Halfway There
I almost never noticed my latest 1,000 mile milestone again this week, but on Mon I passed the 4,000 mile mark for 2019. Perhaps I was too engrossed in the storms on Mon or excited by the promised sunshine at the end of the week. Whatever the reason my annual mileage target is now over half complete, and slightly ahead of schedule. It always seems like a massive target at the start of the year but it’s amazing how it soon adds up. Starting off is the hardest part but once you make that first step the target only ever becomes closer.
Weathered
Speaking of the weather, this week has been totally crazy. Mon started off with awful rain, thunder and lightning storms. It was so bad that roads were getting flooded in and around Edinburgh and all afternoon the roads were gridlocked. Having seen the forecast at the weekend I spent time fitting some mudguards that I had lying about the garage onto my Giant bike. It’s probably worth doing a post on these at some point because when they work these guards are brilliant. I’ve had them on my Vitus bike for 2 years so when I saw them for £10 last year I couldn’t resist snapping them up.
Anyway I spent the best part of an hour at the weekend trying to get them aligned so as not to rub against my wheels. The actual attachment is really easy and on my Vitus bike it wasn’t too difficult to get them with sufficient clearance. Perhaps it’s because of the caliper brakes as opposed to discs, but it proved to be extremely frustrating on the Giant. I kept going back and fore making slight adjustments but never being quite happy. After an hour I felt reasonably happy with the result so left it for use on Mon.
It wasn’t long before it became obvious that the guards were not quite aligned right. Pedalling down to the roundabout exiting our estate and I could hear the scraping begin. I had a decision to make whether to continue or return to home and try to sort them. Given that it had taken an hour at the weekend I wasn’t prepared to spend the same again and maybe not even get it any better so I made the decision to carry on. It was definitely much too wet to take the other bike without guards!
The rubbing sure was annoying, but nowhere near as annoying as getting soaked to the skin would have been. I actually missed the worst of the storms as I reached the office before the rain really started and left after it had finished. However, the effects going home were all too apparent. Queues of stationary traffic for about 8 miles! Roads were flooded and traffic just couldn’t get through. People were taking 2 hours just to get out of the city.
Although I had to slow down a bit to filter past all the chaos and avoid the puddles and debris, I was probably only about 5 minutes longer than I normally would have been. It was also huge fun passing everybody stuck in their cars.
Video Danger
When riding home I decided to try and get some video footage of me cycling through one of the big puddles. Obviously I didn’t fancy setting this up in the busy city so I settled on a nice peaceful road in the middle of nowhere. It seemed perfect in all ways…
- Lovely quiet road which never has any traffic.
- Found a perfect puddle, nice and flat.
- No rain so camera won’t get wet.
- I even thought of putting my glove under the camera to keep it dry underneath.
Then this happened…!
I quickly rushed over to save the camera and check if it was alive. Thankfully no lasting damage, although I couldn’t put my glove back on as it was drenched! I went for a second attempt and thankfully no hiccups occurred this time. Here is the footage:
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