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A lovely sunny morning greeted me when I got up: unfortunately it was slightly deceptive to start with: there was a heavy frost which made my ride up to Astwood rather nippy on the fingers.  Still, by the time the small and select group of foolhardy riders lined up to start, the conditions were getting milder by the minute.The event was really billed as a 10 mile 2-up, but at the time we all went to the line, there were only five riders.  Now this, ignoring the 'odd man out', wasn't really much cop for a 2-up event, so we decided to ride it as a solo event.  Needless to say, a few more riders turned up, so there was at least one 2-up team riding.Off I went, and after about a mile, I was seriously disappointed by the lack of energy in my legs.  I actually toyed with the idea of packing - but of course this would have been the beginning of the slippery slope.  I pressed on with the idea that it would at least be a good training session, and help to regain fitness lost recently through injury and illness.  The frankly pretty moderate head wind on the Chicheley leg of the course (the BBC weather page suggested it was a measly 4mph) did seem to dent what little speed I could muster, as once I rounded the turn at Chicheley, I found my speed picking up.  Unfortunately, this didn't last, as I climbed the awesome 'Col de North Crawley' (it's a tiny rise in the road - it just seems big when racing!) and wound my way past the University and returned to the finish line.As usual, the elastic nature of time when time trialling was evident - I genuinely though I'd improved to a long 24, but in the event I finished in EXACTLY the same time as last week (25:28).  Most disappointing, though I must be honest and say that training has been minimal over the past week.  Still, onwards and upwards.  I hope.2-up event:

1	8	Ian Marshall	TeamMK	24.38	V42
		Richard Golding	TeamMK		V42

Solo event:

Pos	No	Name	Club	Time	Cat	Vets Std	.+ / -	Vets Std
1	6	Simon Cannings	TeamMK	23.06	V40	25.30	.+2.24	1
2	4	Robert Saunders	NBRC	25.28	V51	27.46	.+2.18	2
3	1	Steve Abraham	NBRC	28.08	S
4	2	Ian Stokes	NBRC	29.12	V51	27.46	.-1.26	4
5	3	Gilbert Wheelwright	NBRC	30.29	V68	31.45	.+1.16	3

Timekeeper: Tony FarmboroughPusher-off:  Bryan Scarborough

This event was the first in the 2011 series of North Bucks club events, and followed a period of injury and ill-health on my part: beginning with a spectacularly painful back injury (which led on to sciatica) and followed by a cold for most of the week prior to the event.  This has been particularly disappointing, since all the signs were that my winter training had been going well as far as early February.It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I set out for the event, which was being held on the popular Astwood 10 mile 'sporting' course.  There had been some discussion about whether the village hall had been hired: in the event, it turned out it hadn't, and a last minute booking enhanced the social aspects of the event.  In fact, the morning proved quite mild, with overcast skies, with sunshine peeping through and a 13 mph SE wind.The event itself was a bit of a struggle for me.  I couldn't get particularly comfortable, nor could I bash out enough effort on the tougher uphill sections.  I finished in 25:28, a rather disappointing time though not surprising given the last few weeks.  Simon Cannings pulled off a long 22, which was pretty damned good for the time of year (he'd said before starting that he'd done masses of base training but little speed work and was unsure how he'd do - well I guess he answered his question!).Result of the NBRC time trial 12/3/11 (Astwood, F5v/10 - including medium gear event)

								Pos. on
Pos	No	Name	Club	Time	Cat	Vets Std	.+ / -	Vets Std
1	9	Simon Cannings	TeamMK	22.54	V40	25.30	.+2.36	1
2	8	Lindz Barral	i-teamCC	23.54	S
3	5	Phil Melling	TeamMK	24.22	S
4	12	Richard Golding	TeamMK	25.20	V42	25.54	.+0.34	4
5	11	Robert Saunders	NBRC	25.28	V51	27.46	.+2.18	3
6	10	Ian Marshall	TeamMK	25.33	V42	25.54	.+0.21	5
7	7	John Buchanan	TeamMK	27.00	V40	25.30	.-1.30	7
8	2	Yvonne Gurney	Baines Racing	27.48	SL
9	4	Clive Faine	TeamMK	28.23	V64	30.45	.+2.22	2
10	1	Daren Haseldine	TeamMK	28.59	V44	26.18	.-2.41	8
11	3	Ian Stokes	NBRC	29.12	V51	27.46	.-1.26	6
12	13	Dave Carrington	TeamMK	30.22	V45	26.30	.-3.52	10
13	6	Katherine Dilks	TeamMK	30.46	LV41	27.20	.-3.26	9

Winner of the NBRC 2011 Medium Gear Event is:-

1

13

Dave Carrington

TeamMK

30.22

V45

Time keeper:- Tony Farmborough NBRCPusher off:- Bryan Scarborough NBRC

The Guardian reports that the police bill to protect the Liberal Democrats at their part conference in Sheffield this weekend will reach £2 million (Police spend £2m to protect Liberal Democrats at Sheffield conference| guardian.co.uk).

Police are spending an estimated £2m to protect this weekend’s Liberal Democrat conference, with measures including a 2.5m high steel and concrete fence to deter up to 10,000 protesters.A thousand officers will be on duty or standby from Friday until Sunday to shield the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, in his own city from anger over public spending cuts and his party’s U-turn on student fees.

Apparently Nick Clegg is to tell his party to ‘hold their nerve’ – I wonder how successful he’ll be with Lib Dem support slumping.  The Guardian reports (Clegg tells Lib Dems to hold nerve) that

The latest YouGov survey for the Sun puts the Lib Dems on just 9%, trailing far behind their Conservative coalition partners on 34% and Labour on 45% – the largest lead recorded by the poll for the opposition since the general election.

And this on top of their hardly stellar slump to 6th place at the recent Barnsley Central byelection.  I guess this is the penalty you pay when you discard your principles for a slice of political power.One wonders whether the 1000 or so police officers would rather be doing something else, particularly when faced by the police service cuts to be imposed by the minority Tory government with support from those LibDems inside the conference centre…

The BBC reports that Fred Goodwin, who led the Royal Bank of Scotland to financial[caption id="attachment_1350" align="alignright" width="189" caption="This man is not a banker"][/caption]disaster bringing the UK to brink of financial catastrophe has secures one of those bizarre gagging injunctions (BBC News – MP raises Goodwin media ban order).  This one of these bizarre “super-injunctions”, which not only bans the reporting of the subject of the injunction but also bans the reporting of the existence of the injunction.  This is an astonishing crushing of press freedom really.  According to reports in the Guardian (Fred Goodwin gets superinjunction to stop him being called a banker):

“In a secret hearing this week Fred Goodwin has obtained a superinjunction preventing him being identified as a banker,” said Hemming, the MP for Birmingham Yardley.

I suppose on the one hand, this smidgeon of information isn’t unreasonable, given that he presumably isn’t a “banker’ any more, but what else is in this super-injunction, and why should reporting of it’s existence be proscribed.  Anyway, the story’s now out and around the blogosphere (e.g. The Plashing Vole)This is a man who presided over a significant component of the financial crash that afflicted the UK, and other countries, and which has seen spectacular negative effects on large swathes of the UK population, who are presently suffering a largely ideologically-driven assault (by a minority Tory government shored up by the LibDems) on many fronts.  Meanwhile, the banking system carries on regardless, awarding themselves bonuses even as the banks make losses or at best marginal profits.

The 2011 UK census forms are being mailed around now.Visit the Census Campaign to find out why you should check the "No Religion" option if you have no religious belief.

This event is the usual curtain raiser for my racing season, and it's also the first 2-up event that I ride each year and as such gives an indication of how Team Grumpy's form is at this early stage in the season.  Usually, we also take advantage of the journey over to Wales to visit interesting archaeological sites, previous visits having included the Avebury stone circle, the Uffington White Horse and Wayland's Smithy.  This year was slightly different: we stayed in Bath for a couple of nights en route to Wales.I'd never visited Bath before - we enjoyed traipsing about seeing the Royal Crescent and visiting sites such as the Assembly Rooms, the Roman Baths, and the Herschel Museum.  Bath appears to be astonishingly well endowed with restaurants, and we visited a fish restaurant (One Fish Two Fish) and a Moroccan restaurant (Cafe Du Globe), both of which were excellent.On to Wales for the main event, and the signs were ominous.  Gerry's training programme had recently gone slightly off the rails, while as observed over at the Team Grumpy blog, I had suffered an extraordinarily painful back injury three weeks before the event which not only prevented training but threw my participation in the event into question.  To add an interesting frisson of excitement, it transpired that the Team Grumpy entry had been lost in the post, and only a phone call of enquiry from Gerry earned us a start in this event.Absorbing medical advice, I did in fact manage to recover in time turn up in South Wales in a relatively pain-free condition.  All that remained was to see how we'd perform on the day.In time-honoured fashion, we conducted our usual preparation: consumption of sufficient energy drink. Thus fortified (and indeed entertained by 80s pop music courtesy of Sky TV), I retired to dream soothing (and deluded) dreams of time trial success.The morning of the event dawned rather cloudy and cool - but not as cold as the sub-zero conditions faced by riders in the 2010 edition of this 2-up.  We set up the bikes with clear apprehension: what would the consequences of our combined lack of training and form be?  And would my back hold out for the whole 25 miles?  More to the point, what was the road damage on the second half of the course to which riders' attention was drawn on signing on?  And, indeed, how significant was the presence of traffic lights on the same section (to which the instruction that riders must 'obey the highway code' was appended?In an effort to answer these uncertainties, we mounted the bikes and nipped out for a brief warmup. It was quickly apparent that (a) the road was in a shocking state, and (b) the traffic lights were at the top of a climb and looked like they could present real problems if at red.With reconnaissance over, and all too soon, we were lined up and ready to go.  We launched ourselves onto the course (see map below), with only a brief backward glance from Gerry.  The opening dual carriageway stretch proved to be very fast, with a gentle tailwind.  We were pleased that we were able to fall back into 2-up mode straight away.  After the first turn, the going got a little harder, as the head wind was nagging.  We were gratified to see our "Manager" on a bridge apparently videoing proceedings as we made their way past the start area (see video below).  Once off the dual carriageway, the usually efficient Team Grumpy changeovers became rather ragged as the pitted and potholed road surface made it difficult to judge whether a rider was pulling out to let his team mate through or merely to avoid crashing through a pothole.A massive sprint pulled us into the traffic lights on amber, but at the cost of a bit of an oxygen debt: this rendered the approach to the turn somewhat arduous.  Returning to the traffic lights, delays were once again avoided.  This was just as well, as by this time we were hanging on for grim death, looking for the finish line, which seemed to take an eternity to arrive.  Eventually it did, at 1:04:36.This wasn't an excellent result (though not as bad as it sounds: the course is rather hard at times), but enough to take a composite team prize.  More to the point, at least Team Grumpy proved their ability to ride well as a team, even after a lengthy winter lay-off.Results are here.  And here's a map of the course: Here's a video, showing us coming out of a roundabout, and doing a changeover: PTW-2-up 6th March 2011.

Road.cc reports that a (or, more accurately, another) major clenbuterol doping ring appears to have been uncovered in Spain (Where's the beef? Spanish police seize clenbuterol, and not a cow in sight | road.cc).  It's all highly topical, given Contador's 'get out of jail free' card this week following his positive clenbuterol test last year.  After successive failures at dealing effectively with sports doping, will this lead to greater crackdown?  This doesn't just reflect my unbridled optimism: incidents like the idiot Ricco's home-brew transfusion reveal the dangers inherent in tinkering with one's physiology.Recent news stories have failed to reveal any Spanish cattle containing clenbuterol, while here's a case of a doping ring actually dealing with the stuff.  Oh and EPO too.  Let's get real here, and not prat around failing to uncover the full story (c.f. the Fuentes affair).  And let's get the UCI and its constituent national federations singing from the same song sheet.A bit more information via BikeRadar.com (Spanish police arrest seven doping suspects): those arrested so far aren't cyclists.  But as Road.cc point out, clenbuterol's clearly in use as a performance-enhancing substance in Spain... An interesting point in the BikeRadar.com report touches on how the police got wind of the doping ring (which mostly targetted amateurs):

The operation began in December based on information received from a professional cyclist. The rider, who wasn't named, received an email "from a person he didn't know offering doping substances," the spokeswoman said. No cyclists have been arrested, but police have yet to disclose who was being supplied with the drugs.

I find I'm just getting used to the accumulated smudges on my iPad screen, and no longer obsessively wipe it clean. Now, I see that this represents a map of the iOS UI! (Remnants of a Disappearing UI: Design Language News)!  As it turns out, each app generates its own pattern of finger-smears, which is actually quite interesting from the perspective of UI design.  So for example, the mail app generates a very different pattern than, say, Safari use - and interestingly the article implicates personal usage patterns relating to how the iPad is held - portrait vs landscape.  The video app only has two fingertip smudges!Which all brings to mind a game I bought for the iPad the other day.  I was intrigued by Papa Sangre, a game with virtually no visuals, in which you navigate in pitch dark using binaural sound effects, in an effort to rescue a lost soul.  It's genuinely quite creepy, but you no need to have decent headphones, a reasonably quiet environment and not too many visual distractions.  Time will tell whether it's fun enough to keep my attention (I don't play too many games on computers or the iPad as a rule).The minimal graphics in Papa Sangre would undoubtedly generate a limited 'heat map': one only uses finger-swipes to orient oneself relative to the soundscape, then finger taps to regulate one's speed in the labyrinth.  And you can trip over your own feet!

One of the reasons I think modern doping in sport needs to be treated more harshly is that increasingly the doping products of choice are likely to be risky. Not only are many of the products biologically active hormones (such as EPO, growth hormone, testosterone), with unpredictable long term effects of the athlete, but it seems to me that practices such as blood doping are in themselves particularly dangerous.Hot on the heels of news that Riccardò Riccò (who has only just returned from a doping ban) had collapsed with kidney failure while out training, comes further revelations that he's to be investigated fro blood doping (Italian Police Investigate Riccò For Blood Doping | Cyclingnews.com).These practices can have dangerous consequences, and it's a shame that the Fuentes blood doping ring wasn't fully prosecuted by the Spanish authorities.I don't know whether he has been blood doping and in any case I hope Riccò makes a good recovery, but I also hope that if he is found guilty of blood doping he gets the life ban he'd be due.Update (0): Velonews reports that Italian media report Riccardo Riccò confessed to transfusion.Update (1): Road.cc reports that the Italian Olympic Committee is to begin a Doping Investigation into sick Ricco.