing that looks but invariably isn’t, and cock my life up even more.  Yay for irrational leaps of faith.

Bike:Humuhumu
Distance:31 miles

Commute.

Now as far as I can tell, it only rained twice, for an hour each time on this day. It rained really hard when it did though. Can you guess when it rained? Or what I was doing at those precise times? In particular the at work times stop/start were within the second of me arriving/leaving. Like someone was turning a tap off and then on. I caned it to the office in a complete deluge, saturated I was. The second I rode under the building where I keep my bike, the rain stopped dead, *click*, just like that. Then it was quite nice all day. Then I got back on my bike in the afternoon, under a blue sky with white fluffy clouds in it. Inbetween walking to my bike and riding it off, they changed to dark grey clouds and as I wheeled my bike back out, bang! It started raining again. It really was that precise.

Also, *someone*, although I’m not sure who, thought it would be nice to throw my soaking wet clothes on the floor after I’d hung them on a radiator in the changing rooms. Now the building has pretty much shut down there are only a couple of people who use the gym/changing rooms and it’s not like we’re short of space, or indeed, radiator space (both radiators had masses of space left on them – I’d even put my shoes, gloves and helmet on the pipes at the bottom and they’d moved them too) in there any more so I can only assume it was done out of complete malice.

So I had to put on a sopping wet pair of shorts, shoes, coat, gloves and had that lovely squidge feeling as I put my helmet on. Thanks you fucker. If I find out who you are you’ll be getting a nice hard kick up the chuff.

Bike:Vela
Distance:31 miles

Nice easy ride. Started off that way anyway. My arms and hands were aching from lifting cement and paving stones all morning so didn;t fancy any heroics. On the tops at Rivington a van passed me and I thought nothing of it. Came round a corner to find him reversing up the road towards me fast. I backed off a bit, he stopped, stayed in the middle of the road and then floored it off. He slowed me down all the way down the first hill and then on the second hill he went even slower and started wathcing me in his mirror. Everytime I moved out to the right a bit (and bearing in mind, I left a pretty big gap between me and him, I wasn’t trying to overtake him), he would swerve out. We got to the bottom of the hill in Rivington and he indicated left, I moved out as I was going straight on and he shouted ‘That’ll teach you’ out the window.

….

…

Teach me what? That the roads are full of knob jockeys? Bit late for that lesson mate, I learned that one a long time ago. I carried on for a bit towards Chorley and then realised the red warning LED on my light was on. Pants, forgot to charge it up. No alternative but to turn around and head for home. Although now of course, I was riding through football traffic coming out of the Reebok. And I’m a little ashamed to say that after the 10th or 12th near miss by walkers or drivers I flipped out and turned into a complete fucking bell end. I wound it right up, started ducking in and out of the cars and started screaming at anyway who even looked like they were going to walk in front of me. Repeat for about 4 miles. Fun but dangerous and I probably did for the attitudes of some people towards cyclists but jesus christ open your fucking eyes! They say Saturday afternoon is the most dangerous time on the roads  and I can see why. The ones who’s team had won were all looking up to the heavens, the ones who had lost were all focussed on the ground and I was trying to ride in between them.

Edit: Didn’t get out on a ride on Sunday, I really couldn’t be arsed so a very poor week this one, only 92 miles.

Bike: Humuhumu
Distance: 31 miles

Commute. Not much fun actually but ULTRA FAST. I was pouring sweat when I got to work and then rode like a crazy man back home. Sweet, but painful.