Alex Harries's diary

Since I've spent a shedload of money on the bike (and a couple of toys) so I can go out and do some distance training, I thought it might be good for me to go through what I've done to get fit lately...

• Got the bike - £900
• Upgraded the bike (so I can do road training) - £200
• Bought the toys (bag, speedometer, lights, helmet) - £150
• Got the iPod for Christmas (thanks parents! :o) ) - £170
• Got toys for the iPod (splashproof case & headphones) - £60
• Total spent: £1,480 (or 6 years' gym memberships -ish)

Ok, so that's the money spent.

• Total number of miles I've cycled? Err, 20.

I think that comes under the heading of "must try harder". Oops.

 

It's just gone 7am. I've just stumbled through my front door sweating, confused, legs filled with jelly, eyes red, throat burning and a desperate need not to have a cigarette for the first time in a long time.

No, I haven't just woken from a nap in a gutter after a PWs night out. Nor have I just spent the night doing anything more fun. Nope, I've been road-testing my bike with all it's Shiny New Bits™.

Rewind back to midnight last night: I worked fairly late at the Union tying up some loose ends and generally doing the things I should have done months ago. Earlier in the day I'd been to Halfords to buy the last part I needed for my bike - yet another "bit" I thought I had covered but didn't, so I got home hoping, praying and pleading with lots of Gods - none of which I believe in (where's the point in religion? If I've picked the wrong one, I'm just making the right God angrier...) - to let me put The Bike together at last.

After two hours of alternately swearing, bolting, trapping fingers, screwing, knocking expensive things over, banging, and lots of other noisy adjectives that probably have you lot at the back of the class giggling, the bike was back together, with hundreds of pounds of new parts on it. By this time it was 5am, and with a dentist appointment (which I have to skyve off thanks to my tonsilitis earlier this week - no kisses for me then...) later this morning, I figured I might as well go out and test the bike while the roads are empty and the chavlets are a-kip.

(By the way, I'm not entirely sure where this post is going...)

So, off I go down my road in the cold morning air. The sky's just beginning to turn a deep bluey-purple, and I'm struck by how little road vibration the new - very hard - tyres actually transmit. I'm also nearly struck by a passing car. A parked car. Somewhere in my head, a light bulb flashes on and I remember to turn on my lights so I can actually see where I'm going. Yes, I am proud to be an idiot...

A minute or two later and I'm grinning like the village idiots I'm descended from as I shoot down Fawcett Road, and heading towards the sea front. If the weather were a bit warmer, I'd be picking flies out of my teeth.

A couple of minutes after that, I'm starting to realise (a) that this is the first serious exercise I've had in a long time, and that (b) smoking is the reason I'm starting to hallucinate due to lack of oxygen.

Still, it was nice to perch on the sea wall enjoying a cigarette while watching a trio of wheezing joggers I'd flashed past ten minutes previously. The look they gave me wasn't exactly awe... More a "stop bloody smoking and get back on your bike you fat tw*t". Something like that, anyway...

I know it sounds like I'm whinging, but I'm really not - I love cycling, mainly 'cos it's the only form of exercise that seems to be almost-efficient-enough to not seem like a daft waste of time, and I'm looking forward to getting fit enough to be able to start working back up to my 100 miles-a-ride goal. Hell, I might even give up smoking because of it...

Coming tomorrow: what new parts I've put on the bike, and how much the new bike parts cost me.
Coming soon: Adventures In Halfords trying to get a refund for all the new parts.
Coming later: Adventures In Street Begging...

(Another very off-topic, slightly ranty entry...)

My hands ache. I've skinned three knuckles, crushed one finger, managed to put a sizeable hole in our concrete doorstep, chipped the wallpaper, put a hole in my sofa bed, left an oily handprint on the recently-painted doorframe, and - best of all - I haven't actually achieved anything with my shiny new bike parts.

Y'see, this evening, having watched the penultimate second-to-last (*) episode of Spooks tonight, I decided to get on with fitting the new parts to my bike to turn it from a wannabe trials toy (which doesn't go at all fast) into a long-distance cruiser I can use to get my cardiovascular fitness up to a half-decent level over the winter.

The only problem with that idea was the new parts reaching a group decision - without telling me - that they weren't going to fit on my bike: first the new stem turned out to be too skinny to fit over my forks, and then I spent half an hour trying to hammer my new cranks onto my old bottom bracket before I realised that the old kit had 10 splines, and the new kit had only 8. Use your imagination - there's no way that's going to fit. It's like trying to get those square bricks you get at the Early Learning Centre to go through the round holes...

Bugger.

"Ok," thinks I, "Let's rescue my pedals from the old cranks. This shouldn't take long - they've only been in there for a year or so."

Ha ha, yeah... Uhhm, no. I could almost hear my pedals laughing at me as I wrestled in several different positions, one of which I'm sure has given me a minor hernia, trying to unscrew the pedals. No happy ending here either - those pedals are never coming out of my old cranks.

At this point it crossed my mind that my bike and I might have upset a Witch Doctor somewhere, and all this trouble's happening because of a curse placed on me.

The alternative doesn't bear thinking about - that I actually made a mistake. Oh hell no, not possible - I'm male... Errm...

So, while I spent literally minutes choosing the new bike parts, it wasn't enough to make sure all the new kit would fit the old kit. Still, I have a plan - tomorrow I'm going to chuck some motion lotion (**) in the Shed (a term of endearment for my Fiesta... What a manly car... ;o) and take a wander up to Halford's. So far I need the following to get the bike up and running again:

• Tyre levers (can't get the old rubber off the wheels without damaging them otherwise)
• Foot pump (flat tyres don't go so fast)
• Bottom bracket (bit that holds the pedals together in the middle)
• ... and a tool to remove the old bottom bracket
• New pedals
• A chain whip (surprisingly, not something that can be found in Ann Summers. I think...) to get my cassette off.
  

... and I've still got to post my stem back to Evans Cycles and beg for one that fits.

... and I still have no idea if all the other new bits actually fit yet - I just can't bear to try and do anything more with the bike again tonight. If I do, I'm positive the little git will kill me. Please, all of you out there in Reader Land - wish me luck. I'll definitely be needing it...

(By the way, the seven "P"s in the title refers to the "Seven Ps" acronym - "Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance").


* I'm hereby declaring the Campaign for the Reduction of Unnecessarily Posh-Speak to be open for business.

** Petrol. Not some other lotion...

I've just spent £275 on mountain biking kit. Given the fact I'm part Sunderland, that's like waking up and realising you were so drunk last night that you gave a mate your car, your house, your significant other/laptop/inflatable sheep, and a big wet snog for good measure - in other words, I;m suffering acute pain from the wallet area at the moment.

The worst bit is, I didn't buy anything impressive, such as a set of super-light wheels, or a frame made from unobtainium - oh no, it's much more boring that that: I've decided that, since swimming poses too much danger of drowning, death-by-horrible-disease, or being mown down by a school of rubber hat-equipped blue rinsers on a morning swim'n'chat session, I'm going to try and get my cardiovascular fitness up (also known as, "trying to force myself to smoke a bit less") by cycling up and down the twisty lanes of Hampshire. Probably mostly at night, since I don't seem to be able to get out of bed before dusk during winter... ;o)

Clearly, much safer than churning up and down a swimming pool. Or not...

So I've been over to Evans Cycles dot com to pick up the parts I need to convert my trials bike (which I built under some naive belief that I had the required sense of balance and lack of self-consciousness required to hop around on one's back wheel and jump up and down "things" in order to be a proper trials rider) into a proper cross-country spec'd mountain bike - chainset, gear levers, cables, longer stem, nuclear-powered lights, daft little back pack that will only hold a spare tyre and an hour's-worth of food (for me, so about one shopping trolley load then...), helmet, reinforced gloves to protect my delicate digits in case of a stack... You get the idea.

And somehow that came to £275.

No, I don't understand how, either. But when you've just been paid, and getting fit whilst seeing the world the countryside (within a 2 mile radius of my home, given how lazy I am) seems like a great idea - even when it's barely above freezing outside, and seagulls are freezing to death in mid-air - it looks like a great idea to go and spend all your hard-earned on MTBing kit.

All that said, I used to cycle a lot - where my 'rents live are some great trails, and I used to love hacking up and down them a hundred miles at a time, so I've got a fighting chance of surviving. The only worry I have now is that I can't actually bring myself to go and buy a pair of padded cycling shorts (lycra - oh, the shame...) so there's a reasonable chance I'll be identifiable solely by my gait in the coming weeks. That and the fact I'll inevitably have red marks around my (newly-shaven) head from a badly-fitting helmet.

So, in short, if I didn't look comical enough before, I'm certainly going to look a plonker now. Here's to good health... And chafage...