Douglas F Shearer

BMBS XC 2010 Round 1 - Sherwood Pines

Sherwood Pines once again hosted the first round of the BMBS, and being the second closest round this year, it’s likely to be one of only two I’ll ride this year. It’s five hours each way in the car, not terribly pleasant or relaxing.

The course was described as an ‘evolution of the popular 2009 course’, and it certainly was. Sections that had some technical edge to them had been added, meaning that physical endurance rather than outright speed was what was needed. It still feels a bit like a cyclocross course, with flat out sections separated by what are best described as obstacles, but it was good fun to race on. I rode the big ring for all but one 30s section on each lap, so you get an idea how much climbing there was.

I was gridded on the front row, and had decided to make sure I was still near the front into the first singletrack. A chicane section near the start meant I could use tight lines to hold my position, rather than suffering at the hands of the roadie masses as on the previous year’s straight-out approach. I got into the singletrack in about sixth or seventh, and was instantly held up. I just had to be patient and wait for people to calm down after the craziness of the first lap.

Into the second lap I was immediately passing people, including a group, containing Ryan Bevis, whose members were obviously just looking at each other and figuring out who would chase the leaders. I went straight past the whole group on one section of doubletrack, and didn’t see them again. I soon caught the second place rider, and was just left to chase Giles Drake (again!). He was hovering at about 30s ahead of me after getting a great start, and I just couldn’t close that gap.

I heard 24 hour legend Matt Page was coming up behind, and he was slowly catching me a few seconds at a time on each lap. On the only steep climb I saw he was about 10s behind, so I put the gas down in the last 3km to keep him at bay. I cramped on the second last corner, but had enough time to come in for second place, 33s behind Giles and 17s ahead of Matt.

I’m really pleased with a podium place, bettering my 4th place best result of previous. Other Scot’s had good results too, with Paul ‘Elvis’ Newnham (honourary Scot) and Alex Glasgow standing on the podium in Masters and Veterens respectively. Rab Wardell had an awesome result to score ninth in his return to Elite level cross country, his best ever BMBS result.

Thanks to Becks for doing my bottles, and Paul Newnham for getting a bottle to me in the second feedzone when I fumbled the first going into the second lap. Also thanks to Steve at MSC, and all the folks who shouted encouragement round the course.

Other stuff:

Giles Drake and Matt Page are both on Twitter, and Matt wrote about his race on the Wiggle Blog. Rab has his report on his Kinesis Morvelo Blog.

SXC 2010 Round 1 - Kirroughtree

The SXC kicked off at Kirroughtree for the second year running. Given my poor result at Kirroughtree last year, I wasn’t expecting anything great from it this year, especially as it was to be my first race of the season. The course had been greatly improved, with the long fire road sections broken up with challenging natural singletrack, and some of the fine rocky trails that were missed out on the last visit. There was even a few super steep loamy climbs to contend with, just my cup of tea.

The field was just as glittering as the year before, with Paul Oldham making the trip up for some early season action. At the start I knew Paul was right behind me, so I took it easy till he came past then jumped on his wheel. I couldn’t hold him for long, but got into the first singletrack in about fifth place. By the end of the first lap I was in sixth, and would remain so for the remainder of the race. I could see Giles Drake of MSC up ahead almost all the time, and closed within fifteen seconds of him going into the last lap, but was unable to catch him as little hydration meant I was suffering cramp pretty bad on the steep climbs. Luckily I had enough in the tank to hold off Alex Glasgow who had punctured earlier in the race.

I’m pretty chuffed with sixth place in the first race of the season, the preparation and training is definitely starting to pay off. Thanks to Steve and Linda at the Cairnholy Old Farmhouse for the fantastic accommodation for the weekend.

Training Camp: Lanjaron 2010

I’ve not been partial to the idea of killing myself on the bike for a week then sharing a plane back with lots of ill people in a state of reduced immune. This year I decided to break with that tradition for the chance to go to Spain with some of Scotland’s Elite XCers: Andy Barlow, Dave Henderson, and Paul C Smith. We headed to Lanjaron, just north of Motril on the southern Spanish coast, and were staying with Freeride Spain for the week in one of their rented villas.

We rode for six days out of the seven we were there, covering about 500 km and 16,000m of climbing. The rain was non-stop for the most part, but at least it was 10C warmer than the freezing temperatures at home. Spain isn’t really made for the rain, what with exposed electrics on the buildings and road cuttings through sediment that collapsed and created some nice landslides for us to wade through.

The training value was fantastic and apart from the first day, where a 30mile spin turned into a 80mile epic, I felt I managed well, even competing for some of the sprints at the end of the six mile climb home. My results this year have already shown benefit of the extra training both at home and on the trip, so I’ll definitely be considering similar next year.

You can find more pictures of the trip on Flickr, and Paul’s own report on his blog.

Integrity Git post-receive Hook

I host a few of my repositories myself, rather than on GitHub. As a result I can’t take advantage of their marvelous post-commit hook support. Instead, when it comes to informing Integrity of new commits, I have to use a custom Git post-commit hook.

Use the following in /path/to/repo/.git/hooks/post-receive changing the login credentials, URL, and project name as necessary. Make sure the script is executable.

#!/bin/sh

# Username and password not needed if publicly accessible.
curl -d '' http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@example.com/PROJECT_NAME/builds

echo "\n\n=========="
echo "  Received push and alerted Integrity"
echo "==========\n\n"

Now whenever I push to the remote repo, Integrity is informed and grabs all the new commits to run the test suite against them. This could also work as a post-commit hook, if your Integrity CI server pulls from your local working repository.

Mountain Mayhem 2009

The first in a series of ‘better late than never’ postings.

The Glencroft Rabble invited me to ride the 2009 Mountain Mayhem with them, a race I had never done before, and indeed my first 24hour since I swore off them after bad experiences in 2006. Queue a road trip with the boys down to deepest England in Gav’s Dad’s ridiculously powerful VW van. We entered the event arena with the ceilidh music blaring, much to our own amusement. After a few rude folk insisting their barbeque would take up five tent spaces, we settled next to some of the army crowd.

For some reason I was volunteered to do the Le Mans style start. This was pretty brutal, as running on hard ground in race shoes is not something super comfortable. After finding my bike I pushed on to pass loads of folk and eventually come in 16th or so after the first lap. The course was pretty awesome, though as we later found out, the chicken run on one steep descent was about 30s faster.

Geoff broke his mech on his first lap, resulting in him losing a few minutes. This was OK, but it resulted in me being a few minutes late to meet him after his next lap as I didn’t adjust his lap time for the mechanicals. My fault, but luckily it was one of only a few minor troubles we had.

During my first night lap it rained, which turned the dry dusty ground into an icerink due to the putty-like clay on top. We were all running dry-tyres, but were managing to ride everything with ease, only losing a few minutes a lap compared to the dry times. Gav did have a bit of a mega crash on a cattle grid on his wet lap, but being the legend he is he got straight back up to finish his lap then report to the first aid tent.

The weather turned nice again, and the course soon dried up as a result. This didn’t stop the organisers taping out one fun part of the course as someone had broken their pelvis. Shame, as I was loving the roots and mud on that section.

Someone told me we were in third in expert and fifth overall before my 6am lap. This was the boost I needed to crack on with the rest of my laps. I passed George Budd from Team Salsa, who were in second at that point, on the steep forestry road climb. I said hi, and kept the pressure on for the rest of the lap. The rest of the guys did the same for our remaining laps.

In the end we were fourth overall, and the second expert male team. Great performance all round.

On the way home we were pretty sleep-deprived. Geoff and I amused ourselves by texting BBC Radio One’s “The Surgery” with our own definition of ‘success’. Well, they did ask.

About a week after the event, I discovered that I had the fourth fastest climb time for the steep forestry road I mentioned above. Not bad since this was just the place on the course I was using to make up time, rather than specifically targeting it.

Thanks to Geoff, Gav and Jack for the brilliant weekend. Also thanks to Andrea for the cups of tea and food between laps and afterwards.

Clearing a File Input Field Using JQuery

While working on some file uploads today, I was in need to a way to clear a file input field if a user changed their mind after selecting a file. I came up with the following simple solution.

In my example I place a ‘clear’ link next to the field, but a modified method could be called from anywhere.

HTML

Wrap the field you intend to clear in a span, with a descriptive ID so we can find it.

We’ll also want our ‘clear’ link to be descriptively IDed.

<span="myfileinput"><input type="file" name="myfile" /></span>
<a href="" id="clearmyfile">clear</a>

JavaScript

Now in our JavaScript (JQuery) we want to add a click event to our clear link which will clear the file input field.

$('#clearmyfile').click(function(){
  var fieldSpan = $('#myfileinput');
  fieldSpan.html(fieldSpan.html());
});

Explanation

Since we can’t write to the value of a file input field due to security concerns, instead we overwrite the contents of the span, with the contents of the span (itself), thus creating a new file input DOM object which doesn’t have a value set.

A crude but working example can be found in this Gist.

Kona Kula Deluxe 2008 Dropout

Last night I snapped the replaceable deraileur hanger on my 2008 Kula Deluxe, and was looking for a replacement.

Kona don’t list it in the technical guides on their website, and the hanger is merely marked with ‘S9’ or ‘6S’ depending on which way you hold the hanger. Thankfully after a bit of looking around, I discovered what I wanted in the form of a BETD 197 hanger.

Phew, now I can be riding in two days, while my dealer-ordered one can be a spare.

2009 in Review

Just like I did for 2008, 2007 and 2006, I bring you my review of the year, in the form of one of those annoying round-robin email type question things. Yeah!.

This year I’ve changed some of the perennial questions to more appropriate things.

1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
Bought a car.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Yeah, I beasted it on the bike. Next year; Do the One Hundred Push Up Challenge by my birthday (February 20th), and learn to juggle by the years end.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Not that I noticed.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Magnus and Emma’s Mother, Margaret Bean. May they both rest in peace.

5. What countries did you visit?
Pretty poor this year, only Cyprus.

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
Less paperwork.

7. What date(s) from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
8th October; Driving through the night to Newcastle after Margaret died.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Minor race positions probably.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Crashing on the Forth Road Bridge while looking totally the wrong way (the truck I was looking at was pretty exciting).

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Had a sore throat for a week, been lucky this year.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
My MSC Koncept Carbon frame.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Kirsty, my sister, who graduated. Again.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Davide Rebellin. At least with Schumacher it was predictable.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Bikes, despite buying the car.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Seeing Up! at the cinema.

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?
Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Happier.
ii. thinner or fatter? The same, as always!
iii. richer or poorer? Richer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Training.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Driving.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
Mum’s for Christmas day, Dad’s for Boxing day.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?
My dad, getting updates on the happenings in his world.

22. How’s the big romance going?
Ace.

23. How many CDs did you buy this year?
Probably only about five. Hello digital music era.

24. What was your favorite TV program?
The Big Bang Theory, second season just keeps the laughs coming.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Nah, I’m pretty mellow with everyone. Same again.

26. What was the new best book you read?
A Dog in a Hat – Joe Parkin. Pure comedy.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
MGMT.

28. What did you want and get?
A car. A nice watch.

29. What did you want and not get?
Sledging, despite all the snow.

30. What was your favorite new film of this year?
Burn After Reading.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I was 24, rode my bike and had a birthday meal..

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Retiring to become a full time cyclist.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
It was the closest thing to hand when I wanted to put clothes on. Same as last year. Again.

34. What kept you sane?
The bike, Emma. Same as last year.

35. Which public figure was the biggest loser of 2009?
Tiger Woods. What an idiot.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
The car scrappage scheme coming in right after I swapped cars.

37. Who did you miss?
Magnus the Dogoid!

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Steve Deas, he helped me out loads this year.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009:
Have more than one compass, so you can find it when you really might need it.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
“It’s times like these we learn to live again, it’s times like these we learn to love again”

SXC Round 4 2009 Fort William

The fourth round of the SXC was also the Scottish Champs. I was hoping to reasonably well, maybe get myself a top five. This didn’t happen for me, as on the day my legs were not enjoying the three big-ring flat sections, and I lagged quite a bit towards the end, eventually ending up in eleventh place.

The course was awesome though, with the super steep start section, then some of the climb from 10 Under the Ben two weeks before. Then into an awesome natural descent, full of stumps and dropoffs to catch out the unwary. I honestly wonder what it would have been like had it rained for several days before the event.

Muchos respect to Andy Barlow for finally adding the Scottish Champs to his Palmares.

The SXC site has results, and images are available from Colin Robinson.

10 Under the Ben 2009

No Fuss yet again put on a sterling event for the 2009 edition of 10 Under the Ben at Fort William. And they got the weather right, with 30C heat beating down on the riders in the middle of the day.

I was riding with Allan ‘The Love Machine’ Love, taking it easy, and generally having some fun. This didn’t stop me having a go at the fastest lap. I thought I had it in the bag, even though on my first and fastest lap my front mech cable slipped leaving me unable to get into the big ring. No worries really, it possibly stopped me from pushing to big a gear. It looked to be in the bag, until Mr Andy Barlow popped in to do solo, and pushed out some of the quickest laps of the day, beating my times be a few minutes. Not to worry, it’s all a bit of fun.

Like last year I felt the event was slightly over-subscribed, with far too many people on the course at any one time. Despite the good humour of those I passed, I did have one crash when someone stopped right in front of me at a water trough. I expect a little inexperience from people, but it was so busy it was feeling almost dangerous at points.

The course was a cracker though, definitely the best so far, with some of the World Champs descent used as a climb, and lots of nice natural stuff thrown in.

I wasn’t on my own for the weekend; Emma came up for a mini-holiday, along with Magnus (who got lost briefly when he went to insect the sausages cooking across the carpark). Murray and Vo were riding solo, with Dawn and Tracey supporting them respectively. Murray did six laps, which was mightily impressive since he underwent brain surgery less than a year ago. Vo beasted it up for eight laps, resplendent in his Molteni top.

Photos from the weekend can be seen on Flickr.