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Today Today - April 2015

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thomas

The Crank Engine
Nov 1, 2005
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Voilà, the monthly TCC thread.

@theBlob, @joewein: you are both kindly requested to refrain from starting the monthly threads in the future. Thank you.
 
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Yesterday my wife and I rode around the neighbourhood to enjoy the cherry blossoms.

With over 1100 km total, March was my longest distance month in a year and a half, helped by the 300 km Fuji ride as well as two century rides earlier in the month.

Unless the weather is awful this coming weekend, I'll do my first big ride of April to extend my "Century a Month" streak, two weeks before the AJ NishiTokyo 400 km brevet on April 18/19.
 
You will all now be able to breath a collective sigh of relief.

I went down to meet @jrico this evening, for a Grindr hookup, I mean to sort his new bike out and get it ready for shreddy.

Have to say, it looks properly nice in the colour scheme he got. The new CAAD10s have internal rear cable routing, like the carbon Evos, and are generally way more polished up and shiny than the plastic paint you get on carbon mass production frames.

Sorted the cleats, seat height and position for him, and decided to leave the stem right at the top of the steerer until he has ridden the thing for a few weeks and got used to its' radness, at which point he will then be bullied into getting it slammed to the point of giving himself spina bifida.

So there you go. @jrico is ready to give it some stick.

I made him get on Strava too, so that is pretty much game over for him now. No escape.
 
You will all now be able to breath a collective sigh of relief.

I went down to meet @jrico this evening, for a Grindr hookup, I mean to sort his new bike out and get it ready for shreddy.

Have to say, it looks properly nice in the colour scheme he got. The new CAAD10s have internal rear cable routing, like the carbon Evos, and are generally way more polished up and shiny than the plastic paint you get on carbon mass production frames.

Sorted the cleats, seat height and position for him, and decided to leave the stem right at the top of the steerer until he has ridden the thing for a few weeks and got used to its' radness, at which point he will then be bullied into getting it slammed to the point of giving himself spina bifida.

So there you go. @jrico is ready to give it some stick.

I made him get on Strava too, so that is pretty much game over for him now. No escape.

Thanks for everything!
 
Today I visited a Keirin track for the first time. I had often passed the Tokyo Oval Keiokaku Velodrome on rides along the Tamagawa. Today I went inside and watched a few races.

It was a bit of a strange experience. Admission is 50 yen, paid at coin operated gates. Admission to the ground level of the open air stadium was included, but most of the guys were not watching the races there. There were a few women and even some young families, but they were the exception. The audience was almost exclusively male, with an estimated median age of 60 or more. Most hung around in the hall were you buy gambling tickets or in front of TV screens or outside the building smoking cigarettes.

The way it works is that you mark a betting sheet with a pencil to select your favourites, then take that to a machine that scans the sheet and select the amount you want to bet (anything from 100 yen to several 10,000 yen), pay your money and out comes a ticket / receipt. Bets are accepted until a few minutes before the race start. You can bet not only on races in the velodrome but keirin races around the country.

Races consisted of 2025 m courses, consisting of 5 rounds of 400 m plus an extra 25 m from the start line to the location of the finish line. There are 9 cyclists, wearing different coloured jerseys. The bikes are beautiful and shiny, very high geared fixed gear with toe clips and no brakes. The racers' ages range from early 20s to late 40s. During the first three rounds the 9 riders are not allowed to pass a leading pacer, who then moves aside while the riders put down the hammer for a two round sprint. The whole thing lasts less than 3 minutes.

As a casual observer, the event reminded me of a pachinko parlour without the noise or dense cigarette smoke and with a bunch of guys on bikes instead of steel balls determining how much you win or lose. Compared to pachinko the audience was more male and older and as in pachinko most looked like they didn't have much money.
 
Yeah, it is just gambling, and attracts the same sallow chain smoking gambling addicts that any betting event like this does.

I have gambled on it a few times, in Omiya. It is all a bit depressing, but the bikes are cool, and because it is cycling related, that makes it preferable to gambling on anything else for me.

I speak to a few Keirin guys who ride up on the Edogawa most days. Started talking to them after I handed it to them on a group sprint they were doing down the road one day. Friendly guys, but you can tell they are from that kind of scummy gambling world. Definitely rough dudes. Which was cool with me.
 
ITT @TCC like his dudes rough.

Today I went into the Chichibu hills with @Nizhniynovgorod and forgot to start my Garmin after stopping at the Tokigawa Base (which is kind of underwhelming so far) like a tart so missed my mighty effort on Ono touge. We then got to the top of Shiraishi and headed down Sadamine. The dirty, speed bumped, rock strewn, cat eyed, sorry excuse for a road was properly closed. Closed for repairs! We went down it anyway. There were construction vehicles and evidence of work going on but no bods in hard hats for @TCC to swoon over. Put the cone back after exited and then descended Sadamine like I've never done before, ready for pizza...

Hana Cafe isn't open on Thursdays..in fact Chichibu isn't open on Thursdays! Nothing, nada, zilch! An old lass in a manjou shop told us about a wizened old udon man a few km away so we woke him up and had his noodles and his place to ourselves.

Be warned! Thursdays Chichibu is a ghost town and the locals aren't friendly about it.
 
You will all now be able to breath a collective sigh of relief.

I went down to meet @jrico this evening, for a Grindr hookup, I mean to sort his new bike out and get it ready for shreddy.


I made him get on Strava too, so that is pretty much game over for him now. No escape.

Of the two homosexual dating websites, which do you find is better?
 
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ITT @TCC like his dudes rough

Damn right.

Of the two homosexual dating websites, which do you find is better?

Haha. You get a higher quality of man on Strava. But with Grindr, there is no messing about.

Then there are those elusive alphas who refuse to use either. They think they are safe, but it is just a matter of time...
 
What do you guys do when a car overtakes to cut you off on an ugly left turn? Scuffed up the skewer and my elbow going down, but it could have been worse. Guy seemed genuinely sorry and I just left it that.
Somehow I feel Grindr will work it's way into this conversation @TCC
 
What do you guys do when a car overtakes to cut you off on an ugly left turn? Scuffed up the skewer and my elbow going down, but it could have been worse. Guy seemed genuinely sorry and I just left it that.
Somehow I feel Grindr will work it's way into this conversation @TCC

First of all, glad you are not dead.

Second, here is my official guide on how to ride through traffic. I am a badman at hammering through traffic, and if you follow these hints and tips you will be a lot safer. And a badman too.

1. You get hit, skinned alive, killed, quadraspazzed etc., when a car* interacts with you. This can be overtaking, pulling out in front of you, belting you from behind due not seeing you / caring, etc. It is all interaction. Assuming that all car drivers are not good for anything other than being fuel for the giant incinerator I set up outside Mega City One, when I gain control of earth, this means that the more interactions you have with cars, the more chance you have of being hit. Conversely, the less interactions you have with cars, the less chance you will have of being hit. With this in mind, the best way to ride on roads, is to minimise the amount of interactions cars have with you, or if the interaction absolutely has to take place, you make yourself as visible as possible, and put yourself in a position as far away from the car as possible. Like this...

2. Go fast. Keeping up with traffic means cars don't have to / feel the need to overtake you. If there is a car in front of you, and a car behind, and you are wimping it along at 25kmph, the car behind will get annoyed and want to overtake. Makes sense. So how can you stop this? Go faster. If you keep up with the car in front, and ride in the middle of the road, like a motorbike, the car behind will have no desire (unless they are utterly aggro, and that is when you get your knife out and start giving them something to cry about) or ability to overtake. The added advantage, or the thing that makes this easy, is that by keeping up with the car in front, in the middle of the road, the car in front will see you if they look in their rear view mirror (lol, again, unless they are a mong), and you will also be able to draft them, thus not expending as much energy as you would getting overtaken every 5 seconds going along at 25kmph like a melt. You can also look through the windows of the car (unless they are blacked out) and see what is going on further down the road / catch the prick reading manga on his steering wheel as he drives. You need to be hyper vigilant of brake lights etc, covering your brakes at all times, and be ready to anchor it at a seconds notice, but if you get into this, it is very effective. This also means that the thing that happened to you today is less likely to happen.

3. Cars pulling out on you from a side road. Combined with going fast, and staying in the middle of the road, assume that every single side road has a **** about to pull out of it with no warning. As you approach the side road, slide out until you are as far away from the entrance as you can get, without going into the opposite lane. This will give you as much time as possible to escape, if the inevitable happens and some Pachinko parlour chain smoking Chu-Hi Strong addict, third worlds his way out in front of you without looking. It will make you more visible to everyone else too, and also more visible to those looking round the corner mirrors that might be present for the people pulling out of the side road to not look at.

4. Cars with company logos on them, especially the larger companies, tend (not always) to drive better, as they have accountability. If you see one of them a few cars back from the front, while waiting for a red light, hold back, and get behind them to draft. They usually have rear facing cameras, which you can give a clear and mature raised hand to, to acknowledge your badmanness, and to tell the driver you mean business. I have taken some very very long and respectful tows from trucks like Yamato, JP, Muranaka, etc. in the past, by giving them a wave, then when I finally needed to pass, waving again, and getting a wave back. All good. Your average tubby trodden down heels of Hawkins trainers tooth pick lip smacking don't move shoulders when they walk peasant will not like this radness though, so don't attempt this with regular cars, unless it is a woman between the ages of 25-45 who you caught looking at your brutal calf muscles in the 7/11 car park before you both get back on the road. Then the action is ON.

5. Don't spend your time going down the inside of cars, near the curb. This is asking for trouble. You will get doored, get punctures from all the sharp junk down near the gutter, catch your pedal on the curb, etc etc. It is just not cool. Stick with the traffic. If there is a big long line of cars waiting for a red light and you need to get to the front, hop up on the pavement and get to the front that way. Don't take out any pedestrians though, obviously.

6. Apart from your haunted dagger / prison skeng / peaky blinders flick knife, your greatest weapon is you phone. Take photos of any bullshit that kicks off, even if it is petty. This nearly always backfoots the other party. If it enrages them, so be it. Bathe in the chaos and put them in their place.

7. Cars pulling half out of a side road, starting to move, will not stop for you even if they see you, and will continue to pull out, because they don't know how hench you god damn minotaur engine is and how savagely fast it can propel you along the road. So they will see you in what their pathetic minds think is 'far away in the distance' and will think they can pull out way before you get to them. They can't though, because you are utterly SICK, but just know that they are mongs, and you have to just let them pull out. Catch up with them and spit on their car / through their window / drag them out their car and stab them in front of their kids / kick their little weird dog into the river, further down the road because you are the truck from DUEL. That is what you are.

8. Which leads me to my final point. If it all does get a bit heated, and words are exchanged, know that you have been riding, and are therefore extremely warmed up and ready for action, and they have been sat on their no exercise lolicon obsessed reading manga at 35 years old still living with their mum cup noodle for dinner every night, 40 fags a day long finger nail wimpy arses, so rest assured you can completely annihilate them if they think they are hard and try to get in your face.

*car, truck, whatever
 
@TCC Sage. tears@#4lastsentence

Slightest infraction, whip the camera phone out, start snapping like you're at Yasukuni shrine on a national holiday.
 
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