Sno' cycling

There are braver soles than me out there, all wrapped up in their super warm cycling gear, or just bearing the freezing cold through their lycra, but I haven't cycled to work since 2009. I felt like I admitted defeat early by buying a week tube pass early last week but my bald fat tires were already prone to skidding a little in the wet so they definitely wouldn't be happy on ice.

My bike would quite like a new pair of tires with decent mountain bike tread, but I'm hoping these ones will hold out till I find it a new home in March. In the middle of last week's crazy snow days, I looked into how to make studded snow tyres, but seems its a fairly permanent DIY job which requires a spare set of wheels with decent tread to start with, and might not be so easy riding once I get out of the ice-lands of North West London to central London where there's still dry tarmac around.

We managed the ten minute ride to the supermarket on Sunday in a light snow blizzard but that's been the extent of my cycling efforts for more than two weeks.

This morning I was actually looking forward to riding into work. The roads were drying up nicely after a couple of snow free days and ice was all but melted. Yet again snow foiled my commuting plans, a few inches had stuck to the ground overnight and a fine mist of snow continued to drizzle until lunchtime. I'm not quite sick of the freezing cold / snow / craziness yet but much more of this and we'll have to invest in sleds...

Rolling Tales

Justin's brought the domain name for our new bells-and-whistles website which will be the home for our future cycling adventures. Not much there in terms of content or current photos yet, but over the next few months you'll find a bit more over at www.rolling-tales.com.

Less than three months till we're off... scary!

Broken chain link

My £60 Trek Antelope wasn't much loved by its previous owner, so I've learnt to replace gear cables which have snapped within the shifters housing, know what it feels like when a crank arm is about to fall off and cleaned a lot of gunk off the cogs which look suspiciously cracked and worn.

No surprises then when the chain gave in earlier this month, though it was only one side of a link, which was somewhat of a blessing as it took a couple of days of commuting with my pedal-stroke feeling a bit 'weird' before I had a closer look and saw the link sticking out like a broken arm.

Fast forward to mid-November and with a handy Protools CT-5 chaintool purchased and a Sunday morning spare, we attempted a repair job, with this video serving as encouragement that the task ahead would be a piece of cake.

In reality the old pins really didn't want to budge but with a bit of brute force (Justin) and encouragement (me) we pulled off the broken bits of chain and reattached the slightly shorter chain, even having time to read the instructions for our new tool which showed how to loosen the chain links after reattaching.

Clever eh, and we didn't even leave grease on the living room floor.

9500 k

If I could easily take a a photo of the inside of the sewer system, it would be here.

I'm not one hundred percent sure that's where my bicycle computer ended up, but the romantic in me thinks that clattering off the road and into a gutter grating is a good way to go, even if the clock was only 500 kilometres from clocking over.

Last Friday evening, when this micro tragedy struck, I'd been pondering the distance on my way home – just five weeks of commuting until the clock ticked over, less if we managed some weekend rides into November. I wondered how far you'd get if you travelled 10,000 k in a straight line? Could I have cycled to Russia?

The computer will have filtered through the waste water system and has probably been fished out with leaves and rubbish and empty cola cans by some mechanical arm.

As for the 1000k photo project, I'm not sure if I should try my luck with another Cateye Strada 8 and reset it to 9500 (which frankly feels like cheating), start again with something new, or give up the idea all together? I'm going to have to think this one through.