My new bike, the carrera subway LTD commuter

I wrote before that I was learning to ride a bike again, and even that I’d started tracking my trips by riding with an n810
I did cycle to work a couple of times on Kat’s old bike. I even signed up for a bike2work day last week. Unfortunately no sooner had I signed up than disaster struck on my way home.

The peddle came off! And not just ‘oh dear it’s come unscrewed’ but the threads completely sheared off in the crank. So I was faced with a choice, pay to repair the old bike, give up cycling, or buy myself a new bike.

Well I’d been planning to buy a new bike anyway, I just wanted to prove I’d keep at the cycling first. But this forced the issue and so I ordered myself a Carrera subway LTD commuter bike. Fortunately it was 20% off, so at least something good from the accelerated timescale.

It arrived on Tuesday and I had the fun of assembly. I wasn’t sure how hard this would be. I turned out to be pretty easy. The bike arrived with the bike frame and backwheel assembled with gears, chains, derailers etc in place. The controls were attached to the handle bars, which just needed to be bolted onto the mount point. The saddle came separate and needed to be inserted in the frame and tightened at the appropriate height.

Peddles needed to be screwed onto cranks and the front wheel needed to be put in place with its quick release mechanism. All pretty simple stuff. The most complicated bit was checking the settings of the disc breaks. Though really nothing that you wouldn’t need to be able to do in owning the bike anyway.

The quick release wheel is useful as it means I can hang my bike up as I had been with Kat’s old one, but rather than loosening the handle bars to flatten things against the wall, and have to reset it every morning. I can now just whip the wheel off, and it’s easy to replace.

I inflated the tyres and learned that my foot pump has a broken pressure gauge, that tops out at 40psi. I thought it was failing to add more pressure, but when I switched to an electric pump it’s gauge showed pressure was about right, up at 60psi, so just the gauge had been rubbish.

My first ride on Tuesday was great, I took it easy on the way to work; and everything felt good. I particularly like the stopping power of the disc brakes. Good when hurtling down hill, to know you can stop reasonably well.
On the way home I pushed it (in the rain) and was pleased to make it in about 35 minutes.

I’ve continued to track my journeys with my n810, and have seen a peak speed of 34mph and a best average speed of 12.4mph.

After 2 days in a row, I really needed a break to let my body recover. The saddle region in particular needed some respite. But I’m hopeful that I’m still on an improving path. If I can get to work in the morning in 40 mins, and not feel dead at the other end, I’ll be happy. But some serious training required first.

In the time since I got the bike, I’ve added lights, rear mud guard, kick stand, rear pannier rack, panniers, under saddle bag and of course a bike lock.

None of which are cheap. All told I’ve probably spent 40% of the bikes cost again on accessories. I had really better keep at it now!

The mud guard was a faff, I specifically asked if it was ‘compatible with disc brakes’, the pannier explicitly claimed to be. The Halfords bloke said yes, they were the ones to use… Well to be fair I have used the rear one. It just took a lot more fiddling than I expected. The disc brakes get in the way of the metal supports the bolt to the frame and go to the mudguard. However the pannier came with long bolts and shrouds to allow it’s ‘legs’ to come wide of the disc brake mechanism and bolt in.

this meant I could mount the metal mudguard supports similarly wide. but then I had to bend an couple of kinks in it so that it would enter the clips at the correct angle. The instructions do mention needing the wires bit to enter the clips at the right angle, but don’t mention anything about bending to achieve it.

I’ve still not mounted the front mud guard, since I do not have bolts/shrouds that will widen the mount point. I’ll have to figure something out. Though I was more concerned with the rear guard.

The kick stand I’ll have to take back. I hadn’t checked before hand, but the wire that controls the rear derailer passes under the bottom of the frame and up through the hole I’d need to bolt the kickstand through. Nothing to be done there, I didn’t really need a stand, it was just cheap and I was carried away accessorising.

I’ve not done a commute yet with the panniers, I’m hoping it will really make things easier. Carrying laptop and stuff in a bag on my back takes its toll over the journey. My posture ends up all wrong and my shoulders/neck were feeling it. I did take the bike into town yesterday just to pick up some shopping, and it did make things nice and easy. So looking forward to Tuesday when I next commute.

Overall I’m really getting into this riding to work thing. I’m still not sure how much I’ll continue if the weather is bad, but in the sunshine it is nice. I also like the mechanics of the bike. Yesterday I adjusted the rear derailer, as it was skipping between the top 2 gears. Basically in the penultimate gear, the chain was skipping between the correct gear and the top gear. Adjustments made I shall see how it goes. But there are loads of bits and bobs to play with, and unlike a modern car, it’s all easy mechanics which are user tweakable and that’s cool.

Riding with the n810

I mentioned previously that I was learning to ride a bike, trying to get to a standard good enough to ride on roads. Well I think I’m there, and yesterday I made the journey to work and back. I still had Kat to ride with, so she could show me the way, and I wasn’t entirely relying on my own ability to signal. The journey is about 7 miles in each direction. So I think I can say I’ve done some serious cycling now.

On the way back I decided to run maemo mapper on my n810. And have it store gps trace of the journey. I don’t normally use maemo mapper for much. Whilst it is a cool application, I think it will only really come into it’s own on the next internet tablet which will have built in 3g. Since it requires a network connection to download map tiles as you go.
That said I do have quite a lot of map tiles cached for my surrounding area, so it was able to show me on the map. But of course I wasn’t looking at the map, I just switched it on, stuck it in my pocket and forgot about it.

After we got home I saved the track as a gpx file, then went in search of a site that would do interesting things with the infomration. I found http://utrack.crempa.net/
This site let me upload my gpx file, and it generates a pretty cool report. What’s even better is that it worked from my n810 (although it was a little slow to load) The report shows a google map with your track ontop. But also the graph of elevation over distance, elevation over time, distance over time, speed over distance, speed over time, various statistics about maximum and minimum speed. Speed whilst climbing in elevation, speed whilst dropping in elevation.

Just a whole load of cool stats.

My track included a bunch of wandering around to begin with before we actually set off on the homeward journey. So it reported the journey as about 8.2 miles. But I believe almost a mile of that was just wandering. So the graphs over distance where slightly better for me, as my wandering didn’t cover much distance but did take up a chunk of time.

So you can see that for a big chunk of the time no real distance was covered. Then it’s clear when we set off in earnest for home.

The elevation chart is interesting, and shows very clearly the point we get to otterbourne hill.

It’s also clear from the speed chart that we walked up most of the hill, then had fun going fast down the other side

It was cool to see that my top speed was 23.7 miles per hour. Not bad on a bike, and it will be interesting over time to see how I improve (or not) on the various stats.

Utrack also lets you export the report as a pdf, so you can keep it in already processed form.

That was yesterday, and today I don’t feel too bad. I can deffinatly feel a couple of specific muscles that I clearly haven’t really worked much before. But I’m seriously considering doing the ride to work on Tuesday. I won’t do Monday, because I need to go do a weeks shop after work. And I won’t do Tuesday is the weather is bad, I will be a fair weather cyclist. But I think it will be a good way to occasionally do the work trip without a car. Saving the environment and my petrol bill, if only by an incredibly small amount. But more imporatntly a good way to get some exersice in a slightly less contrived way than just going to the gym.
The main advantage I think is that it’s a very specific goal, and you can’t just decide to quit early. And I came home feeling like I’d achieved something, been somewhere. I was not bored. Whereas the gym is always an effort to make myself go, even though it is only a 20 second walk from the house.

It is also cool to find yet another awesome way to use my much loved n810. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It is the best device I’ve ever owned. I will continue to track my trips, and see what the stats have to say about how I change over time. Will my top speed increase? Or just my average?

I guess watch this space to see if I get into this cycling thing, or if I find it just as easy to not bother cycling as I find it to not bother going to the gym.

Learning to ride a bike.

It’s true what they say, that once you’ve learned how to ride a bike you never forget.
Unfortunately whilst I learned how to ride as a kid, I pretty much stopped at the point that I could go forwards and not fall off. After which, having proved I could do so, I didn’t bother again until a couple of years ago. At that point I had a theory that I’d ride around the place I was living. And so rode enough to find I could still go forwards and not fall off, but for various reasons I did not keep it up and so never got much further.

Recently however Kat has gotten back into riding. She used to cycle a lot, and in a random conversation with a collegue at work, wound up in a bet that she could ride to work, 3 times a week for 6 consecutive weeks. This is no small feat as the journey to work is just over 7 mileas each way. And contains a fairly daunting stretch of national speed limit road, where cars zoom past and don’t always give as much room as they ought.

However despite the challenges Kat has managed her first whole week of this challenge and is giving every impression of enjoying it. At least whilst the weather is accomodating it seems like a good way to include some exersise in a normal daily routine.

All of which has gotten me back on a bike and trying to learn again. My main problem is that whilst going forwards and not falling off is a big part of cycling. I’m still far from a standard I think is required to ride around on busy roads. I can just about handle gears (something bikes didn’t have when I were a lad) But riding with one hand?, either hand, to enable signalling….erm not so much. And actually when I consider my cycling in terms of if I try to ride on a road, I’m not convinced I can manage a straight line that well either.
But practice is all I require so, I’ve spent some evenings in the last week cycling around a local bit of green, and venturing on to some quiet roads. And I am improving. Just need to keep at it and maybe I’ll get to the point where Kat and I can go cycling to places together.

Not sure whether I’ll also try to ride to work at any point. Maybe a little bit. But one thing that trying to learn to ride a bike has highlighted again, is that I really like driving. It comes much more naturally to me, and when I’m not stuck in traffic, I really enjoy it.

But it’s not good for the planet, or my pocket. So given that it’s been proved to me that cycling to work is not an unreasonable thing to do from where I live, I really should give it a try. At least in the summer.

One other thing I’ve learned, that had until this week completetly passed me by, is that there are girls bikes and boys bikes and the difference is more than just the colour. I still don’t understand why a boys bike needs to be different. I understand why having a lower middle bar, means that girls can get on and off in a skirt-friendly way. But why not make all bikes like that? Is there some advantage to the boys bike frame that makes it worth the difference? In any case I am for the moment using Kat’s old bike, and given that it is white, feel no shame in riding a ‘girls’ bike.