Douglas F Shearer

BMBS XC 2009 Round 2 - Dalby Forest

The second round of the BMBS was held at Dalby Forest, a venue that shall host the first round of the 2010 World Cup. After my top 10 result at the first round, I was hoping to have a similarly good result. Dalby forest is an off place to get to, the last quarter of the journey takes half the time, due to a combination of rural roads and a massively long forest drive to finish.

The course was a good one, steep climbs, with similarly steep descents. Much was made of the steep drop at Worry Gill, with queues of people watching as I rode down it without even looking. Some people even went home on the Saturday, so unsettled by the course were they.

A fast start was required to make sure that there wasn’t many riders holding me up in the singletrack. This didn’t all go to plan, as starting from the right side of the front row, with a long left hander right of the start line, meant I got into the first section in about tenth. Patience was the key at this point, as I slowly worked through the riders over the first few sections. This wasn’t enough though, as several hesitant riders allowed the first few riders to get away while i was stuck behind. This is nicely evidenced on Vimeo starting at 9:54. The top three can also be seen running away in this video as several riders wuss out on the drop in front of me.

Going into the last lap I heard the announcer say I was in 5th, so I put the hammer down for the last lap. About 3/4 of the way round I could see the rider in fourth place ahead of me. I caught and passed him on the last steep climb, he was unable to respond to the pace I was setting. So I finished in fourth place, definitely an improvement on the last round.

Results can be seen over at Timelaps.

Tags: bike, race, bmbs, bmbs2009, dalbyforest.

Drumlanrig Tearfund Challenge 2009

The Drumlanrig Tearfund Challenge is a road sportive based at the wonderful Drumlanrig Castle. The entry is very limited, and unlike other sportives, you don’t pay to enter, you make a donation to Tearfund. With an entry of 300 the event feels very low key and friendly, and everyone seemed to be keen to chat and swap stories before, during and after.

A unique feature of this sportive is the un-timed rest-stop in the middle. Here you can eat cakes to your hearts content, or at least until the final departure time, without this affecting your overall time.

As per Team Macchiato directives, I was there with Vo, resplendent in our matching (well, not so much these days) Bianchis. I was also wearing an Innerleithen MTB Racing top, just so people would know what to expect when we came to the climbs.

The first half was expected to be the hardest, with a big climb up to the UK’s highest village, Wanlockhead, followed by a section back into a headwind. Up the climb I left the group Vo and I had started with behind, and chatted to the Team Colnago team manager, who was wearing a peaked helmet in an effort to show off his roots. Up over the top of the climb I was on my own down the first descent to Elvanfoot. On this descent I was caught by Vo who unfortunately punctured as soon as we turned into the headwind.

The headwind was a bit of a nightmare for me, as I couldn’t see any groups coming up behind, and all the small fragmented groups of riders I caught up with were going slower than me, so much so they couldn’t hold my wheel when I went to the front. After another descent a fast group came past, mostly made up of Ayrodynamic members. I latched onto this group and we chainganged it back to the castle. I was surprised by some of the big guys missing turns at the front, but maybe they were saving themselves for the second half. Vo appeared about 10 minutes later, having been lucky enough to meet a fast group just as he finished fixing his puncture.

After the cake stop, Vo and I set off again. Two of the riders in our group were riding rather pimped-out Storck bikes, carbon spokes, the works. Both guys evidently were aware of the fragility of their steeds, as rough sections were approached at a far slower pace than what I would call normal. At one cattle grid I almost became a human suppository, as both riders on the front failed to warn those behind, and braked rather suddenly and excessively. On the first climb I was glad to leave them behind, with the sound of crumpling carbon and swearing as poor gear adjustment on one of said bikes left the rider to walk back with broken spokes, mech hanger and seatstay.

The second half was a different beast to the first. Wind played little part, and steep climbs (one was 25% for some considerable distance, and resulted in lots of people walking) were followed by rough gravelly descents. Just my cup of tea. I was on my own for the first twenty miles or so, but in the second half I joined up with a lad of similar age and build to myself who superbly fast on the flats. We worked together for the remaining twenty miles, taking turns on the front on the flatter sections, and me driving the pace on the front up the climbs. Having someone to work with made the pain of pushing so hard a lot easier.

I rolled in at four hours and eighteen minutes, I thought comfortably within the ‘gold standard’ time. Unfortunately the event was slightly shorter than last week, and the correction the the times was not made until after the event. I missed out by a minute, but that’s always something to go for next year.

Without a doubt the Tearfund Challenge is an awesome event, and to make it even better you receive a ‘virtual goody bag’ at the end, being a record of all the things your donation will provide for those in need. I was most glad to see that they will be receiving t-shirts with the image of Che Guevara as a badger, definitely something everyone needs. I wonder how early I can enter next year…

Tags: drumlanrig, tearfund, sportive, bike, race, vo, bianchi, team macchiato.

Easy_Install Leopard bug: No Eggs Found

Today I came across Zed Shaw latest awesome project, Lamson, an Python mail server that isn’t stuck in the past. The Register has a pretty good rundown on it if you want to know more.

So anyway, on installing it, one of it’s dependences, the jinja2 templating engine, exposed a bug in easy_install that seems to be quite prevelant on OS X 10.5 Leopard. The error message will be something like No eggs found in /foo/bar/etc (setup script problem?).

The solution is to upgrade to the latest version of easy_install as so:

sudo easy_install http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.5/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg

Best to check the project page to see if a newer version has be released.

Credits: A similar older fix by Sean Lynch with a non-working patched upgrade.

Tags: python, easy_install, lamson.

SXC 2009 Round 2 - Aberfoyle

After my disastrous start to my 2009 SXC campaign, I was hoping for better at round 2. Things were looking up as soon as the course was announced way back in November; Aberfoyle! Compared to the berms, jumps and baby-smooth groomed trails of the likes of Laggan, Kirroughtree and Glentress, Aberfoyle is a mountain-bikers paradise. I shall bore you with descriptions of my pre-rides, the first was in heavy rain a few weeks before, which made the many steep and rooty descents slightly dicey, but altogether very good fun. The second was in dusty dry conditions a few days before, where even a sedate lap came in at under 22 minutes.

In true Aberfoyle style, it rained for the day preceding the race, and continued until at least midday of the race. Guess what? The course was even more fun! Mud made the previously easy bits between the steep bits into something technical themselves, and apart from one traverse which I chose to run most laps, it was all rideable and resulted in massive smiles on the faces of lots of riders. OK, so that’s the course looking good, how about the race?

I got off to a good start, settling into about 8th on the first forestry-road climb. For the next few laps I made pace with Dave Henderson (Pedal Power RT), sharing some embarrassing and at the same time funny moments on the traverse mentioned above. On the last lap I passed him going into the second singletrack climb, and put a bit of a gap in. We’d caught and passed Liam McGreevy (Banbridge CC) on the penultimate lap, but I could see him coming back, so I kept pushing hard up the last climb. Coming into the finish Liam was right behind me, and despite my best efforts (hampered by my choice to run large tyres finally causing my stays to finally fill up with mud), he came round me on the last corner to claim 5th, with me taking 6th (1st expert). Ace!

First year junior Kenta Gallagher (777 Racing) put in an awesome race to win the Expert/Elite category. Future superstar, right there!

Next up is the giant big-ring BMX course that is Laggan. Oh joy.

Results are on the SXC website.

Tags: bike, race, sxc, sxc2009, aberfoyle.

BMBS XC 2009 Round 1 - Sherwood Pines

Round 1 of the BMBS hit up Sherwood Pines. The course wasn’t really my cup of tea; very little climbing, nothing technical, and fast forestry-road followed by tight singletrack with no passing.

I didn’t get a great start, and despite being gridded on the third row, I got into the first singletrack in about 40th place. This made the first two laps very frustrating, as I had to jump whole groups of people just before every singletrack to save getting stuck behind them walking or just going slowly to get a rest in.

By the third lap I was with a group going at a similar pace to mine, along with some other Scots; Greig Walker (ERC), Jack Richards (Deeside Thistle), and Steven Halsall (VCM). JoJo was doing my bottles at the second feed zone, so I decided not to have a bottle for the first lap as it would be very close to the finish. This plan worked against me though, as I dropped my last bottle shortly after the feed zone, meaning I had to do a lap and a half with no bottle.

Going into the last lap Greig was pointing at his rear wheel frantically, making sure I got into his slipstream before we hit the forestry road and the headwind out of the start-finish area. This I did, and we jumped the rider we were drafting about halfway along, and powered into the singletrack. Halfway round Greig popped out of his pedal on the only steep climb of the race (Still big-ring material though), so I went around him and put the foot down. I gained a few more places during the remainder of the race, placing nicely in 9th, within my target of a top 10. Greig finished in 11th, Steven in 17th and Jack in 22nd.

Results can be read over at Timelaps.

Tags: bike, race, bmbs, bmbs2009, sherwoodpines.

Flic.kr - Flickr Short URLs Explained

Flic.kr links recently began appearing on Twitter and around the web, so I did a little bit of digging. Twitter has brought about a wild storm of URl shortening services, and some issues surrounding them. James Duncan Davidson has a good summing up of these, and some of the solutions.

One of these solutions is to use a link tag on a page to give an alternative short URL. Flickr has started to support this, as so…

On a photo page, say http://www.flickr.com/photos/douglasfshearer/3447346323/, we find in the source:

<link rev="canonical" type="text/html" href="http://flic.kr/p/6fCxXz" >

Twitter clients can now take a pasted Flickr link, and go look up this short url on the Flickr page, without making use of a third party service such as tr.im. Good stuff.

This also works for user accounts, as an example, mine would be http://flic.kr/douglasfshearer.

Tools

The short photo URL is the photo ID converted to Base58, so you need to turn one into the other.

The item that really brought this to my attention was Fraser Speirs Base58Encode Objective-C class, ideal for those of you making Twitter clients.

I’ve released a RubyGem for this, Base58, and a CLI script that takes a flickr URL and gives you the short version.

Tags: flickr, objc, ruby, rubygems, twitter, base58.

Acts_As_indexed v0.5.0 Released

My Acts_as_indexed plugin has been updated to version 0.5.0.

New in this version is:

• Ruby 1.9 and Rails 2.3 compatibility.
• Index location can now be set. Provides Heroku compatibility.
• Better errors on bad options.
• ActiveRecord order argument overrides ranking returned by find_by_index.
• Various test environment improvements
• Various Bugfixes

Get it on Github or view the RDoc.

Tags: ruby on rails, plugin, fulltext search, search, index, acts_as_indexed.

SXC 2009 Round 1 - Kirroughtree

Kirroughtree was a new venue for the SXC, and given my previous racing experience on the trails, I was looking forward to it. The course was a mixture of some of the red-graded manmade trails, some natural sections, and a whole pile of forestry-road. There was little climbing or technical content, so it was never going to be my thing, but it still made for good racing.

The field in Expert/Elite was pretty top-notch, with Paul Oldham making the trip north to give us all a kicking. I got a pretty good start, and was settling in nicely. On a short rooty climb my chain dropped over the back of the cassette, despite not having done this on a ride a few days earlier. I pulled the chain back onto the cassette, and ran up the rest of the climb. While remounting I ripped the scab from my knee on the gear lever, which required me to stand at the side of the trail and think for a few moments. Jack (Richards) told me to get back on the bike, so I did.

On the second lap the chain dropped again, losing me more time. After this I used the granny ring on the same climb so I could stay in the middle of the cassette. I did go slightly wild chasing people back after these two bad laps, a bad idea in hindsight as I suffered for it in my last lap, losing about 2 minutes compared to my previous lap times. The last two laps were contended with a deflating front tyre, control under braking was almost non-existent on the last lap.

I finished 13th, not what I expected given my performances in previous weeks. Hopefully the next SXC round at Aberfoyle will go better for me.

Tags: race, bike, sxc, sxc2009, kirroughtree.

Alistair Lees Memorial XC TT 2009

The Alistair Lees Memorial XC TT is now in its second year. Last year was a multi-lap affair, whereas this year saw a longer 21km course ran as a single lap. Yet again the weather played ball, and racers were treated to minimal wind and some sunshine. I was riding my new bike (more on that to come) in its first ever race, so was expecting good things.

The start of the route was fairly brutal, up a section of zig-zags followed by a draggy bridleway and some more zig-zags. After this there was a tiny bit of natural descent followed by a long gentle singletrack climb where you could really get some speed up. Next was part of the old red-route, complete with the ‘mouse-trap’ rocky stepups, before joining up with the middle of the push-up track. A short section of forestry road took you to the very steep and loose top section of push up track.

After the final steep section really began; the top section of matador is fairly straightforward, although I lost a small amount of time on it due to having my forks locked out. A small section of twisty natural trail finished this off, before zipping along some forestry road to the next section. Natural trails with small berms, jumps and some interesting forestry ploughing made this section truly great fun.

Back to the red-route climb, through the quarry, then up towards Minch Moor before taking the shortcut to the Crop Circles. Along to the Plora Craig rock gardens taking the red options. At the switchback where red rejoins black, we went off the trail onto a super-steep access track onto the uplift track. Like others who had pre-ridden the course, this was a change I was not aware of, and even though I got down the gears fast enough to make it up, I still had to stop at the top and remove a stick from my rear mech.

A blast up the smooth uplift track took us to the top of the DH tracks again. I caught Chris Herraghty (EUCC) at this point, who decided to put his saddle down, something that saved him 7 seconds on the descent. Down the tunnel, new-luge, old luge, new-luge, then down the Merida trail and onto the bottom section of Caddon Bank.

I was rather pleased to find out I had finished in second, with Gareth Montgomerie (Freeride Spain) being first, and Iain Nimmo (Squadra Porcini) being third.

Thanks to Helen at Inners MTB Racing for the great event and support, and Steve at I-Cycles for the coffee, biscuits and banter.

And now, onto the British XC Champs course route….maybe not, I’ll keep that under the hat for now.

Tags: innerleithen, race, bike.

Blairadam Blast

Sunday saw the inaugural running of the Blairadam Blast; a short course XC race run on a fun and spectator friendly compact course. Laps were in the region of two miles, with the rider having the most laps after 90 minutes being declared the winner. Lots of roots and slippy sections kept people on their toes, a bombhole and some lovely swoopy singletrack made for smiles, and only two minor fireroad sections broke up the fun stuff.

I was planning on having fun at this race, and not going too crazy at the start. A spot prize opportunity about halfway up the start straight put paid to that, with a massive effort at the start seeing me take this early prize. I was first into the singletrack, with Sean Clarke and James Fraser-Moodie hot on my heels. About halfway through the lap James came past and started to ride away. Sean tried to go with him but ended up in the middle with about 10 seconds on me. At about the third lap I caught and passed Sean as he removed a troublesome stick from his cassette.

I held second position all the way to the end. Somewhat disappointingly I missed out on doing an 8th lap by about a minute. James took the win, with Sean eventually being overhauled by FOO BAR for the third place. VCM predictably took the top spots in the singlespeed category, with Jon Meredith and Martin Steele in first and second place respectively.

Thanks to the organizers for putting on such a great little event literally minutes away from my house, I really hope the put it on again. Thanks to the event sponsors and volunteers also. Finally thanks to all those who turned up to cheer riders on, and of course to those who took part with smiles and courteous overtaking manners.

• Blairadam
• Results

Tags: bike, race, blairadam.