Pyro's Yard v2.0

The ranks are expanding! The regular Tuesday night Team Dogger (or 'Respectable Cycle Ride', according to the canoe club sweary-filter) Meanwood expeditions have swung up to a massive 7 riders of an evening, which fortunately means I don’t get suspicious looks for wandering around in the dark with a Frenchman any more.   Last Tuesday night was a normal ride. Meanwood was pretty wet, so we figure-eighted the loop to try and avoid some of the soggier patches, with varying degrees of success. One comedy snakebite, a couple of comedy crashes, slips and slides, new boy Charley missing a turn and leading some of the others astray and quite a lot of giggles and muffled swearing. All in all, a bit of fun.   I finally got round to sat-tracking the ride using the rather spiffy Nokia Sport Tracker software on my phone, so there’s a map of the route below. Meanwood has so many little trails and interlinked bits of singletrack there’s a pretty limitless variety of rides you can do, and ea...

Just had a cracking weekend with the crew from Extreme Care , the guys I do Water Safety & Rescue and First Aid work with. With the 2010 event season starting soon with probably our most intense event of the year, the National Student Rodeo , we were keen to get everybody up to date on the latest doctrine in First Aid. Dave was updating his assessors’ qualification as well, so he put on a 3-day First Aid at Work course for us, with both him and us being assessed. Of course, with us working as a rescue team, that means the 'at work' part is generally a riverbank and the level of First Aid we might have to do is a wee bit higher than the normal office based scenarios. So, out with the sticking plasters and ‘there there’ commentary, and in with the drowning victims, C-spine immobilisation and head injuries. Excellent...   We ran the course over two weekends, with plenty of time in between for revision. Well, sort of. Okay, I might have glanced at my notes once in a week. But a...

Disclaimer: Anything contained herewith may be a complete pile of cobblers and may not be the opinion of anyone, even the author. Apologies to whoever does the Shimano Corporation's marketing. "Your will to say 'yes' is only as strong as your ability to say 'no'." I'd love to claim that phrase was a bit of self-professed modern philosophy, or a lightbulb-lighting lightning bolt of raw intellect from some new-found guru of deep-thinking, but it's actually a piece of marketing spiel from Shimano for one of their new disc brakes. Still, I'm sure they paid someone a lot of money to come up with that, and as commercial philosophy goes it isn't bad. Good, original, semi-mystical gibberish is hard to come by these days. I read it once and went "Hmmm. That's interesting" , scrolled down and read about the brakes. They’re very shiny. I scrolled back up the page to read the spiel again, read over it a few times, and went "Wai...