Spinning Like a Loon

The eighth article! I know it's not a particular watershed, but I've now written ten posts for the blog (if you're wondering where two of them went, they were combined into larger ones). The sharper will have noticed that there is a hit counter on the bottom of the page - so I do know that people are at least clicking on the link to this page (and hopefully reading it). But I don't particularly know what you think - so please tell me. Leave a comment either here, on my Facebook page, or on Twitter: what do you want me to write about? Think the blog's any good? Ideas to make it better (dispense with the author is a valid suggestion) - leave a comment!

When you choose to be a SingleSpeedist, you choose one gear (I've got the hang of this, haven't I?).
But this week I'm not going to wax lyrical about how hard that makes it to churn up muddy inclines, or compare popped knee caps, or indeed the faces we pull when trying to haul ourselves uphill. This week I'd like to take a post to pause and think about the tragically under-geared. It's a time when we can stop and reflect about the SingleSpeeders currently on flat tarmac, whirling their legs like demonic washing machines - desperately trying to keep up with their geared cousins.

Off road, this isn't particularly a problem. A few years ago, I used ride with The Huddersfield Star Wheelers, a notable member of which was "Noggin," (no clue as to his real name). And Noggin's chief advice for going faster downhill was "just don't touch the fucking brakes!" Nowhere is this truer than a SingleSpeeder on an off-road descent. With no braking, you can do a tolerable impersonation of a good off road descent, but on road is a completely different fish filled tea making instrument.

A few days ago, I didn't fancy jaunting up into the Pentland Hills for my usual ritual of mud eating - so I headed out for the Forth Bridge instead (to gaze upon its Victorian engineering magnificence, but nerding out about cast iron is another article for another time). The route to the Forth Bridge is mostly on sustrans bike paths and roads - which are not exactly the most technically taxing places to be, and as I was passed (again) by someone in jeans and a hi-vis jacket, it occurred to me that not enough is written about the perils of not having sufficient gear-inches.

The gear you pick for your bike has to do everything: a jack of all trades, and master of none (I was trying to think up a funny analogy about mechanical engineers, but couldn't come up with something that wasn't both not funny and wildly offensive). One (of the many, see my very first article) downsides to this is that sometimes you're powerless. Cruising on flat or slightly downhill roads, there's nothing you can do to go faster without doing the aforementioned impression of a whirling dervish. I know there are people out there who can summon cadences of over 120 revs/min (usually track riders), but we lesser mortals can only lean back and pretend that the scenery is lovely (all the while watching the people you're riding with slowly disappear into the distance). Infuriatingly, you often know that you could definitely keep up with (and sometimes pass) these people, if only the road sloped up!

Though the major problems start when you're not riding with friends. When you're on your own - perhaps you're commuting, or just using the road to get from one bit of trail to the other. Because then you're in the realm of Everyone Else on their bikes, most of which have gears, and nearly all of which have substantially less kit than you do. SingleSpeeding is often very embarrassing.

Off the line at traffic lights this is a particular problem, especially if you're the second to show up. Annoyingly for me, this only seems to occur when the bike box is already being occupied by someone particularly attractive looking (complete with basket full of kittens and flowers on the front of their bike) who under any other circumstance you'd attempt to steam past and, in passing, charm with skillful overtaking and thighs of steel (in my head, at least. And I should tone it down - my better half reads this). Or another cyclist is at the starting line, also bedecked in lycra, and that grim acknowledgement of existence occurs - along with it the tacit assumption that whoever is rearmost in four hundred yards time is clearly weak, and should start saving up for a Pashley as soon as they get home.

As soon as the light goes green - everything is brilliant, for about three seconds. SingleSpeeding has lent you the acceleration of Odin (trust me, his horse had eight legs - can you imagine how many speeding tickets he picked up?), helped in no little part by the fact that the bike weighs as much as a paperclip. And then your legs reach their maximum speed - at which point anyone else would change gear up. Since you can't, you're left proceeding, legs a-blur, along the highway at a stately eleven miles an hour (depending on your gear), which is a speed even my mum can muster in a hurry. As a result, the rival cyclist bombs off, and an almighty struggle ensues to keep the purveyor of kittens and flowers behind you.

Just consider that, the next time you see someone in full mountain bike regalia, making like they're The Swan from the Carnival of the Animals. On the surface they might be moving at a positively regal pace, but take a look at their legs - and if they're spinning like a loon, they're almost certainly SingleSpeed.

Jim's Bike

Both Bike Snob and Matt Seaton warn against it, but they both do it. As does everyone who uses a bicycle on a regular basis: get sentimental about the machines they're riding. So with the health warning that I'm about to do that: let us plunge in.

Many years ago, I moved to the US (I moved back, don't worry), and in the basement of the house where I lived the landlord had left an old, red Peugeot road bike. It was the first "proper" bike I rode, and it's the one that got me into cycling. When I left the States at the age of 14, the landlord (Jim) gave it to me, and I started to put a respectable quantity of miles in on it. My ascent of Holme Moss on it (complete with small vomit at the top) is one of my happiest cycling memories (we're a strange breed, but if you hadn't realised that - what are you doing here?). I also learned bike mechanics on it. My weekly custom of a Saturday afternoon was to take a moderately working bike, and tinker with it in such a manner that it wouldn't work until divine intervention in the form of my dad and a spanner had fixed it again.

Over time I acquired more bikes, and "Jim's Bike," (as it was known) was relegated to the status of town bike. For five years it's been reliable enough to get me to work for 9AM, yet also familiar and speedy enough to be pilotable in the early hours of the morning when I've been trying to do an impression of a plausibly sober man cycling through a (what seems to be at the time) town centre crawling with police. Through that time it's also become more and more bastardised. Every time a part falls off, it's usually been replaced by a hand-me-down from a more flashy bike in my stable - or I've bought something almost entirely inappropriate for the job, and then had to put up with it (for the last few months I've been running a red and white cable housing, claiming it's art-deco).

In short, (and to sound dangerously close to a Disney film) the stories that bike has are irreplaceable (including the excellent one about me crashing it on the way to meeting my girlfriend's parents for the first time, and having to show up with blood and knackered jeans very much in evidence).

So why all this arse-sunbeams and navel gazing in a SingleSpeed blog? Well, because I'm a muppet and have totalled Jim's Bike. In what we could euphemistically refer to as a "fatal rear derailleur/wheel interface," I managed to bend the frame cycling home from university (much to the horror and consternation of the learner driver behind me who had to deal with a suddenly flailing cyclist undergoing a massive skid and deceleration from twenty). I have taken the frame to local bike shops, and much sucking through teeth has been done, and the unfortunate reality has been reached that it will be far cheaper to buy a second hand bike than to try and fix this Millenium Falcon of a bike. So tomorrow morning I'm off to the second hand bike mart to see if I can pick up a natty (yes, I did use the word natty - and yes, I have recently watched a lot of Bargain Hunt) fixie. Or failing that something equally as cool as Jim's Bike.

I won't throw Jim's Bike away though. Not yet anyway (though my landlord may object to me hiding a bike in my flat, though given the lack of functionality I'm going to claim it's merely a "bicycle shaped object,"). I have done what we're all warned against, I have become sentimentally involved with a bike (not like that, concentrate people), and then written about it. Just as everyone has one bad novel in them, every bike blogger has at least one bad and overly sentimental article in them. For which I can only apologise (and just imagine how exciting my next post will be if I do buy a new bike).