To finish off a top week where I won a race, I passed my driving test today! One minor.
It took me six years (from turning 17) to get round to even getting my provisional licence, and three months (with one out of the country) to learn and pass.
Thanks very much to my instructor, Scott at Lemon Squeezy, for the great tuition.
August 22nd 2008 13:59 | comments (0)So at the first round of the series I was 6th, 5th at the second round, and on this attempt I posted the win!
Conditions were wet and muddy, just like how I like it! Got stuck in the big ring similar to the Selkirk Merida, but I’d pre-empted this and made sure I stayed in the middle ring all the way to the top. On the muddy techy section I had to do some running, but even with access to a smaller chainring, I would have been wasting time trying to ride some of the stuff.
Notable entry of the night was Stephen Jackson of GMBC, a man I have not seen at a race in a good few years!
August 22nd 2008 13:52 | comments (0)A few people had been requesting that I moved my Acts_as_indexed plugin to GitHub.
See the original post for the new install details.
The pagination for this plugin has now been rolled into the release version, no more separate plugin.
August 10th 2008 15:37 | comments (0)Hoping for second time luckier after last year’s mechanicals, the Selkirk Merida is an event I’ve really been looking forward to, with lots of effort going into making sure my knee didn’t play up.
It was wet, for the second year running, but I had enjoyed the conditions last year, so this year was going to be no different. This time I’d prepared a spare front wheel with a knobbly tyre on it, hopefully avoiding whatever issue it was that caused me to puncture last year.
I lined up with the few others on the line with about 20 minutes to go. We were informed that we were facing the wrong way, and turning round meant there was about 800 riders in front of us. I followed quick-thinking Hamish Creber who dived into the carpark and along the back of the wall, climbing over a fence to be on the front again.
The road start was an easy 4 miles as expected, just drafting behind the pace-van until the fireroad. As soon as we left the road I jumped round to the top 10 riders, and a gap was quickly made on those behind. From there on it was just all about staying on the bike, and keeping fed and hydrated.
Over the top of Minch Moor I was still feeling good, but on reaching the bottom again, I discovered I was stuck in the big ring. I knew I wasn’t as strong as last year when this happened, so I stopped and botched it into the middle ring.
Next up was an over-the-bars stack at the bottom of the really muddy descent where the 50k riders join, it took me a while to get it back together, and I felt I was struggling on the huge fireroad climb. At the top I munched a packet of crisps and a banana, and set off feeling a lot better to tackle the last section.
Just like last year I felt the finish was a bit easy, a few little climbs followed by a huge descent with nothing to really drain the last of the power from your leg. Despite this I was glad to be finished.
2007: 8th, 4h 32m, ~30m on leader.
2008: 9th, 4h 43m, ~30m on leader.
From comparing the difference in riding between the two years, I feel pretty happy with the result. My knee also gave me no bother, so hopefully some solid training between now and the end of the season should see some other pleasing results. Roll on Penrith!
August 9th 2008 12:34 | comments (0)Things have been pretty hectic for the last 2 months, so I’ve not really been keeping up to date with the whole blog thing, and so now I’ll post a composite update on my travels…
At the beginning of June I travelled to Kuala Lumpur for ZoeCity. Had a wicked time out there, only really spoilt by lack of being able to ride a bike, and the gym in the hotel being pretty lackluster. The Petronas Towers are pretty cool, as well as the Trader’s Skybar opposite.
Check out all the photos!
In July; Vo, Tracey, Murray, Dawn, Emma and I headed to France for two weeks.
Highlights included…
Check out all the photos
July 31st 2008 05:40 | comments (0)Fed up of riding boring, non-technical courses? Then get yourself along to the Innerleithen TT Series!
The course is a spanker, climbs most of the way up the black before taking the shorcut across to the crop-circles. Then it’s round some of the old-school singletrack which I hadn’t ridden since a few years back with Pete Laing. After this, the fun really starts! Down the downhill pushup track (very gravelly), down The Tunnel, down New Luge, out onto the bottom of Old Luge. Then down The Deer Hunter, eventually finishing with the ski-jump into the arena.
I decided to ride there for the first round, a hugely sensible idea after 3 weeks off the bike. I blasted the climb, loving the slightly damp technical bits. Unfortunately, when I hit the old-school part, my right calve locked up, and I sat in the heather for a while waiting for it to ease off. It didn’t, so I had to suffer it for the descent (and most of the next day too). Was still loving the sheer awesomeness of the course.
Organised by Helen Findlay there are another four rounds, roughly the last Tuesday of the month for July, August, and September. Check the web-link at the top for more details.
July 4th 2008 07:46 | comments (0)Team Macchiato headed to Fort William a few weekends ago for the 2008 edition of 10 Under the Ben 10 hour endurance race.
Part of the entry for the 2008 race was a ride up the Aonach Mòr Gondola to register at the top station. Unfortunately, the race was rather over-sold this year, so we were denied our Gondola ride. Maybe for next year No-Fuss would like to limit entries, but that would really go against their ethos. Saying that, the member of their team that told us this seemed rather ‘no-fussed’. Not an impressive start.
Luckily we had alternatives available; I nailed some pasta in the “Glen Nevis Campsite”: http://www.glen-nevis.co.uk/, while Vo and Tracey went into town to grab some from a fast-food outlet.
A good sleep, then up early for registration meant we bagged a great spot for our pits, not far from the transition, and close-enough to the course to see people riding the last section of singletrack.
Vo did the first lap, a setup we both enjoy as it takes the pressure off. The course started with the usual hugely boring and draggy fire-road for the first few miles, followed by the railway track, a super steep climb, then the fun bits, full of rocks and marginally tech-stuff. The newly-cut natural section was awesome, I thoroughly enjoyed buzzing through there in the big ring. ‘The Wall’ also featured, one of my favourite course-features, mostly due to it’s mincer-baiting characteristics.
Vo and I had decided we would do 5 laps each, as since we wouldn’t be competing for the podium this year, there was no point in one of us doing a greater number of laps. Anyway, we had a booking at a restaurant to make!
We finished up 16th, the fastest team with 10 laps. Another lap would have put us in seventh, or thereabouts.
On the Sunday we (or me, with L plates on!) drove back to Edinburgh, but not before a stop in Glen Etive for some sunbathing and a swim in the river.
Great weekend (apart from the gondola fiasco)!
June 9th 2008 07:35 | comments (0)Now, I know I am totally late to the party on this one, but how much does JQuery rock??
For several years now I have done all of my JS(JavaScript) stuff using the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. I think they’re pretty awesome tools, and certainly being part of the standard Ruby on Rails package has helped them gain a lot of respect and usage.
Today I had to do a fairly complex piece of UI prototyping that involved a lot of complex JS. It took me about an hour to do it with Prototype, but I wasn’t completely satisfied with the results. Some of m fellow ZoeCity devs had been talking about JQuery for a new project we’ve just started, so I thought I’d give it a bash. 20 minutes later I had a functional better implementation, with less, neater looking code.
As I’ve already mentioned, Rails ships with Prototype, so how do you go about using JQuery in these places? Enter JRails by aaronchi. This is a Rails plugin which replaces all the regular Prototype utilizing helpers with JQuery. Sorted!
JQuery is stupidly easy to learn, especially for anyone from an OOP background, so you should definitely give it a try on your next project.
May 23rd 2008 20:39 | comments (1)After three weeks off the bike with a(nother) knee injury, I decided to take my return to racing easy. The 50km Whyte Enduro at Drumlanrig was a superb choice; terrain I love, no pressure to do well, and a chilled-out atmosphere.
I decided I was definitely going to take it easy, so took the start easy, spinning away at my gears while others stomped on the pedals up the first fire-road. This payed off pretty quickly, as people started going backwards as soon as the gradient kicked up. After the initial climb it was a short fire-road descent to the middle section of fast rooty descents.
I love these descents, especially when I can use the smooth lines to hold speed. Unfortunately traffic was a bit of a problem, with me nearly crashing twice taking risks to get past people. It never ceases to amaze me how many riders obviously don’t ride technical trails with roots outside of racing. None of these guys were Scottish, so maybe they need to visit the north more often!
On the second lap I didn’t take a bottle. Mistake! I stopped for a few minutes to give a guy a pump, and pulled in to let Nick Craig and Will Bjergfelt past.
Third lap I was starting to feel the heat a bit, did I mention it was 25C plus? Lovely! I caught Vo who was doing the 75km on this lap, and sat just off his wheel for the rest of the lap.
As soon as I started the final lap I could feel the dehydration hitting me. I emptied the bottle I had just taken, but needed more. Luckily Iain and Janet (Nimmo) were having a wander round the track, and gave me some more water, total stars! I had dropped Vo, but later on I had really bad cramps, so he passed me again while I was on the ground stretching the cramp out of my legs. The rest of the lap was a bit of a struggle, and I was pretty shaky at the finish.
16th, not to bad after time off the bike, at least I was happy with it. Hopefully I’ll get more riding in over the next few weeks.
Cheers to Vo for driving.
May 12th 2008 15:50 | comments (0)
Close followers of my equipment turnover will have noticed that I’ve been riding my Kona Kula Primo for almost three years now. Time for a change. And what better to replace it with than another!
Almost. This time I got the 2008 version of the same frame, in the Kula Deluxe colours, which features some improvements for the first time in 4 years:
Otherwise the measurements are exactly the same, and it’s still sub 3lbs. It’s even almost the same color. Looking forward to riding it, when my knee’s better. Oh, and yes, it shall be getting some white SIDs when they’re available.
April 28th 2008 21:15 | comments (0)
This is the homepage of Douglas F Shearer, a software developer and mountainbike racer. Find out more at the About page.
