Fremantle today

Prove your literate.

Knowlidge Is Empowermentfull!

Mama's got a brand new hat. And I got her before she could whip out the traditional V for victory.

Lunch

Found some shells.

Mama keeps an eye on the beach.

Home time.

Visitors

The in-laws are here, which is excellent because I’ve taken a week off work to be their chauffeur. Yesterday we went to the chocolate shop and the wildlife park. Please note, it is now law that any photo displayed on the internet must have some sort of effect and vignetting applied. I’m sorry – it’s out of my hands.

This is what chocolate looks like, in case you're unfamiliar with it.

 

And here's what Kaz looks like when she's eying off chocolate.

 

Mama went full Japanese grandma for this trip. She's even wearing gloves to keep the sun off her hands.

 

Sakurako gets stuck into the free sample chocolate.

 

Kangaroos are very friendly when they think you might have food.

Two friends.

 

Someone's starting to look hot and tired.

A koala.

 

Another koala. They're not really bears, you know.

 

I did something

It’s going to be über-warm today so Kaz got up early and went for a ride while I addressed a task that has been lurking in the background for some time at Rollerson Towers. A sample of the in-laws is coming to visit in a fortnight and we need to make some space for them. I had to move stuff from the spare room out to the back room where the Indonesian furniture my brother bought in a fit of failed entrepreneurialship is kept. I reckon that hour’s work has earned me the rest of the day on the sofa, don’t you think?

 

Seatpost

My Bianchi Vigorelli was my first proper road bike. When I bought it, Steve at Elite Racing Cycles fitted it up for me and, being new to cycling, I didn’t like to change any of the settings. I now know a bit of trial and error doesn’t go astray and that my preference is for a higher saddle position. In any case, I spenta couple of years riding around on the Vig in the sun and in the rain and then put her into storage while I lived in Japan for a couple of years. When I got back and rode it again, I found I was now used to a higher seat position but when I tried to adjust the height, it turned out the seatpost  refused to move. It probably didn’t help that my last ride before leaving for Japan was quite a wet one.

I spent the next couple of months spraying the post with WD-40 but it still refused to budge. Eventually, a few weeks ago, after one or two pinot noirs at the bike shop, we put the thing in a vice and twisted it and belted it and destroyed the post but it still refused to move inside the frame. The only thing left to do was to go the hardware shop, buy a hacksaw blade and cut the thing out.

First the saddle had to come off.

and work begin on the post.

 

An incision here...

...another one there.

The post refused to fold in on itself so I ended up having to wedge  a screwdriver in there and twist and wedge and twist and wedge, slowly peeling the aluminium post off the steel frame. It sort of became my after-work hobby for a couple of weeks. Eventually I got my hands on a great big screwdriver and used a shifting spanner as a substitute hammer, which speeded the process up nicely. It took a while, but I got the bugger out.

All that's left of the old seatpost.

 

The Vigorelli looking much happier with a new post.

The moral of the story is: grease up your setapost (unless it’s carbon, in which case, don’t grease up your seatpost) and every so often give it a little adjustment to make sure it still moves. Or was the moral to just maintain your bike a bit? Well, something like that, anyway.

MTB Friday

I knock off work a bit early on Fridays. Today I got a message from Uncle Jason that he’d finished early, too. So we went out for a Friday evening mountain bike ride in Kalamunda. It’s a perfect time to ride – no one’s about, the light is perfect and the forest is cool. Jason thrashed me around the track but I got more confident, which is a plus, and we even saw a few kangaroos. Lovely way to spend a Friday evening.

You mark my words - the MTB dork look is right back in.

Jason sets the controls for the heart of the sun.

And shows off his mad skillz.

Oh yeah, and this was a lovely little bit of forest.

Here's the course we did.

And just in case you’re interested, here’s a video someone else made of part of the trail we did today. It was pretty good fun.

12-hour MB race

Okay, so I always write too slowly and then put off writing up a blog post during the week because I come home and feel like I’m too tired to write anything coherent so I’ve decided to experiment with just putting something up and then adding to it during the week as I have time and remember things that happened. Maybe this will work better than hoping I can sit down and write a post in one hit when my time management skills are so obviously poor. Anyway, to start with, here are some pictures from this weekend’s 12-hour MB race:

Or you could look at Jason’s flickr photos of the day, which are considerably better than mine.

So with a whole day’s mountain biking experience under my belt, it only made sense to enter a 12-hour race at night. Our team of four was me, Chong, Uncle Jason and Karl. Karl is the only one who has done one of these before and he was the driving force behind our team being set up. Whereas he was very prepared, the other three of us hadn’t even got supplies in until the morning of the race. I should have spent Saturday morning in bed but instead I got up early to take some students to surfing lessons; something I would pay for later. I didn’t actually surf, I just waved the students in the direction of the surf school, it was the early-ish rising that I would pay for. In any case, by the time I got home, Kazuko had done her morning ride and was busy preparing things for us to eat. The team was most impressed with her onigiri and chicken karaage that we got to eat during the night.

When Chong and Jason came around to pick me up, I was still figuring out what I needed to take and fluffing around the house throwing random stuff in my bag and hoping I hadn’t forgotten anything important. We had tasty hamburgers for lunch before heading off to Karl’s place.

Kaz waves goodbye from Rollerson Towers

As you can see, Rollerson Towers is experimenting with this season’s cutting edge fashion, ‘building site chic’. This time next year, everyone will decorate their house like this. And our place will probably look the same, as my brother has employed the world’s slowest builder to build the house out the back.

Loading up Karl's massive car.

Karl has some sort of massive four-wheel-drive car which allowed us to load it with stuff, including all four bikes without having to take any wheels off.  We also hada tent, a couple of chairs, a blow-up mattress, a chilly bin full of food, and sundry other items. We got to the site of the race in good time, paid our gold coin “donation” for parking and were able to choose a campsite right next to the race course.

Young child tries to infiltrate our operation.

Uncle Jason breaks out the peanut butter.

You may think  we over-catered for ourselves, but let me assure you, it turned out we were slumming it. The aging bogans in the camp next to us had brought a generator to power their ridiculous music system and whatever other electric toys they had brought with them. I didn’t catch whose music they were playing, but I did overhear one of them singing the Wiggles to himself as he was doing something to his bike. I suspect the Cold Chisel only comes out on special occasions these days when the missus is away. And without wishing to be too snide, there does seem to be something of a disconnect between the lap times they were telling each other they got during the race and their final team times.

Uncle Jason almost certainly took better photos than me of the event. (And he did)

Karl gets ready to open the racing for our team.

Once we’d settled in, there was little to do but wait about for the start and work on eating all the food we had brought with us. Our plan of attack was to send Karl off first,as he was the only one among us who had done one of these before. The rest of the batting order was chosen on strength, with Jason at first drop, then Chong and finally me. We based our calculations on averaging about one hour per lap so it made perfect sense to me to go last because if we didn’t have enough time for all of us to get three laps in, I would be the one to miss out and it would probably be my fault as well. Also, I reckoned I was most likely to not want to do a third lap.

Big crowd for briefing.

At the pre-race briefing, we were informed that the race had the maximum possible number of competitors, 400, and I’m pretty sure that out of all of them, I was the only one who still had reflectors on his spokes. I thought I might have pie-plate exclusivity as well but I did spot one on another bike during the night.

After the briefing, Karl headed off for the start line while Chong, Jason and I lingered around the finish and transition area before heading back to the campsite to make ourselves comfortable and wait for Karl to cycle past.

Karl nears the end of the first lap. Note the red eyes of rage. His chain came off very early on and he claims he was the last rider on the course for a while. Luckily for me, this meant I didn't ride the slowest lap of the night.

Karl and Chong get a Mexican wave going while Jason is out on the course somewhere showing the rest of us how to ride.

Early morning. The sun is up, making riding easier but it was a bit chilly in the forest.

Uncle Jason waiting to ride what would have been our 14th lap.

The course ran through the campsite. Here is some bloke riding past.

And here is the reason we only got 12 laps in. Karl is too strong for his chain. Apparently this is all the excuse he needs to buy a new bike. He was overheard telling his wife that there was a world-wide shortage of 10-speed chains.

Part of the campsite.

My bike.

I crashed so much that I may as well have just rolled my bike in dust.

Jason's bike. Not a Bianchi?

My forks. I knew you'd want to look at them.

MTB Friday

Just as an aside, why is the abbreviation of mountain bike MTB? Tain is not a word and nor is moun. I checked in the dictionary. After all, we call it a CD, not a CPD. Which is odd, because pact is a proper word and com is a proper prefix (I checked the dictionary again).

Anyway, I’ve gone and bought myself an MB, haven’t I? You can never have too many bikes and I spotted one going going quite cheaply at Elite Racing Cycles and to make it even cheaper, I was given a special deal. I couldn’t say no. This means I can enter the 12-hour dusk til dawn MB race after all.

Chong also has an MB but he hasn’t used it much so we thought we had better get a bit of MB experience under our belt ahead of this 12-hour race at the end of November. Here’s a picture of our bikes:

Mine's the cheaper-looking white one.

Always one to be different, Chong’s only carbon bike is his MB.

Last Friday was a public holiday thanks to the Queen being in town, so it seemed only right to avoid town like the plague and head for the hills. We performed very nicely on the ride out to the base of the Perth Alps and even tried a little off-roading by riding on the gravel next to the road. This filled us with such confidence that it came as a little shock when we finally did have to leave the road and get on to a trail. We were, in a word, pathetic. The slightest uneven surface or steepish descent brought out remarkable fear in us. I mean, we were ready for surfaces not coated in asphalt but this path had chasms the size of Geikie Gorge. We stumbled on to an old quarry before finding a path that should take us where we wanted to go but not before we had to go up a stretch of trail that held a good, steady 20 per cent gradient.

At the top we found what we were looking for—an MB track known as the goat farm. We hopped on to this and it all started quite well but, to our horror, we soon found it had perilously steep descents and all sorts of rocks everywhere. We picked our way pretty hopelessly through the rocky patches but got up to almost as fast as walking pace on some of the flatter sections. Here’s Chong nervously prodding his bike along the track:

Chong sweeps the path for stray pebbles before giving the all-clear to proceed.

We did somehow manage to go fast enough for my handlebar camera to fall off (clearly I lack the strength to tighten it properly) and to lose one of the mounting screws. Our ride up till that point looked like this:

We tried a bit harder on the second lap and managed to figure out that you can actually run over things on an MB. I’m looking forward to getting back to the goat farm for more practice.

After all these goat farm exertions, I had a lie-down under a tree and got bitten by this ant:

Look at his big, nasty pincers.

I’d've taken revenge and crushed him but you have to admit he is quite scary-looking, isn’t he. I magnanimously let him live.

Karl gave me and Chong a hiding and I’m pretty sure he was going as slowly as he could for our benefit.

But the day was not yet over for Chong and me. We had to ride to Karl’s place from where we drove out to Jarrahdale, the scene of the 12-hour race. Having just gained a little confidence riding over rocks, I had it shattered again by the pea gravel that covered this trail and had me floating and sliding around every corner.Karl gave me and Chong a hiding and I’m pretty sure he was going as slowly as he could for our benefit.

Chong and Karl boil a kettle waiting for me to catch up.

Inevitably I fell, as you would expect, in the most absurd possible way. I was going so slowly I couldn’t get over a log on the path and tumbled to the left. This broke the ice and enabled me to fall off a good two or three more times before we finally got back to the car.

It's a manly wound.

Then, two days later, Chong and I entered the two-up time trial (on proper road bikes this time) and Chong rubbed in his superiority by taking all his turns at least 2kph faster than mine. Lucky there weren’t any hills on the course. He still managed to drop me within sight of the finish line so that’s it – I’m fitting aero bars to my bike now.

World cup champions

Today is a wonderful day to be a New Zealander. Like it or not, you can’t be a kiwi without being touched by rugby. For me, I’d grown up in Australia but my parents were always pretty patriotic. There really wasn’t much rugby in Perth but when it was on the telly, my dad did his best to explain the rules to me. For a boy who had grown up playing field hockey, it seemed bizarre. What do you mean the forwards do the defensive work and the backs are the ones who score all the points? I’d thought of joining a club before this but it took New Zealand’s 1987 world cup win for me to look up rugby clubs in the phone book and join Perth-Bayswater – the closest club to where I lived. I went from being a reasonably competent hockey player to one of the worst rugby players you’d ever hope to see, but I loved the sport. One of my enduring memories is when the world cup champion All Blacks came to our club in 1988. Apparently the club pulled off something of a coup by getting the All Blacks to visit us instead of one of the more successful clubs. I just remember seeing them get out of a bus and stand in front of the clubhouse and being amazed at how big they were – especially John Kirwan. The guy was a winger but stood as tall as the second rowers. They all seemed like giants to 16-year-old Bruce.

Although I’ve never really been any good at rugby, I’ve always followed the sport avidly. My first English teaching job was in Prague in 1995. With an English colleague, I watched some of the pool games at the French cinema there. I wrote the name Lomu on his whiteboard after Jonah Lomu singlehandedly ran over the top of the English team in that year’s semi-final. Unfortunately his students changed the L to a D, as domu means go home in Czech, so he never got the joke but I’m sure he would have appreciated it. In 1999, I assumed we would have no trouble against France and didn’t bother staying up for that semi-final. In 2003, we were certain to beat Australia so I went to the pub and ended the night surrounded by gloating Aussies. In 2007, we had totally smashed the French every time we had played them for the past four years so the game should have been a procession but I sat in my living room watching in horror as the French held us out for a whole half a match.

This year was to be different. This year we were playing at home. The All Blacks drew a relatively easy pool and had no problems beating Tonga, Japan, France and Canada. France? They were lucky to make the finals. They lost to Tonga and only got through to the play-offs because Canada had beaten the Tongans earlier in the pool games. New Zealand took a while to get on top of Argentina in the quarter-final but beat them handsomely in the end. France was lucky to beat England. New Zealand were fired up for their semi-final against Australia. They smashed the Wallabies in the first 20 minutes and that set them up to stay on top for the rest of the game. France was lucky that the Welsh captain was sent off after 20 minutes and they still only managed to win by one point.

The final should have been a stroll in the park for the All Blacks. They had beaten the French handsomely in their pool game. They had taken their closest rival Australia apart in the semi-final. The final was practically part of the victory parade. Of course it hadn’t been all smooth sailing for the All Blacks. Dan Carter, generally acknowledged to be the world’s best player, had missed pool games because of minor injury. Everything seemed under control but in the week leading up to the quarter final, he injured his groin in training (I know – had it been anyone else, I would have found it hilarious, too) and his back up, Colin Slade, is a talented player but had spent the whole tournament looking nothing other than nervous. To replace Carter, Aaron Cruden was called into the squad. He’s a young guy and full of promise. He was selected for the All Blacks’ early tests last year but his star faded and he was even dropped by his Super 15 team during the season. There are photos of him in the crowd during pool games with a beer in his hand.

Naturally, Slade got injured during the quarter-final and his world cup was over. This actually seemed like a good thing because of how nervous he had been looking and Cruden slotted into the team as if he belonged there. In fact, he made the backline almost all entirely from Wellington’s Super 15 team and they looked very confident (unlike in the Super 15, where they somehow conspired to be rubbish). Cruden was our saviour in the crunch game against Australia and pretty soon New Zealand was singing his praises. There were t-shirts and everything. And yeah, Stephen Donald, that villain who cost us the game against Australia in Hong Kong last year, was there but the coaches had the good sense not to let him on the pitch.

So we expected the French to put up a bit of a show on the final, but the All Blacks to eventually get on top of them and win by, I don’t know – 20 points or so. The All Blacks scored an early try and looked on top of the game except that Piri Weepu, the hero of the quarter final, kept missing kicks at goal. We managed one try and should have gone to half time leading by 13-0 but because Piri’s kicking was a bit off (and let’s not be too harsh – he was brilliant in every other aspect of his game) the score was, in fact, only 5-0. To make things worse, 34 minutes in to the first half, Cruden buggered up his knee and that clown Donald came on. Some of us would have preferred the All Blacks to have played with just 14 men. I mean this is the sort of thing people tweeted after the semi final, where Donald was on the bench but didn’t actually get to play:

Very impressed with Stephen Donald's game tonight.—
bruce rollerson (@brucerollerson) October 16, 2011

But instead, he came on, played particularly competently and kicked a penalty which would eventually turn out to be the winning points. At 8-0 up, New Zealand looked fairly comfortabke because the French hadn’t even looked like scoring. Until, of course, they did score a try.And convert it to put the score at 8-7. I know of no other expression for my feelings than to say that I was shitting bricks. And I’d imagine the rest of New Zealnd was with me on that one. At one point, the French were awarded a penalty. Had they been successful, that would have been the game over for the All Blacks – they were at sixes and sevens. They didn’t look remotely like scoring. They were being outplayed by the French!

I wouldn’t say the French were the better team in this game but I would have a hard time proving the All Blacks were either. All I can say is that ther was great relief and elation when the final whistle blew and the French hadn’t managed to score more pints than the All Blacks. We cracked some New Zealand sparkling wine, went to a restaurant for dinner and ended the night with me trying to persuade my  father that there really wasn’t any point getting into an argument with the bouncer at the wine bar as it really was pretty close to closing time. I’d like to celebrate all night but I suppose I’m expected to be at work tomorrow this morning.

Time trialling

Here in WA, we love superlatives. We live for them. It’s what we’re all about. We don’t need to know it’s been a wet month – we can see that. We want to hear that it’s been the wettest September since 2007. And we trust superlatives, we don’t question them. It’s why we will happily accept and repeat that Perth is the most isolated city in the world without going through the whole rigmarole of looking at a map and finding places such as Ulan Bator or Honolulu. You’ll remember from an earlier post that we even have a radio station that will tell anyone who will listen that Perth is the world’s greatest city but this is no surprise to the residents familiar with our deluge of world’s best things.

And so, without recourse to such trivia as facts or research, I feel no shame in telling you that I am a member of the World’s Most Successful Time Trialling club (see what I did with all those capital letters?). Riders from the WA branch of the Australian Time Trialling Association picked up two gold and one bronze medal in the time trial events at the recent road cycling world championships. Under 23 rider Luke Durbridge and junior rider Jessica Allen both won gold while defending elite women’s world champion Emma Pooley finished an impressive third considering it’s a flat course and she is tiny. I don’t know if these three are all members of the WA ATTA but they have all done more than a few rides with our* club and, frankly, that’s good enough for me.

* I say ‘our’ – I’ve been a member for about two weeks now.

The great thing about time trialling is that you don’t have to be the best or even want to be the best to do it. You can spend the GDP of a small African nation on your bicycle or you can show up with something you found on a neighbour’s verge on large rubbish day and see how well you get on with that. And oddly enough, the slower your bike or the less fit you are just means you get more time to emulate the suffering of your professional heroes.

I’ve done a few time trials lately with my pal Chong and we fit somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I like to think we are amongst the better guys who don’t have specialist time trial bikes. We humour ourselves that we ride in what is known as Merckx class. Our club has no such class but in other time trial clubs around the world, Merckx class refers to people who time trial on a regular road bike, just as Eddy Merckx did before all this new-fangled nonsense came in. I believe some clubs are very strict in their definitions while others are more liberal. Chong and I would fail in the stricter ones as Chong has deep rim wheels and I like to rest my forearms on the handlebars and pretend that I do have aerobars (Mmm - Aero bar). Nonetheless, we reckon we fit into our own version of Merckx class because our bikes would be legal to ride in a road race.

We have good reasons for wanting to use our normal bikes for these events. Getting a time trial bike is embarking on an arms race. The bikes themselves can be quite reasonably-priced. Temptation drove me very close to getting an aluminium Bianchi TT bike earlier this year for only $2800 (yes, if you don’t cycle much, that doesn’t sound particularly cheap but that’s only because you retain a sense of rationality when looking at bicycle prices). But why would you get the aluminium Bianchi when there is a full-carbon option? And you’ll be needing deep rim carbon wheels. Hang on, not for the back one – you want a full-disc carbon wheel for the back. And a skinsuit and pointy helmet. And you can’t be without a power meter. It doesn’t stop. You can see why I don’t want a part of this. I’m not going to win anything on the most expensive bike there is so I might as well not win anything on the bike I have and spend my money on beer (or bicycles for Kazuko but that’s a different post).

So there is all that but there is also the satisfaction of beating someone who has all that gear riding just your plain road bike.

Chong and I have gone TT head to head twice now and I’m largely relieved to say that I have scraped home ahead of him twice. This is a good thing as we seem to have rapidly developed an old tradition of the loser buying the winner lunch at the pub up the road from my house. We seem to be pretty even so it’s only a matter of time before I have to buy lunch for Chong. The next time we ride, we’ll have to buy our own lunches, though, because we have entered a two-up TT at the end of the month. It’s 28km and I’m pretty sure we won’t have anything left in the tank between us by the time we finish.

This weekend I rode a TT but Chong wasn’t there so I cheated. I had to go sailing after the TT and didn’t have time to go home and change bikes before riding to the sailing club so I didn’t want to use my carbon bike and leave it at the sailing club while I was out on the water. Instead, I used my old steel-framed Bianchi Vigorelli and entry-level wheels. I have aero bars which fit on this bike’s handlebars so I decided to use them in the hope they would compensate for the slower wheels.

This is Mike. He beat me by three seconds, the swine. I'm not at all competitive but I will have him next time.

 

Here's Robin, getting ready to start.

And here's Karl. He had an excuse. I mean a cold. I'm always confusing those two.

Some people say time trials are boring but that’s only because they are watching them on television. If you’re actually doing one, it’s not boring at all. I would describe it more as painful. Your goal is to keep pushing your legs as hard as you can but not so much that you run out of steam before the finish line. It’s a big mistake to go out too hard, so this is exactly what I did on Sunday. My first lap was a ripper and I even caught myself thinking: “40kph? I might even crack 41 here”. This was, of course, utter fantasy and by the end of the first lap the legs had a few unpleasant truths to tell me. There were also the dilemmas of whether I should continue puffing and panting or try to slow down for some deep breaths. Should I wipe that trail of snot from my face or would that just slow me down and reappear again quite soon anyway? Do I dribble out of the left side of my mouth in the southern hemisphere and the right side in the north? Karl was kind enough to tell me I looked like I was suffering in the third lap so I may as well be pleased I didn’t bother trying to look cool.

In the end I finished the 20km TT with a time of 30m26s and an average speed of 39.6. The TT association has my average speed at 39.4 but my Garmin also said I rode 20.1km so I think the discrepancy lies there. I’m taking the faster of the two speeds. I was a little disappointed as I have cracked 40kph before on that same bike with aero bars but better wheels a couple of years ago and it makes me wonder if I have improved at all in the last few years. However, I can’t complain and I’ll just have to assure myself that I’ll keep improving this summer.

And after the TT I went sailing. I haven’t been on a boat for a few years but it was opening day at the sailing club and I got invited along so I thought the change would do me good. By the time I had ridden there, I needed a beer so I settled in for some pre-race relaxants.

It's an altogether different kind of warm-up in sailing.

I assume the guys in the rescue boat had done the same thing as they apparently hadn’t tied it to the jetty very well.

Or maybe they were testing the new remote-control system.

Eventually I was drunk enough to sail, so we hit the water. I was given the job of  tying the big sail at the front to the ropes that hold on to it and I’m pleased to say none of my knots came loose at all during the race. Nonetheless, I wasn’t allowed to sit at the back like everyone else.

Here they are in their happy little cockpit.

Instead, I was cutting a bold and remarkably handsome figure up the front bit of the boat.

How's this salty seadog, eh?

I was in charge of putting the big front sail up and down but had plenty of time to nap in between.

My view looked like this.

I didn’t really pay much attention to how we did but I’m pleased to say that we did beat the boat that Pistol was on. They were faster than us and should have beaten us easily but luckily bits started falling off their boat and they managed to sail in completely the wrong direction. Luckily when the race finished it was starting to get dark and I didn’t have any headlights so I rode home instead of going back to the bar so I was able to finish the day with justover 100km cycling, a boat race and not too much beer under my belt.

This weekend the masters cycling is having a two-day four-stage race. I’d probably better stay off the beer for that.

Wildflowers in the park

I racked up my much-anticipated 10,000th kilometre for the year on Monday and promptly realised I wasn’t going to do many more this week. The legs have been constantly heavy for a while now and I’ve been feeling lethargic all the time so I decided to keep cycling to a minimum for a few days. This has turned out to be a good decision because I now feel a lot better and it also gave me a chance to do something different this Sunday and have an easy ride with Kazuko to Kings Park to take photos of the wildflowers that are out now. There was also a free jazz concert in the park, so I got to snap a sample of Western Australia’s many wildflowers to the tune of some cool Jazz. Here are the results: