Aidan Harding

Category: biking

  • Stumbling towards the start line


    One week until the Iditarod and things aren’t looking as organised as they were a while ago…

    First my seatpost bolt snaps on a training ride so I have to go home and swap seatposts before carrying on. At least I managed to do that and fight the gremlins saying “Go home now, eat cake now.” I went back out and earned the eventual cake. No luck in sourcing a new bolt, though… how hard can it be?!

    Then the effect of knackered shoes gets to my feet again. The soles are so worn out and flexy that the pedals stick through into my feet and roll them outwards. Some sort of suspected tendon pain makes it hard to walk and impossible to run (even across the road).

    Having got sick of having the scrape ten tons of sticky mud off my bike after every ride I decided to have a road-heavy week. I set off for some big commutes: 30 miles each way with panniers stuffed to the gills. 10 minutes into my ride home, my freewheel dies, taking me from singlespeed to no speed. I swap it round to fixed (a harder ratio) and carry on home. It was quite nice doing two 60 mile days sandwiching two 30 mile days with nice (ish) weather and no mud. But by the end of all that my shins are seriously painful. I can’t point my toes out or up and it really hurts to walk.

    After a day of ice and rest, I set off for my last big ride before the race. It should be about 9 hours and the sun is shining. Trail conditions were still pretty sticky, but the descents had some grip so there was chance to let fly a bit. Four hours into that, the shin pain is back so I plan to cut that ride short. Then I’m nearly home and the freehub on my xc bike jams, going from singlespeed to fixed. Fixed off road might be fun, but not when any failure to keep up with the pedals will further mash the internals of an expensive hub so I limp home and and end the ride on a low.

    And of course, I get home to find that my drop bags for the race haven’t made it to Alaska. They were supposed to take 5 days so they’re 13 days overdue. Which may mean I have to carry all my food with no drops. Crap.

    At this point, there’s no stopping me but I just wish the little branches and brambles pulling back my progress towards McGrath would give me a break. I’ll just have to keep reading books about people who’ve done harder things and overcome bigger obstacles. It’s just a bike race so I just need to turn the pedals or trudge my feet for a few days. Injuries or lack of food aren’t necessarily the end of that. Look at the scenery, have a laugh.

  • More help for the race… Goodridge

    Another lovely company has been nice enough to help me out with training for and riding the Iditarod… Goodridge! They make steel braided brake hoses and brake pads. Since brake pads are one of my biggest training costs and Goodridge are my first choice brand that’s great news. I had already specced their hoses for the Pugsley to avoid cracking at low temperatures or worrying about crash damage causing a leak so I was very glad that they were willing to help.

    Hooray for them!

  • Food


    To quote Bill Merchant, nutrition on the Iditarod trail is about “Fat, fat, and more fat“. A reasonable estimate of expenditure on the trail is 8000 calories per day (an adult male’s recommended intake is 2500 per day in normal conditions), so high fat and calorie dense foods are needed. Roughly speaking: fat is 9 calories per gram, protein and carbs are 4, and alcohol is 7.

    This makes for a weird food shopping experience and a new stat-counting measure. I’ve never been that much of a weight weenie on my bikes, but I have definitely become a calorie-per-gram weenie for food. It makes a huge difference. 8000 calories in raw potatoes is 10 kg. Even if you could carry and cook that many potatoes, you wouldn’t want to eat them. 8000 calories in butter is 1.1 kg. A lot easier to carry but also not a lot of fun to eat. For a “short” trip like the Iditarod race, fibre is just indigestible extra weight. Nutrients aren’t a problem because you won’t be gone long enough to suffer a shortage. The key things are: calories-per-gram, easy preparation, and palatability. Low weight is an obvious advantage. Anything that needs to be cooked over a flame will use up lots of fuel so “just add water” is better. And it doesn’t matter what food you’ve got if you can’t bring yourself to keep shoving it down every day.

    At least these were my thoughts… I don’t really have the experience to know how well my food plans will work out. I am setting myself back by sticking to vegetarianism. There will be food at checkpoints, but Alaskans are into meat (with good calorie density reasons) so I will have to assume I can only eat what I bring. Bearing all of this in mind, I started experimenting and creating a spreadsheet…

    Foodstuff Cal/g
    Muesli 3.6
    Powdered Milk 4.9
    M & Ms 4.8
    Cashews 6.2
    Torq recovery 3.5
    Almonds 6.1
    Dried Apricots 1.7
    Chocolate coffee beans 5
    Couscous 3
    Powdered Butter 6.92
    Pumpkin seeds 5.9
    Pine Kernels 7

    With this information I could plan my meals and get to 8000 calories in 1.6 kg. Hopefully I’ll be able to eat all this, here’s the menu…

    • Breakfast: Muesli with dried milk
    • Daytime: Cashew nuts with M & Ms, Almonds with dried apricots (chopped up for when they freeze), Torq recovery drink (that stuff isn’t super energy dense, but it really helps me recover while training), chocolate coffee beans (yeah, I’m having caffeine on this one)
    • Dinner: Couscous with lots of dehydrated butter, pumpkin seeds, and pine nuts

    And there it all is in bags. Using freezer bags means I can cook and eat the couscous straight from the bag. It also means relatively minimal waste packaging on the trail. Making up all the bags certainly did show how much waste there is in food packaging though. My recycling bag was jammed full of cardboard, and the main big was overflowing with plastic by the end.

  • Enter The Pug

    Well, there was an awful lot of waiting, but the monster has finally arrived. On Friday afternoon and with many thanks to Cycle Care, I took ownership of my Pugsley. Then, life being life, I couldn’t even put the grips and pedals on until Monday. Saturday was 10 hours of training on the bike, and Sunday was training on foot with Emily and spending some time together. Still, the big grey bike was still lurking when I went out to see it today and now it’s ready to ride tomorrow. So bring on the glamour shots (apologies for poor quality camera-phone work, my camera is elsewhere. Click for bigger images)…


    No comments about the fence… it’s on the neighbour’s side! Nice, clean lines from the Pug, though.


    New style seat-clamp from Surly has a nice S embossed on it. Open cable guides for full-length cables/hoses.

    Apparently, Hope SS hubs only come in gunmetal colour these days. The seals look different to my 1 year old one too. Note the crazy-big rims with offset build to allow a full range of gears that don’t foul the massive tyres.


    Lovely Hope stem, Goodrich braided hoses (to avoid plastic cracking in the cold. Arguably I should have gone with cable discs), King headset. The front is very high and wide as that’s the usual style for snow bikes (so I’m told and it worked for me with the rental).

    This is what it looks like to get run over by a Pugsley. Yes, the tyre really is bigger than a tree 🙂 Also of note: the front wheel using a rear hub. For the race, that’ll have a different gear from the back just in case. Even if I use that gear, I’ll still claim to have ridden it singlespeed!

    View from the seatpost… a 100mm FSA ISIS bottom bracket. Wise people say FSA ISIS is pretty good these days. Hope so! 

    That’s how a drivetrain should look! Simple lines. For the race, I’ll be running a granny ring at the front, but 32t for now so I can ride it round Swinley.

  • Lobsters are cool but…

    Lobster gloves seem like the perfect balance of finger grouping for warmth vs dexterity to ride. There is a problem, though. You can do this:

    But you can’t do this:
    And sometimes the second one is essential. Like when you hear some raging metalcore.
    Oh, and these ones don’t leave room for chemical handwarmers making them useless for me in the Iditarod. Good for UK, though.

  • New Year Carnage

    New Year didn’t bring any training but it did bring the chance to go play on bikes with Emily in the woods of Shropshire, and then have a fun party for New Year’s Eve itself.

    First, we headed out to Mortimer Woods near Ludlow for a bit of “follow your nose” riding. Riding up a deer track gave us challenging branch hopping climbs in a soft, quiet world of our own. Ducking branches and working against the slope, we eventually had to turn round for some real free riding. Just the suggestion of a flowing trail and no guarantees, it was great. And then the elbows came out. Throwing elbows is a bit of a Tuesday night ride habit with Adam and me, but it’s also an occasional feature on rides with Emily. Except that with Emily it tends to involve more contact. So on a perfectly level trail, the shoving ensued and one missed elbow from her entangled our handlebars. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground and I’d hit my hip hard on the end of the bars. It took a few moments to figure out that everything was ok to move.

    In the end, it was just a scratched hip and a dead leg but a bit of a shocker and lucky to be near the end of the ride. Unfortunately, the main carnage was reserved for later when a fast fire road conspired with an adverse camber and some cut logs to take out both Emily and her frame. Fortunately, she wasn’t too hurt but the bike was, as you can see, terminal. Doh!

    There aren’t many worse feelings than hearing someone you care about wiping out in a painful sounding way behind you. Fortunately, she was ok and Merlin Cycles have been good about doing a crash replacement. When I was getting into riding the question wasn’t whether or not I crashed on a ride, it was how many times. Exceeding your limits accelerates your learning, it just hurts sometimes.

  • Rhossili is so bracing; NYT

    3 days in Wales and 3 sea swims to help acclimatise for the competitions to come. Cold water swimming is such a weird thing… In a lot of ways it’s just awful. Pain in the arches of your feet as the water first hits you, then shock as the water gets up to crotch height. And finally, the breath-wrenching dive to become fully immersed. If it weren’t for Emily, I wouldn’t be there.

    But once you’re in, it is fun in a muscle-twinging way. You break through some barrier between normal comfortable life, and surviving in a truly hostile environment. The idea of winter biking is to avoid getting cold, but here we have no protection for anything but modesty. Just swimsuits and temperatures that are guaranteed to give you hypothermia if you stay there long enough. So we built up each day: 4 minutes, then 10, then nearly 20. Once you’ve taken the plunge and ignored the horror, it’s actually kind of fun to be there in a place where people really shouldn’t be.

    Bring on the UK Champs at Tooting and then Finland!

    And in other exciting news, the New York Times article is out with words and videos… yay!

  • Bikemagic article is up

    Well, the Bikemagic article about the Alaska training school is up. Go read it here.

    And today’s training ride? 1 snapped chain. 1 standing in water over ankles incident. 85km distance, 2030m climbing, 6h45m time. Completely battered body.

  • Mr Selle Italia is having a laugh

    The Pugsley build is underway and while I was crushing down boxes, I came across this:

    In a sunny country villa in Italy, Signore Italia is laughing. But, signore, this is what we do to your saddles with our lack of sunshine…

    I don’t know why I bother with Ti rails!

  • Training, iPod, wet

    I’ve found myself doing more and more training rides this year. Today being a perfect example… there’s no way I would really want to go out in the pouring rain and ride for 4 hours if I didn’t know I had to. If I want to ride the big events I’ve got to put in the hours on local trails no matter how nasty they are.

    So, I finally caved to using an iPod for these rides. I’d always thought they rob you of your connection to the bike. I’d always listened to the sound of the tyres across the ground, the click of the freehub, and in quiet moments the birds in the trees. But when I don’t want to be out there, or I know I’m going to be out on the same old trails for a long time then the music helps me to keep going. The right track can make things better… Today I was just wrenching the last pedal stroke out to get over a mud-sucky climb when Bad Religion popped into my ears. It was the perfect liberation as I hit the singletrack coming out of the climb. Sometimes it’s all too much though… Reading a leaf-covered trail that’s speeding at you whilst Miles Davis is swirling in 10 directions at once or (as today) Steve Reich’s phase-shifted drumming is taking up a significant proportion of your brain is pretty difficult. But the same music can be the perfect antidote to long boring straights.

    I think that if I’m riding for pure joy, then the music stays at home but for putting in the miles it seems to help. You’ve just got to see the pictures from today to appreciate that it wasn’t a day to stop and smell the flowers. More a day to stop and wring out your gloves. Those are rivers, those are the trails!