Author Archives: Admin

Singletrack Mind 2013 Round 3 : Awaba

Chocolate_Foot_Awaba_Sept_2013__0762September 29th saw Round three of Chocolate Foot’s SRAM Singletrack Mind series roll around. I hadn’t intended on racing this series at all this year, but I did round two at Coondoo as a pair with Steve Kick (under the moniker Velofix) and this whetted my appetite somewhat. So when round three rolled around, I signed up – this time for a seven hour solo.

Since getting back onto the bike in 2012, I’ve raced mainly 100km and four hour races, with a couple of shorter smashfests, so seven hours is a bit of a step up in endurance terms. Still, Awaba is probably the trail where I’ve got most track time. Continue Reading →

Bad habits

It’s been a pretty good year so far, riding and racing wise. But there are more gains to be made.

That’s why, for the last month or two, I’ve been actively looking at, and trying to work on, some bad habits of mine, on both the road bike and the mountain bike. I thought it might be useful to put a few of them down in a blog post, and maybe ask readers (I know there at least a couple of you out there) what their bad habits are, if they share any of my bad habits, and how they might get rid of them.

Continue Reading →

A big weekend of racing: Shimano MTB GP Round 5 and The Oaks Classic


Doarama
My legs are somewhat tired. It was the biggest race weekend of the year so far for me, with Saturday spent lapping Stromlo Forest park in round five of the Rocky Trail Shimano MTB GP, and Sunday on the annual 25km smashfest that is the Careflight Woodford to Glenbrook Oaks Classic.

It was also probably the most successful weekend of racing for me since the 2012 Kanangra Classic. But enough of that, let’s look at this weekend.

Continue Reading →

I found a new painful thing

You go out riding of a cold wintry morning, and while you’re out mashing yourself into a shrivelled-up ball of pain, you slop a load of energy gel on the legs of your thermal cycling tights. And you don’t really notice, because you’re being severely dropped on a climb by your riding partner and are too busy trying to fend off the man with the hammer to worry about goop on your legs.

So you get home and you go to remove your lovely toasty warm tights but the gel has set into an araldite-like epoxy glue, sticking the hairs of your upper thigh to the toasty warm fabric.

And so, while removing said clothes before a delicious warm shower, you give yourself an impromptu surprise waxing.

This is another reason why roadies shave the guns. It’s also a good reason to shave the guns beyond the normal shorts line. And a really good reason not to spill energy gel on a more vulnerable area.

This has been a public safety announcement

Ouch ouch ouch.

Bike Lanes

Yep.

The best overtaking move you’ve ever seen

And there’s a bonus second angle…

Continue Reading →

Shimano MTB GP Round 4 : Mount Annan

This is a somewhat late post, because, well, there was a thing. I’m not sure if you noticed it. The Tour De France. It’s just a little bike race, but watching it kinda got in the way of some things, especially since I took a week off work and vanished to a hotel somewhere in a far-flung NSW wine region to watch the final epic week.

Both wheels off the ground as is right and proper

I really will get round to buying the proper images soon folks.

Anyway, round four of this year’s Shimano MTB GP took place a couple of weeks back at Mount Annan, home of the Australian Botanic Garden. Not the most obvious place for a mountain bike trail, an non-Sydneysider might think at first glance, but it’s one of the region’s better known and best managed trails. Rocky Trail as ever managed to put on a fantastic day of racing, the weather stayed resolutely cool and dry, and though I wasn’t plagued with the tyre issues of the previous round, not everything went according to plan.. Continue Reading →

In Memoriam: Colonel Horace Threepoint OAM, CBE, DSM. April 1 1822 – July 5th 1913

Horace Threepoint was a man of many parts. A polymath, if you will. Among his myriad patents were the Thrimping Jimmy, a now-obsolete but revolutionary flax weaving device, the Phrooking Valve, a crucial component in steam-driven hostess trolleys and his most famous , eponymous invention, the Threepoint Turn.

Before Threepoint’s inspired turn, users of horse-drawn and later petroleum-driven transport had precious few options to turn their vehicles through one hundred and eighty degrees, and certainly none that would drastically impede the  flow of traffic in the immediate vicinity. Afterwards, drivers were able to gaily throw their conveyances across roads, engage a reverse gear to propel them back, then proceed forward once again in the smooth ballet of mechanised, road-jamming motion now familiar to us all.

Many attempted to improve on Threepoint’s original, assertive and distinctly British Colonial technique. Such suggestions include the frankly preposterous “indicate first”, the absurd “look both ways and ensure your turn will not cause an accident” and the frankly outlandish “safety first”. All failed the test of time, with Horace’s original descriptive text remaining the canonical form of the Threepoint Turn to this very day. An excerpt of the original patent is inscribed into Threepoint’s Tomb at Rookwood Cemetery, and reads

“Pay no heed to the peasants you may observe around you. You are the pilot of a motorised conveyance, showing your true rank in society. All others are merely chaff before your wheels, and you must pay them no heed. Throw yourself assertively into the turn, glancing neither left, nor right, nor behind, and if a ‘pedestrian’ or ‘cyclist’ should happen to blunder under your wheels, then this is a right and proper expression of the natural order. Though if a child should be nearby, take some extra care, since the nation is enduring an unbearable shortage of chimney sweeps.”

Alas, Horace’s star is now all but faded. No longer is his birth celebrated as a public holiday in such far flung places as Bangalore, Baghdad and Bogota. He is now remembered privately, though by many thousands of devoted motorists, who keep the flame alive by blindly flinging their motorised jalopies into Colonel Threepoint’s famous Turn each day, with neither fear nor favour, and with their eyes averted – or preferably closed – in the proper Victorian fashion, lest they espy a sight which may disturb their inner calm. Such as a cyclist, a pedestrian or another driver.

Threepoint was born in Sydney, Australia, during one of his parents’ regular convict-whipping sojourns. There he will be remembered, on this the anniversary of his death at the hands of an angry mob of the peasantry, by thousands of drivers who will execute his famous turn as many as five times in a single short journey. The sight of them devotedly hurling their modern-day cars, vans and utilities into ill-considered road-blocking manoeuvres, scattering pedestrians and cyclists alike to the four winds, is a truly fitting tribute to memory of this great man.

Another less well-known figure from this age of invention is Dame Myra Signal-Manoeuvre, inventor of a now all-but forgotten situational awareness technique now abandoned by the drivers of the world. Dame Myra’s resting place has been lost to history, and is presumed to be under a car park somewhere in Mildura.

 

Jason Brown is a sometime historical journalist specialising in obituaries of long-forgotten heroes. Among his hobbies are cycling, cursing at traffic, and making stupid jokes on the internet.  He is currently working on a book about the drivers of Sydney entitled “Die, you pointless pricks, die”.

The US, Liberia, Burma and Liggetsherwenistan

This week, like many of you, I’m watching the Tour De France, which is wonderful, though I’m trying not to blog much about it because saturation.

Still, I have to note that I’m feeling particularly exercised during this tour, because I’m watching the SBS coverage, sitting about three metres from a 155cm television, in a country that runs on metric, watching a bike race – a sport that runs on metric – in a country that runs on metric and I still have Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen attempting to explain stuff to me in miles.

Miles?

I mean, what the fuck even is a “mile”? And why would anyone want to do an arbitrary number of them per hour? Continue Reading →

On Rule Nine

Wake up. Dark. Push the cat off the pillow. Find smartphone. Check radar.

Oh man it’s raining again. Listen. Rain. Rain on the roof. Rain on the street. Rain. Rain for miles.

What day is it? Damn. Riding day. Nothing for it. Continue Reading →