by Mark Champion age 44 & 11 months

As a small boy, before the advent of mountain bikes and well before indexed gears I heard tale of a sport called cyclocross. A sport where racing bikes were ridden off-road and the riders got off and carried their bikes. My reaction was one of considerable amusement, it made no more sense than girls or beer…

It took me rather longer to find cyclocross but in October at the tender age of 44 & 11 months I raced my first SCX race in Irvine on the South West coast of Scotland.

It was the first truly competitive race I’d entered since the 1983 Junior Army Cross Country Championship… I was nervous.

You turn up to a hive of activity, lots of people carrying out well-versed preparation rituals. You quickly work out that they know what they’re doing and copy them

Registration found and entry fee paid you go and ride the course. Practice laps – learn the course, watch the pros. Already you’re riding sections you didn’t think possible, is that good?

Practice over it’s food, liquid and warmth until the mass of bikes and riders begin to roll towards the assembly point.

Then to the start line… inevitably you cast your eye across the ‘competition’. Confirmation of worst fears as everyone is faster and more confident than you… fight or flight reflex in flight overdrive… beam me up Scotty!

They talk of tyre pressure and knowingly agree on a number, a number that you didn’t read on your pump this morning… game’s a bogey maybe you should call it now.

But wait, the Commissars (weren’t they the ones who ordered the shooting of retreating Russian soldiers? – better stay put) are calling people forward by name… not you, just the players.

30 seconds later and the gun makes you a bike racer, get you!

The start is frenetic, all you can do is worry about your own line and keep going… still upright you start to grin… then there’s lactic, gallons of lactic… you start to grimace.

The first two laps are an adrenaline fuelled pain fest, pray for a mechanical, break damn you! The bike hates you, it’s not going to break, it’ll do that later when you’re starting to enjoy it. For now you must gasp for breath through all available orifices.

People overtake you, you overtake others… this feels good, slightly less suffering for you, slightly more for them. You wish them more, but only because you wish yourself less.

Physical and mental weakness mean that the technical sections that were straightforward in practice now become monumental tasks, all the places you thought you be able to recover become the only places you can maintain any speed; recovery is a myth.

Then the world slows down a bit, the pain subsides, you recognise this part of the course and you start to think about how to ride it.

You find yourself in your own group, a meaningful race… you could beat these people, or they could beat you.

This is good. Cyclocross is really good.

You look at your watch, over half way, what have you been doing? Time to put some effort in. Legs aren’t so sure, muted screaming is still screaming… why didn’t you train harder?!

The leaders are passing you, while your pedal strokes drive you deeper in to the mud, theirs create lift: they are, quite literally, flying.

Loss of concentration and one of your mini group passes you, last time you lost concentration you crashed, that was better at least you didn’t lose a place then.

Hold their wheel, make sure they know you’re there, decide where to reclaim your place. Execute the move and it’s yours… the racer races!
People are cheering, they’re saying nice things. They’re saying nice things specifically about you… you should try harder; for them.

In the distance you hear the bell so someone is starting their last lap, soon you’ll be doing the same. Legs and lungs feel little relief but the head is just getting the hang of it, come on hold this position… no idea what position you are, might be last… take one place: to not be last…

The bell, your bell, one more lap. Not a nice one like the middle section. The adrenaline is back and so is the lactic, but there’s less than one lap to go, you will finish this race!

And finish you do, finding strength to ride the last few yards like you did the first. There they are again those cheering people, impressed by your performance and thankful for your efforts on their behalf.

You ride in to the assembled throng of finishers, the heart of your new home, among the crossers, you are a crosser for everyone to see.

Legs aren’t tired, could have gone faster! Starting to buzz… feels like discovering beer… and girls. This is brilliant, did you see what we just did? It was brilliant!

Let’s do it again! Now! Or next week!

Need to talk about it. How did you cope with that off-camber? Those steps were a killer! What about the sand?! Any crashes? Mechanicals? Shall we do it again?

The elation starts to fade but now but it’s Thursday and only 3 days until the next race… can’t wait.

Cyclocross: almost as good as beer and girls….

While we are kicking around all of the traditional ways for a business to support cycling we thought we’d try a few quick wins the first of which is the offer of a forum.

It’s a simple offer: we give you a private forum for your Cycling Club or Cycling Group, you administer it including membership and moderation. We’ll host it on Bicycles and cover all of the associated running costs.

You can use it as broadly as you wish – it might be simply for club notifications or you might want to expand it to be the main point of contact for your club (if this takes off we’re looking at a club website widget), it’s up to you.

In return we want… well nothing. There will be one link on every page that takes you to the price comparison section of the site but it won’t flash and you don’t have to click it if you don’t want to, we won’t be offended.

You won’t see any other cycling clubs and they won’t see you but there will be a general area where anyone can post so you don’t have to be completely antisocial if you don’t want to be.

You can find a sample of the Bicycles Forum here

So if you think it could be useful to you then please get in touch.

About 50% of the people I talk to about Shimano Di2 electronic shifting are sceptical. None of the sceptics have tried it but intuitively they distrust it. Setting aside the financial aspect of the change they see more potential negatives than positives, the perceived complication does not have sufficient pay-off.

No doubt over time their outlook will change as the concept ‘normalises’ but there are also developments that could accelerate (or completely destabilise) this process.

The people at Parlee Cycles have worked with Prius to develop neural shifting, no levers just gear changes through the power of thought:

If you haven’t seen neural control before then you might assume some sort of elaborate hoax but it’s a real science that is being driven very seriously in the development of wheelchairs for quadriplegics, so this technology will be arriving in a usuable form some time soon.

Whether it can be scaled for the bike market and how much concentration you will need to divert from all the other things you need to think about whilst riding may be limiting factors but there are some other interesting ideas in the video.

One is using GPS to provide signals to your bike to make adjustments to gearing using the system’s previous experience of your riding… so it knows that your at the base of a climb, it knows your usual gear selection for that climb and it adjusts accordingly. I don’t completely buy this particular application unless it can also judge my energy level, state of mind and the company that I’m riding with but I think that there are other options.

We sell a lot of Rockshox Reverb Seatposts which enables remote adjustment of the seatpost height depending on whether the rider is ascending or descending. Couple the above tecnology with this and you could have one less thing to think about during your cross-country race… it’s an on / off decision that will very rarely differ and so may be better suited to the technology

This sort of stuff excites me. Not because I necesarily disagree with the sceptics’ cost / benefit analysis but because every step offers opportunites to be that bit closer something really clever.

Michigan based Inner City Bikes have taken the bike to an brilliantly compressed form with the Inner City Bike.

It’s minimal in almost every respect… but those 36″ wheels really make a statement!

At $3-5000 you could be buying yourself a piece of cycling design history… or a travesty of bicycle geometry

For our money it looks cooler than it probably rides – that saddle is a long way back (think Alpine descents) and the fork rake will surely make for a twitch filled journey.

That said it’s brave and thought provoking… it’s a better world for companies like ICB.

My son, Lewis, started racing this year and the first thing that you learn is that Youth Racing requires restricted gears.

As Youth Cycling categories span 2 years there is often a wide difference in the strength and size of competitors so in an attempt to level the playing field the UCI require riders to ride using gearing that results in the stronger riders ‘spinning out’ meaning that the bunch stays together for longer.

The fact that the restricted gearing creates a peloton give the kids more experience of close quarters racing and ultimately makes them better bike racers.

The table below details the maximum ‘metres development’ for each category. In essence metres development is the distance the bike will travel during one full revolution of the cranks in the highest (hardest) gear.

The cheapest way to restrict gears for Youth Racing this is reduce the number of available gears on the rear cassette.

however if you want to have a full range of gears the most efficient (for Youth B to Junior) is to fit a cassette with a 14 tooth highest (smallest) cog and change the chainring: 42 tooth for Youth B, 46 tooth for Youth A and 52 tooth for Juniors.

If you want to play around with your options take a look at Sheldon Brown’s gear calculator but be warned you are entering the dark world of bicycle geekdom

As far as checking is concerned you can expect the Commissars to check before every race and at the end of the big ones…. so best to get it right… but if you don’t there will always be someone around who can help.

Have you ever noticed that your bike was described as having quick release wheels but whilst the back wheel will drop out without the additional rotation of the skewer the front wheel won’t.

Those little bumps at the end of your forks that slow your wheel change and nullify (in both senses) the benefit of your quick realise skewer are commonly known as Lawyer Tabs to Lawyer Lips.

They exist because the quick release skewer is considered too complicated for you to use safely and this is why I object to them. I don’t really need the 15 seconds I’d save without them but why invent something really useful (and really simple) and then backward engineer it for stupid people.

You see when the QR Skewer first hit the streets (excuse the pun) they resulted in a number of US law suits brought by people apparently unaware that they should be tight when done up. these people were surprised when their loose wheel detached from the fork and caused them to crash.

Being the US the court found against the Bike Companies and so was born the Lawyer Tab.

Of course now that you know why quick release isn’t very quick you do have the choice of doing something about it – you can file off your lawyer lips.

But even as I type those words I feel a pang of fear and guilt – am I being reckless? what if someone suffers harm as a result of my suggestion? I feel I should offer some back-covering provisos but equally I want us all to make our decisions and consider the consequences ourselves…. what to do?

Here’s my snivelling middle ground: Don’t file them off if you don’t know how a QR works… and if you’ve got a carbon fibre frame be really careful of that dust or crashing could be the least of your worries.

And to bike manufacturers I’d ask that you stop putting them on our bike and instead use a sticker that says “if this isn’t tight you’ll crash and hurt yourself”

There is no place in the cycling world for the Lawyer Tab.

This winter a car driver had occassion to stop his car and accuse me of being a reckless cyclist. I had caused him to panic because he believed that I was riding full speed on to a roundabout where he had right of way.

I assured him that I had actually been slowing down but he was adamant that this wasn’t the case because I didn’t have my hand on my brakes and I was still peddling…. he’d never seen a fixed wheel bike.

Now I’m not sure how I could have communicated that to him but it seems to me that much of the animosity that exists between riders and ‘cagers’ could be easily solved with better communication.

What Fraser Mort has done with this fabulous light is to develop the communication device that used to simply say ‘I am here’ and make it say ‘I am here and I am a person’. A small but vital step in creating mutual respect.

Apart from that it’s a load of fun and I want one!

We want every retailer on Bicycles to be a good one so we use them all in order to assess their inclusion on our site.

We do this by making a purchase, contacting them with an enquiry and testing any claims they make about their service. It is inevitable that some will make mistakes and in these cases we consider how they deal with the mistake.

There is a lot of retailer review noise on the net but we find that this is usually extreme in its negativity or it is a retailer sponsored ‘trust’ type scheme that is overly positive…

We prefer to use our own experience which we will provide to you through the Retailer Profiles in our Guides Section.

Today we turned on Bicycles Price Comparison, that is to say we opened the homepage to the public.

Knowing at what point to launch a cycling price comparison site takes more thought then you might imagine. At this point we only have 250 products listed so for the casual browser we might deliver some disappointment.

Indeed if we were a shop we’d think twice about turning the latch but as the vast majority of our traffic comes with a single product in mind I feel that we’ll do considerably more good by opening.

As ever we hope to hear from users who can’t find what they want when we will produce a comparison on their required product. This is standard practice on some of our other price comparison sites so please feel free!

Over the past few days I’ve felt a deep empathy with Cycling Retailers as I try to make decision on what to list. In the bowels of Bicycles lurk the details of over twenty five thousand cycling products with hundreds of thousands of prices all waiting to be lined up in a neat cycle comparison tables.

As we go live I’m particularly please with the specific Ebay listings that we’re pulling through on every matching product. There are some great small Bike Retailers on Ebay and I hope that this will show them the support that they deserve.

In total Bicycles Price Comparison is now comparing prices from 21 bike shops. Our merchant list isn’t quite complete, we’re still waiting for a couple partners to sort out their tech and then we’ll get their prices in the system.

If you’re a cycling retailer and you want to be listed please get in touch, we want Bicycles to be the most comprehensive cycling comparison site in the UK and that means finding the best prices.

Bicycle films keep catching my eye. Apart from the bicycle the common theme seems to be communities, respect and hope.

The Bicycle City Film tells the story of 20,000 donated bikes that helped to rebuild a community.

It’s a long way from here but it sounds to me like a hopeful future for us all.

The Bicycle City. Trailer from Greg Sucharew on Vimeo.