I’ve largely given up on Strava KoMs. For a while it was fun. But these days all the segments around here have been hoovered up by chaingangs in tailwinds, cheaters on scooters, and geniuses who leave their Garmins running during the drive home. (These are, I think, the most likely explanations for my lack of recent success. There are other possibilities that I prefer not to examine too closely.)
On the other hand, I have started paying horrified attention to Strava’s statistic for the number of times I’ve ridden a given segment. Some of these numbers are genuinely shocking. There is a road near my home which, according to Strava, I’ve ridden 940 times since 2016. That’s not allowing for life pre-Strava, when I was riding the same roads and doing, if anything, greater mileage. Adjusting pro-rata would mean I’ve ridden that road over 2,000 times.
Multiple national road champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for Cycling Weekly every week.
Acts of Cycling Stupidity
I’ve recently heard about a rider who had taken to summoning his wife to collect him rather more often that might be justified. Where once he’d only asked for help when he encountered a genuine problem, he’d taken to inventing issues whenever he felt like the ride home was just a bit harder than he liked.
He made the mistake of mentioning this to a friend. Who in turn pointed out to the wife, “Isn’t it remarkable how often **** encounters an unrepairable puncture when there’s a strong headwind for the ride home?”
Next time he tried it, she arrived with a spare wheel, popped it in the bike for him, and cheerily told him she’d have the kettle on for when he got back.
For years part of my standard response to anyone who complains that cyclists don’t pay “road tax” is that cyclists don’t pay a vehicle tax partly because we’re so small and light that we don’t cause any damage to the roads. I’m guessing I’ve caused measurable wear to this one. At absolute minimum, all the rubber I’ve worn off my expensive tyres over the years must have gone somewhere, and clearly quite a lot has ended up on this road. I like to think of this as “highway rubbery”.
There are plenty of other roads with similar personal totals. It raises some important questions. Prime among them being, “What exactly have I done with my life?” I’m a little pleased with my “highway rubbery” joke, but it’s not much to show.
In my defence, if you’ve done as much riding as I’ve done, however adventurous you try to be there are local roads that you’ll ride a lot. This one is a quiet route towards my favourite local rides. Avoiding it and taking the A-road instead would be a bit wilful. But still, once every three days, and probably 50% of rides, seems a lot.
But there are other factors. I like that most of the often-travelled roads have a memory attached; something I saw there once, something that happened. That patch of verge where I fixed a puncture one winter afternoon with the light fading and a murmuration of starlings overhead. The place where I saw a badger scuttle across the road. The spot where my friend Bernard’s rear mech, unable to take his kvetching about its indexing anymore, took its own life by leaping into the spokes of his back wheel.
There’s not generally more than one memory per road, which suggests that not that much happens, but it does build up over time. I’ve always enjoyed the way that riding a bike puts you in touch with the seasons as they change around you. I can imagine myself riding along my 2,000-rep road while around me winter turns to spring, then spring turns to the heat of summer, then summer sinks back to the cool of autumn, and it all begins again.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I enjoy my riding, and I enjoy the easy nature of riding places I know just as much as I enjoy riding routes I don’t.
Of course I still keep my Strava settings on private. I’m happy with my 2,000-rep road. But I don’t need everyone else knowing about it.
How to: watch a slow-motion replay
(Image credit: Copyright (c) 2018 mbrphoto/Shutterstock)
The most important thing about watching a slow-mo repeat of a contentious incident is that each action undertaken by everyone in it is the result of careful and deliberate decision making that is as slow and measured as the repeat. There’s no such thing as a hasty decision in pro cycling.
Remember that the riders in the slow-mo can see just as much as you – ideally an overhead viewing angle.
Riders never have to make decisions when they’re under stress. Even in the heat of a sprint they will be as calm and rational as you are, as you sit watching the replay with a chilled beer to hand.
If you watch enough times you can always work backwards from the incident to a starting point, and then work forwards again to demonstrate a chain of events leading to the incident that only a moron could have failed to foresee.
When you’ve worked out what happened, you can always find someone, however distant they may have appeared from the incident and however little they may have done, on whom you can pin the blame. And when you’ve found them, you can get on social media and shout about it. Unless you’re lucky enough to be a UCI commissaire, in which case you can start issuing one of your exciting new yellow cards.
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