In which Team Grumpy make a good impression by turning out in matching kit and bikes - but then disaster strikes! Most years, Team Grumpy rides an early season 2-up team time trial to keep our hand in by brushing up our 2-up skills ahead of the autumn's Duo Normand. Since the apparent demise of the Duo Normand since the 2020 pandemic struck, these early season 2-up events have become an event in themselves, and this year was no exception. After a couple of evenings of food and beer we felt adequately provisioned for a 25 mile time trial. Maybe.

The Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up 25 was held on a course that was about half on dual carriageway, and half on quite seriously undulating back roads. So it's never going to be astoundingly quick, but it's a fun course to ride.

Generally I like to keep up to date with advances in cycling technology. This includes increasing gear numbers, adoption of disc brakes, carbon fibre frames and parts, electronic gears and the like. I like to think I hold views on bike tech that have an appropriate balance between reality and fantasy.

For example, disc brakes seem to me to be welcome because they offer superior braking in some conditions, such as heavy rain. Given that braking efficiency on a bike is mostly down to friction between the tyres and the substrate (in my case tarmac), I've never found disc brakes to have braking performance superior to rim brakes. And I would not like to be on a cycle tour and have problems with a hydraulic brake system.

I've posted a few times on my modifications to my set up of the Cervelo P3 (most recently on my home brew eTap wiring). The recent mods over the last few months include:

• Fitting a secondhand pair of Aduro tri-bars with the high arm pad extensions
• A complex rewiring of the 11-speed (i.e. non-AXS) SRAM Red eTap gearing
• Replacing the inner tubes with Tubolito PFU tubes
• Sorting out the computer mount to accept a front light
• Replaced the ageing big chainring.

I've been meaning to take the P3 out for a test ride to make sure all is in order, and with my first event of the 2024 season fast approaching (the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up 25) I decided to do so this morning.

I've changed the format of these blog posts, and I'm just pasting my commentary from the 1001 Albums website. I've left the weblinks in - the album title links to Spotify (I haven't tested those since I don't use Spotify), and the artist name links to the Wikipedia page for the album. The Global reviews link is to the reviews logged on the 1001 albums website.

Frankly, the whole exercise seems to me to be a bit lacking in diversity - hopefully we'll see more non-English speaking albums later on. (Click title to read more)

Since the beginning of 2024 I've been increasingly using the Rouvy app in my indoor bike training (see Indoor Training - Part 3 Rouvy vs Zwift and Fulgaz). Until the other day I'd only been using this to enliven my indoor cycling on otherwise very dull interval sessions, but I thought I ought to give Rouvy's workouts a bit of a try. And I'm rather impressed.

The Rouvy website has a very clear description of how this all works. So I needn't offer more than a few comments, based largely on using Rouvy on the AppleTV.

The start of my time trial season is looming ominously on the horizon. In 2024 I plan to ride more open events. Over the last couple of years I've ridden fewer open events (which are usually at weekends) because of various family issues. Mostly those issues have kept me from being able to race at weekends. Our club events are usually mid-week, and therefore have fit better with my lifestyle over the last couple of years.

The first event is an open event, the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up '25' on 10th March. In the past this has always offered an opportunity to brush up my 2-up skills with my regular 2-up partner Gerry - the event is in his neck of the woods. In the following three weekends, I hope to ride the road bike TT series aimed at recruiting beginners to the NBRC club events. This series is on successive Saturday mornings on a 5 mile circuit course.

This was the fifth event in the VTTA's Zwift virtual 10 mile time trial series. Over the first four events, I'd seen a gradual improvement from 24:18 to 23:53. As far as I can tell, the improvement is mostly down to improved consistency in maintaining appropriate power levels, and this event saw my most consistent power so far.

My strategy for this was as follows.

Here are albums 21-40 that the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die website presented me. See albums 1-20 here.

Having got through 40 albums over 40 weeks, I'm actually enjoyig the experience - I'm listening to stuff that in some cases I've not played before, and I usually play the album three times. There's one exception to that in this posting - the Aerosmith album.

Another Tuesday, another VTTA Zwift time trial.

Aead of this time trial, I decided to splurge some of the 40+ million drops I'd accumulated in Zwift and buy the best frame and wheel combination available. At least as suggested by Zwift Insider. Armed with a (virtually) shiny new (virtual) cadex TT frame with (virtual) DT Swiss wheels, I entered the fourth in the eight event VTTA series.

Recently I'd become interested to see how the power reported by my ageing Tacx Neo smart trainer (first generation) compares with my Assioma pedals (i have the dual set). My initial investigations involved fitting the Assiomas to the bike mounted on the turbo and comparing the reported power by eye. This seemed to have a significant different at least at some power levers, so I felt some further investigations were merited.

I've posted in the past about the Squeezebox network music players, most recently owned by Logitech until discontinued in August 2012. These devices require a network connection to a server - either an instance of Logitech Media Server (LMS), running on the local network, or the Logitech-provides server at mysqueezebox.com (MSB). The two server systems do have functional overlap which does cause confusion in the user base, of which more later. However, on 25th January 2024 the announcement was made via the support forum that the MSB service would be terminated in February 2024.

In this, my third event in the VTTA 10 mile Zwift TT series, I tried to maintain a steady power. I also tried ride this as I normally do road TTs - that is, at a very low cadence. This worked marginally - I seem to have improved by a piffling 4 seconds! At this rate I may have cracked 24 minutes by the end of the 8 events!

Just before embarking on my warmup, I figured out why I couldn't reach top gear - it was a problem with the placement of the outer gear housing. In retrospect, being able to access the two smallest cogs was not helpful!

I came across intervals.icu a couple of years ago, via an article written about 2021 Olympic road race winner Anna Keisenhofer. In the article she noted the complex and adaptable graphics that intervals.icu delivers, based on data drawn in from a number of sources.

At the end of December, I came across the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die website, based upon the book of the same name. After signing up at the site, you receive a daily album suggestion. There's an app for Logitech Media Server which links to a copy in your local music library, or failing that to your streaming service of choice, making it easy to listen to the album.

So far, I've had 22 albums - several of which I own in some format or other, some were new to me, and some have been added to my collection. As far as I understand it, the albums from the list are presented in a random order. Here's what I've had in order of appearance. Here are the first 20 albums.

If I was a little disappointed at the outcome of my first effort at Zwift time trial racing last week, I did at least pace myself a bit better than I did in event #2. This was held on the same course as event #1, the pan-flat Tempus Fugit course. After a short delay occasioned by an unexpected Zwift update on the Apple TV, I set out to spin through a warm-up ride.

I’ve had a fairly heavy training load over the last week, so maybe I was left a bit jaded. However, the principal failing this evening was a that I didn’t keep a consistent power level through the event. Starting too hard was just the start. I lacked any kind of serious motivation, and repeatedly felt like I just wanted to stop. In fact there’s a surprising number of pauses in the record of the ride (see below).

Flies & Bikes is a website/blog that I started some years ago. Initially I was writing about my interests in Science and my hobbies which include cycling (touring and racing) and tech stuff. At the time I was a University academic, but as my time available to blog waned, the focus shifted towards cycling and tech, then eventually it entered a rather fallow period. 

Along the line, I transitioned the blog from Joomla to Wordpress. I've now reverted it back to Joomla - in doing so, I dropped various comments on blog articles (there weren't very many) as the transition, while automated, leaves quite a lot of manual rearrangement to be done.

I've been using Zwift regularly since April 2020, when I was building back from being an 'early adopter' of Covid-19. In all that time, I've not raced in Zwift, and I've only very occasionally ridden with friends on Zwift.

Until now.

Part 3 of this series is somewhat delayed by Christmas and associated shenanigans such as the traditional Christmas Cold, which really flattened me for a couple of weeks.

In Part 1 I described the hardware I use for cycle training indoors. In Part 2 I’ll describe the principal software package I use for indoor training, TrainerRoad. Part 3 will cover the other software I use, and Part4 the software I use for monitoring my progress (with some hardware comments).

There's a wide variety of apps out there for use with smart trainers. For some of these I'll only give a brief description in Part 3, while others I'll keep my comments very brief as I haven't used them extensively enough to form a valuable opinion.

This is the first in a short series of posts in which I discuss my approach to training for cycle time trials. I find road cycling to be unsuitable for structured training sessions other than extended endurance sessions, due to a combination of climbs and descents (albeit pretty small around here), junctions, traffic lights and of course motor traffic. The exception to that would be the evening 10 mile time trials the club offers through the season, which provided an opportunity for riding at a high sustained pace for 20+ minutes.

In part 1, I’ll give a bit of background to the kit I use.