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Having managed exactly zero commutes on my bike in 2011 I’m off to a much better start to 2012 having taken advantage of the unseasonably nice January weather and left the car at home today.

I got the double fighters out of the shed last night and once I’d evicted the spiders from them the Specialized was soon back on more road suited rubber and ready to go.

I managed the 14 miles in around an hour and ten minutes each way which I thought was pretty good going having not ridden since my Wales trip in November.

If the weather holds as forecast and my legs have recovered I’m tempted to try another commute later in the week too…

Happy New Year folks, 2012 already…

If the Mayans are to be believed, now is a good time to buy lots of stuff on a years interest free credit.

Movember is almost over and while far from my ambition of emulating Monsieur Poirot I don’t think I’ve done too badly for the just over four weeks I’ve been growing my ‘tache.

That said I am quite looking forward to a shave in the morning

It’s still not to late to donate money to a marvellous cause by going to http://mobro.co/DaveMcM76. Please give what you can.

Well there is just a week of Movember left and sadly I’ve got nowhere near the Poirot I was hoping for, but thats still no excuse for not donating at mobro.co/DaveMcM76.

Ever since I bought the Giant last year I’ve been slightly disappointed with the forks on it – because I bought the cheapest model of the Trance to stay within the Cycle To Work Scheme budget (and my own budget!) it came with Rockshox Tora coil sprung forks as standard, which are pretty heavy and have always been slightly too stiff for my liking even with the preload backed all the way off.

A couple of days ago the usual Friday offers email arrived in my inbox from Merlin Cycles and one of the highlighted items was some nice shiny Rockshox Reba RL air sprung forks for a pretty decent price… so I ordered them

Not only should they be lighter and give me a lot more control over their response and stiffness, they also come with the PopLoc remote lockout system which should hopefully make climbing a bit easier as the Toras didn’t have any lockout on them at all!

The old coil sprung Tora forks are now off the bike and I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of their Reba replacements in the post. Hopefully they arrive and I can get them fitted before the weekend as I’m off down to Wales for a few days next week and Afan would be an ideal testing location

While flicking round tv channels I just stumbled across across an episode of Poirot and a fine moustache to try and recreate for movember.

But is the full Poirot possible in just 30 days?

Do your bit for charity and donate to my moustache at mobro.co/DaveMcM76 and I’ll see how close I can get…

Having ummed and aahed about doing it last year and never quite getting organised enough, myself and a few folks from work have decided to take the plunge and ‘tache up for charity.

Movember is a charity that is raising money and awareness for male cancers
– chiefly prostate and testicular – through the cultivation of moustaches for the month of November.

You can find out more at uk.movember.com and can donate to my moustache attempts at mobro.co/DaveMcM76.

Today is day one, so following the rules I am currently clean shaven. I’ll post updates and as they become relevant.

Lasts week I – like a few million other people – updated my iPhone to iOS 5. After a few false starts trying to get hold of Apples authentication servers as they were buried by the demand I got the upgrade installed and all was well.

All was well, that is, until I attempted my first bike ride with iOS 5, which I did earlier on my regular after work Beacon Hill route.

It would appear that Trailguru, my trusted gps ride logging software, doesn’t work very well with iOS 5. While it quite happily logs time, altitude, current speed and even seems to be working out average speed it fails completely to log any distance. I noticed this when I got back to my car having apparently spent 58 minutes achieving a maximum speed of 24 mph but had travelled 0.00 miles!

I have emailed the Trailguru folks from the feedback link on their website to report this but as Trailguru hasn’t had any app updates for over 2 years I am not hopeful of a fix.

Time to find a new ride logging app…

UPDATE: It is now the 28th October and still no reply from Trailguru. More worryingly it appears that Trailguru is actually no longer even available in the AppStore, so I suspect the chances of them releasing a fix are more or less zero. In the meantime I’ve been experimenting with iMapMyRide – I’ll let you know how I get on.

Just got home from a Friday afternoon out at Nottingham Beer Festival which was once again in the grounds of Nottingham Castle.

With 928 beers and 160+ ciders & perrys on offer it was an extremely pleasant way to spend a gloriously warm and sunny October afternoon.

Of the several different brews I sampled I think my favourite was a beer called Kinder Downfall, brewed by Buxton Real Ale.

Having not got out on my bike much over the summer after hurting my leg and then back in quick succession I’ve finally managed to string a couple of bike rides together without hurting myself again!

Last week’s trip up Beacon Hill was followed by a good thrash round the Kitchener trail at Sherwood on Sunday and then another trip up Beacon this evening.

This evenings ride was particularly odd as it was done in unseasonably warm weather for the time of year. Riding in shorts and a t-shirt at the end of October just feels very odd indeed – no doubt it will be business as usual come next week and the waterproofs will be back.

It is already getting dark half way round.

I’ve just spent the last week in southwest France (Hossegor, about 40 minutes from Biarritz) on a rather fantastic surfing holiday

The holiday was a surf tour organised by West Coast Surfari who are based in Watergate Bay and the other people on the tour were all really nice and friendly.

I opted to rent a board for the week as it worked out a lot cheaper and far less hassle than trying to get my board back up from it’s home at my friends house in Cornwall and then pay RyanAir a stupid amount of money to let me take it on the plane. In the end this was a really good choice as I ended up being able to use a couple of different boards throughout the week with different characteristics so I could learn a bit more technique and try and improve my surfing in different conditions.

A whole week surfing every day in nice weather and warm water was absolutely brilliant fun, but was also pretty tiring. I may need to get some winter training in as I’m seriously considering their South Africa trip next year, and that isn’t really worth doing for less than two weeks!

I got back into Stansted last night with an extra 1.6kg in my luggage than I had going out. From the unpacking I’ve done so far I suspect the extra weight was mostly sand…

My big purple sofa is getting on for 11 years old so I decided it was time to replace it and ordered a new one online from made.com.

When the order confirmation email arrived it said “please allow up to 12 weeks for delivery”.

Brilliant – time to decorate the living room before it arrives. Or so I thought…

Turns out “up to 12 weeks” really meant “less than 2 weeks” – my new sofa arrived this morning!

Looks like I’ll be decorating around it.

July was a busy month with most of my weekends consumed by family birthdays (3 of them!), a bad cold and various other commitments so it’s been a few weeks since I last managed to get out on my bike.

In an effort to remedy this I grabbed a spare few hours this morning to chuck the bike on the car roof and head over to Rutland Water to ease myself back into the saddle.

Rutland isn’t exactly the most technical ride in the world – there is a lot of tarmac! – but it is fairly close by and a reasonable distance with a few steep bits, so it makes for a fairly decent all weather training ride. The weather today was actually pretty nice considering the cloud and rain we’ve had this week – it was warm enough for just a t-shirt I even saw the sun, although it was pretty windy which made for hard going at times.

After a month off I actually feel a lot less knackered than I expected to, so hopefully I’ve not lost too much fitness – need to try and get out a bit more often…

Trailguru link: http://www.trailguru.com/activity/display/Rutland+Water/4432117046/

Today was a sad day and a massive step backwards in scientific terms as it saw the last ever launch of the space shuttle.

Mission STS-135 sees Atlantis heading up to the International Space Station for the very last time.

With no shuttle replacement in sight it leaves the Russian Soyuz as the only remaining option for getting to and from the ISS, and having seen the one in Leicester Space Centre I think I’d rather take my chances with a big catapult!

I went for a walk up Kinder Scout with Tim today in absolutely blazing sunshine.

We started out from Upper Booth about a mild west of Edale and headed to the top up Jacobs Ladder.

It’s been a while since I’ve been up Kinder but the moonscape look of the top doesn’t really change that much.

One thing that was different was Kinder Downfall. In previous visits I’ve witnessed the “downfall” as an uphill waterfall if the wind has been blowing in the right direction, but today the River Kinder was little more than a trickle between a series of small puddles.

After a stop at Kinder Downfall for a beer and a sandwich we headed back south across the plateau along the riverbed and through the peat hags over the summit to Crowden Tower.

From there we made the descent down Crowden Brook (quite literally!) and followed the brook back down into Upper Booth, stopping for a much needed ice cream at the farm shop at the bottom.

Despite the factor 15 I appear to have caught rather a lot of sun on the back of my neck… ouch!

The Trailguru recording of the walk can be found at http://www.trailguru.com/activity/display/Kinder+Scout+from+Upper+Booth/4431065626/.