#womancyclist

[jcdeldf]

The @giroditalia approaches #giro2019 and @paola_gianotti will cycle again all Giro stages with her sparkling new Cinelli Laser, here she is training and testing the stage 15 #cyclingmagazine #womancyclist #guinnessworldrecord holder.. 📸@fabulousport #cyclingphotography #cinelliusa #cinelli #happytomakeanotherriderhappy #peaceandbike #keeponbikinginthefreeworld #cinellifamily #spreadthewinged #ilovecinelli https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw4cQtvAfmK/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=egvf6rs88yu7

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Bicycles... Again

I have been playing with bicycles again, which sounds like a very silly thing for someone with a back injury and some pretty restrictive arthritic joints. However, when have I ever allowed pain to get in the way of fun?

This started when at the very beginning of 2020 a lovely Occupational Therapist started seeing me for my hand pain and finger deformity. My fingers are developing weird growths that make them look gnarled and as one friend described them, 'Witchy'! This comes about as a result of my former career as a climbing and mountaineering instructor, in which I went climbing every day for work and then on my days off, I err... went climbing. Eventually, my poor battered fingers locked up and I lost the use of my hands for a few days, but with finger tape and some swearing, I was able to continue climbing to a reasonable level. That was twenty years ago. My fingers are now, to use the correct medical term, fucked. Add in to the mix, my work in mountain bike leadership, my mountain biking for fun and then the added motorcycle adventures and my poor hands have pretty much had enough punishment.

So the pretty young Therapist categorically told me that riding my bicycles was very bad for my hands, neck, shoulders, back, hips, knees and undercarriage. I went home, I sulked for several days and then I said fuck it and jumped on my turbo trainer anyway. I have been using the hand strengthening and flexibility exercises given to me by the therapist and now my hands seem to have stabilised. I am still on a waiting list to have my finger tips fused and my knuckles replaced with plastic, but not for a while yet. Then just when all seemed hopeless, I was given a new physiotherapist and their advice was fabulous... “You have done all of the damage you are going to do, so go mad, have fun! Mental health is just as important as physical health, so set yourself a challenge and do it.” At the time of writing I am four hundred kilometres into a virtual tour of the UK, completed on my turbo trainer in the bedroom, with with slightly less than a thousand left to do. 

I now own three and a half bicycles, all of which are outdated and obsolete. The first is my classic old Giant, a race level hard-tail mountain bike from the early noughties. There is a new model of this bike available now, but these days it has twenty nine inch wheels and a full carbon frame. The gears are ridiculous, with twelve cogs on the rear and one on the front. My bike has three on the front and eight on the back, with pennies for wheels in the form of old school twenty six inch rims and tyres that are now so old they have the right to vote!

My second bike was gifted to me by my friend and co-author Jan. It was a home brand bike from a dodgy shop that shall remain unnamed and then I scraped the paint off roughed it up and sprayed it to look like a chewy sweet covered in dirty words. Then something strange happened. Wifey asked for an e-Bike and so I turned this bike into an e-Bike for her and took ownership of what is now my project bike. 

The e-Bike thing happened by accident, when a rusted and battered forty year old Coventry Eagle fell into my hands, from a friend who could not restore the old wreck back into the pretty thing it should really be. I lamented with them because the old machine was a thing of hidden beauty, probably not that expensive when new, but beautiful none the less. It is not just the bike that is beautiful, it comes with a narrative that is also beautiful. This bike belonged to a woman I have never met. She had it from new and clearly loved this bike because after she died, the bike was still in very good order and was left to stand in a garage until eventually it was sold and thus began it's life in a hedgerow. It lived in this hedgerow for just over a year and suffered terrible damage before it was sent to me to look at and assess for rebuild. By the time it landed on my hallway, it too was fucked. The cost of repair was going to be huge. The wheels had rusted to flakes, with rotten spokes and seized hubs. Leaves and spiders had lived their lives attached to the frame and the rust had spread with terminal insistence. I declared the bike unfixable within the allowed budget and told my friend that what it needed was a lot of love and a lot of cash to be thrown at it, some of which would stick and some would appear to simply float away. Thus the bike was given to Wifey...

Wifey fell in love with the sad old Coventry Eagle, despite the rust and the rot, but then she is fond of worn out old bikes, ruined by the natural environment. I declared the bike repairable, but it would take time and effort, especially given I would rebuild the bike completely, scrapping the rotten parts and replacing them with newer, better equipment than the pre-index Shimano parts. These parts will still be vintage, but considerably better. The original rear hub was a Shimano Altus LT, a full steel construction with a six speed Uniglide free hub, hence the expense of replacing this antiquated piece of hardware. Uniglide was marvellous, it worked well for those pre-indexed gear times and even followed through into the index era only to be replaced by Hyperglide in the 90s. The rest of the gear system was rusted, dirty and after some oil, in perfect working order, which was such a shame because it now resides in a brown cardboard box under my desk, along with the barely used Uniglide cassette. The plan was to rebuild the bike with bar mounted gear levers, better saddle and much nicer grips. Unfortunately it was at this time that I found an e-Bike motor and battery in a shop for a price that could not be ignored. The Coventry Eagle would have been a beautiful e-Bike for around twenty minutes before the frame folded in on itself and the fork legs pinged apart. Thus the rude Sweetie became Wifey's bike and the Coventry Eagle landed on me.

The half a bike I own is a custom steel frame that I am embarrassed by. It was built by a friend for a price that could not be refused using the best Columbus tubing available in 1997. The friend is sadly long gone, but the frame now hangs upon my wall as a reminder of bad frame design mistakes. When designing a mountain bike, one should never attempt to make the chain stays as short as possible. This was my design, it was long  and low and fast and sadly, horribly unstable in corners. It sprinted and wheelied like a monster on amphetamines. Unfortunately, once the front wheel was down, the back wheel was hanging in the air instead. I found this out when I complained to a friend that my very expensive back brake was not as powerful as I had wished. We reset the brake, reduced the pad toe in and still it failed to perform. My friend followed me home a few days later and when I stopped at a traffic light (some of us cyclists do do this!) he pulled up next to me laughing. I was involuntarily riding through rolling stoppies, hence the poor rear brake performance. During a late night ride, I jumped a curb, landed sideways and spun the bars into the tarmac, narrowly avoiding being badly hurt. The top tube is now showing the scars of my many near misses in the form a large dent.

So the Coventry Eagle was pretty basic in regard frame furniture, having next to no cable guides, lever mounts and no dérailleur drop out. This simple cannot be fixed and there is nowhere to bolt a good quality dérailleur. So to prove that frames cannot be made better, I carved a new drop out from a similar grade steel and went along to Page Engineering in Weston Super Mare where, very kindly, Martin got out his TIG welder and electric glued the new drop out onto the frame. The next job was the utterly bolloxed headset bearing and once again I was presented with the difficulty of finding a quality item that would fit the decrepit frame size of the Coventry Eagle. Sure enough, if you type enough words, numbers and astronomical constants into Google, the great multiheaded beast shall rise and drop a headset through your letterbox in exchange for a few pieces of your eternal soul or lots of pounds sterling if you like me have already sold your soul back in 1992, in exchange for a bag of crisps and half filled carton of juice. You see back then, I was in discussions with a person at college and I seriously doubted their claims to be a servant of the Dark Lord. Thus I jokingly sold my soul to them and alas I am now a servant of the Dark Lord and practise my faith as often as possible, usually in places where such rituals cause most amusement to my fellow atheistic humans.

The bike is now coming together, I have a set of hubs that you would frankly not believe. The first is a Shimano 105 front hub from 1987, fresh out of the box and in a lovely blue hue. The rear hub was a Shimano STX RC from the mid 90s, sadly not in the original pewter finish. This hub came to me via the evils of the Bay of Eee and it was damned before it ever arrived, having been sold under a thread of lies and misdeeds. I was told by a roguish vendor that the bearings were fine and dandy. What actually arrived was rusted, pitted and filled with the phlegm and seed of Abaddon. The freehub body was rusted inside, with bearings turning to dust as I watched. Upon attempting to open discussions with the rogue, he denied my claims, despite photographic evidence and gave me a five star review as a sucker. So it came to pass that I returned to the workshop of Martin at Page Engineering and we had a dark and evil discussion about replacing a bearing surface. First I would need a virgin to sacrifice and then I would need the balls of a... imperial size, being one quarter of an inch because for reasons I have not bothered to look into, Shimano hubs run on non-metric bearing sizes. Oh well, such is life. The virgin was a Shimano Deore XT hub with just the wrong number of spoke holes and a complete lack of disk brake mountings. So it was ripped apart, the bearing surface pressed out and the freehub body was removed and all of this was placed upon STX RC hub, simultaneously upgrading not just the bearing surface, but the seals, cones and freehub body. The remains of the XT hub now languish in a box under my desk. 

The rancid original chain-set, a double set up with more teeth than an overly bullied geek in a private school, was broken by me. The pedals had been fitted dry and decades passed before some idiot (me) decided to remove them. It took a scaffold pole and some frankly awful swearing to release the pedals and as it loosened, the right pedal took the threads with it. So I have replaced this unit with another frankly ludicrous piece of esoteric, worthless tat, once again from the Bay of Eee. I went out onto the sea of simulated shopping, waved my idiot flag at the pirates and purchased a crank-set that has a size only ever used in 1990 by Suntour when they released Micro-drive. A few more days of shopping saw me win some fake Shimano chainrings in a size that they never produced and a nearly new Sugino chainring designed for my exact cranks.

So the Coventry Eagle is now resplendent, her frame was washed, rust proofed, polished, coated and dried on a radiator throughout winter. She has a new sealed bearing bottom bracket, a shiny new headset, a set of touring drop bars and a Shimano Sora STI lever set. The Dérailleurs are a Shimano Deore LX from 1993 and a Shimano Sora from 2009-ish. The cassette is an eight speed Shimano Deore 11-28 in nickel plate. The grip tape is black and red, the saddle is red and black with a black seat pin. The original rear light was an old Ever Ready unit from the 1980's and I really wanted to use this, but not have to deal with D-cell batteries and filament lamp bulbs. So using my trusty knowledge of LEDs and CR2032 batteries, I custom built an LED array onto a board small enough to fit into the bulb holder and used hot snot to glue the battery holder into the battery holder! This gives me a brighter, lighter (ummm, not in that way, but also in that way) and better rear light. 

My final job is to build the wheels and even here I have decided to make life harder by using a peculiar spoke lacing. The front is going to be a simple two cross lacing and the rear is going to be a three cross lacing on the drive side, with a two cross on the non-drive side. Why have I gone for this archaic lacing system? Well, to somewhat misquote the heroic George Leigh Mallory, I am doing this because it is there. I once built a set of wheels for a friend. A set that had crows foot lacing, two cross lacing on the drive side, with radial on the non-drive side. It looked beautiful and was ferocious to ride, it was also a testament to my skill as a wheel builder, but that was thirty years ago nearly. I have not built wheels since I was in my twenties and now I am nearly fifty. So I had a practice and found a Shimano Deore hub and a Mavic rim and now they are together, perfectly round and spoked with stainless steel spokes. It was only later that I found that the cones on the Deore hub were fucked, luckily this is an easy fix and I have a spare wheel for the reliable old Giant.

Hopefully, the Coventry Eagle will be finished in a couple of months, just in time to ride some beautiful summer miles together with Wifey, without the raw of a rampaging motorcycle engine. Where I was in life, I find myself again, all thanks to a physiotherapist who said that mental health is just as important as physical health. He was not wrong.

[javi-ballestero]

#womancyclist #winter #bikekit #snowbike #snowday #citygirls #girlbike #girlsgonebike #ridegirl #ridelikegirl #bikechick #bikelove #bikeporn #girlonbike #conjunto

[bikersbrasil2017]

Repost @alexa.kstro Porque para mi Domingo es sinónimo de Kilómetros! Hoy 120km de mucho ritmo! Pedaleando parejito! 💥🚴🏼‍♀️🚴🏽 Disfrutando al máximo este deporte 🙌🏼 Y ustedes? Muchos Kilómetros ❓ #bikers_brasil #cycling #cyclinglifestyle #cyclingpassion #cyclingpics #cycling_queens #cyclinglove #cyclinggirl #womancyclist #roadbike #roadcycling #ruteros #boyaca #cyclingcolombia #colombiabike #bikersgirls #bikers #bikegirl #garotabike #bikegirlsandmore #misrutascontaba #soycyco #soycycooficial #soyzerie Sigam o gato mais folgado do Brasil @pittuka_cat 😻😻 https://www.instagram.com/p/CC3o__SMwhi/?igshid=15ukfi95weg7b

[biketourings]

That gal is such an inspiration I'm riding #clipless again. She's still healthy and active at the age of ?? :-) Shopping @shopnaturalliving for healthy #ridefuel #rideyourbike #olderwomen #getoutandride #elders #grandmas #seniorcitizen #cyclingphotos #cycling #womancyclist #femalecyclist #adventurecycling #bikestagram #bikewander #justbikeit #justride #peopleforbikes #cyclingphotooftheday # (at Natural Living)

[luvinside]

..biar kalo ada yg nanya jawabnya, “..udah pernaaah..udah pernaahh..” 😝😝😝 . . . #tanjakanasik #nanjakgedongsongo #travelphoto #travelbug #travelphoto #travelindonesia #candigedongsongo #pesonajawatengah #pesonaindonesia #wonderfuljava #wonderfulindonesia #cyclinglife #cyclinglove #cyclingblackandwhite #blackandwhiteisworththefight #womancyclist #ladycyclists #gowestouringpesonanusantara2017 #gtpn2017 #kleinbike #kleinandme (at Gedong Songo)

[steinbacher]

Stradalli is proud to announce the formation of Servetto-Stradalli cycle women’s world tour cycling team. Servetto-Stradalli will be participating in the expanded UCI Women’s WorldTour in 2018. The Servetto-Stradalli team will be riding the Stradalli carbon lightweight R7 bikes through the full race schedule beginning in Feb, 2018. The team will be comprised of 14 racers from 7 countries and will include 4 national champions, 3 former Olympians, 2 European champions and 4 racers who participated in the 2017 world road cycling championship. “Stradalli is proud to continue our support of women at all levels of cycling. Whether a weekend warrior or a WorldTour racer, female cyclists deserve the same support and recognition as their male counter-parts. We at Stradalli feel it is our responsibility to be part of a movement to level the field for all participants regardless of gender,” said Tom Steinbacher, founder of Stradalli Carbon Sports. As part of their commitment to opening up the sport, the Servetto-Stradalli team has held 2 spots open for qualified racers to submit their resume. If you are interested, please send your resume to: sales@stradalli.com About Stradalli Carbon Sports: Stradalli specializes in ultra-light carbon fiber components. These products are professionally race tested and put through the strictest quality control process. Stradalli produces frames and components which allow all athletes to realize their fullest potential without decimating their savings account. Stradalli components put the cost-conscious cyclist on the same level as the professional who gets top of the line equipment for free through their sponsors. The only difference is that with Stradalli, our customers do not have to sacrifice performance for price. We give them world-class performance for an affordable price. Visit: www.stradalli.com for more information. @stradalli_cycle #cyclinglife #bike #stradallicycle #uci #worldtourteam #womancycling #womancyclist #procycling #racing #proracing #bikes #carbonbikes #win #2018season #servetto #stradalli #servetto-stradalli

[onthestereolistenaswego]

My photo... I'm Returning to Tumblr to fill the boredom after recently falling off my bike and breaking my hip in two places. I’m hoping Tumblr will inspire me through my journey to recovery whilst keeping my mind occupied and busy through the rough patches!

They’ve said I may never race again but I’m refusing to believe them. I WILL race my bike again!!!

[shethirtysix]

:::::fridayretro:::::

Before lactoseintolerance got trendy and lactattests were invented, Joyce Barry was drinking her milk and braking record distances rides. (Picture from the collection of the State Library of New South Wales). thanx @onthebackfoot

[biketourings]

Cold windy day at #galvestonisland #cuteandbeautiful in her strength happy #internationalwomensday #biketouring #bikepacking #bikepacker #travelbybike #worldbybike #justbikeit #bikewander #biketouring #bikestagram #bicyclestyle #womancyclist #adventurecycling #canong16 #canon📷 #peasonearth #peace✌ #womensday #womensday2017 #igtexas #texasgram #bicycles #bicycle #bicycletouring (at Galveston, Texas)

[luvinside]

Ride easy, make good friends, create some memories~☀️🍃 . Bandung - Sawit - Ngamprah 90 km/ 1600 elev/ 4 hours ride with @taramandibandung @rtuafifah._ @arjunasetho @gitamaygifa . 📷 @taramandibandung . #easyride #cyclinglife #cyclinglove #indonesiacycling #stravacycling #cyclingpics #cylinggirl #cyclingday #rideforlife #womancyclist #womancyclism #ridelikeapro #ridelikeaboss #ridelikeabosslady #ladycyclist #ladycycling #ridewithpride #ridewithstyle #ridewithfriends #ridewithheart #ridewithpassion (at Padalarang, Jawa Barat, Indonesia)