Dino's daughter, Emily, has been coming to a few track races at Blackburn and cheering her dad on (and watching him win!), and expressed some interest in having a go on a track bike.  After some pondering (she's 11) we thought we'd join her up to Blackburn as a J13 rider and then give her a tootle on the velodrome on Tuesday night when there's no-one there and I can keep the place safe for a complete novice.

All day Tuesday it had been raining on and off (more on, when I'd been riding anyway ... ) but it dried up and at 6 Dino picked me up from aboc HQ and we managed to squeeze my T1 into the back of his car along with his Raceline, and one quite excited and apprehensive young lady.

Once we got to the velodrome Dino took care of putting all the bikes together and Emily and I watched as a Blackburn junior crashed into the grass on the infield.  Emily didn't seem at all disturbed by this (one cool customer) and we went up to the clubrooms to organise her a bike.  Blackburn has a fleet of track bikes that get loaned out to juniors and beginners, they're old steelies that have seen many years of use, but they're pretty well maintained and certainly servicable.  We found the smallest one we could find and we got Emily as comfortable as we could, given that even the smallest bike was still too big for her.

Forms were filled out, Emily was licenced!  Time to ride.  Emily's got a mountainbike I think, and is a pretty confident rider on it, but track bikes? Fixed gear, no brakes, toe overlap ... a very different beast.

We got her on the bike and Dino started her off by push-starting from the side and running along to keep her steady, but in a flash, she was off! Two laps later and we got her to ride beside Dino who caught her.  A great first step.  We progressively gave her more to do on the bike and at the end of the evening, she was happy to start on the handrails in the infield by herself and come on and off the track onto the rail.  We had one little bingle when she got crossed up in the infield and tried to get onto the concrete at a bad angle, but she was straight back up and ready to go without any issues.

I think next summer might well see young Emily shaking up the girls and boys on the velodrome.  She's strong and tough, and has her family to give her plenty of support.

aboc's fame is multi-faceted.  Here's some photos from the Bendigo Madison, on Cyclingnews.com

Yesterday I made the trip out to Williamstown to pick up an order of aboc clothes - knicks, jerseys and bib & brace knicks. I get them made by a local company called Rowbust.  They're good people, I like them, and they've been good to work with, local people, paying their staff decent wages, no sweatshop labour and the quality of their work is, I think, excellent. They do small orders and have been quite responsive when I've wanted specials done etc.

They used to be in Collingwood, which was quite convenient.  But, they moved to Williamstown, which is not! I live in Vermont and work in the city and eastern suburbs.

To cut a long story short, I had an order for about $3,000 worth of kit.  Picked it all up and today, sorted it for giving out to people who'd pre-ordered it.  It wasn't 'til I tried mine on that I noticed the pockets on the jerseys are upside down.  Not a huge deal, except that the pockets are not rectangles, they're shaped, and having them upside down makes them pull in at the midriff, and thus, makes the jersey tight around the middle.  Not good for men's jerseys (but, great for girls jerseys ....). I can live with the pattern being upside down, I doubt anyone would notice except me, but the shape change makes the jerseys both uncomfortable and quite unflattering for those of us who aren't skinny around the middle.

I've been waiting 3 months for this order (as has everyone that ordered them!) and I'm going to have to send the jerseys back and wait for them to be redone.  The worrying thing is that this is the second time they've made the same mistake.  My second clothes order with them a couple of years ago had the same problem, and I thought we had it sorted.  Hrm.

Tuff didn't deliver my new track gloves in time either, but I do have the uberflash Easton EC90's on my T1, and will be (rain permitting) using them this arvo at Blackburn.  w00t!

If this Dolan ARC carbon track bike isn't exactly the same bike as this Teschner Track Pro I'll eat my manky old road gloves.
So who really designed it? Does it matter?  Probably not, all reports suggest it's a top frame, but the curious want to know ... Is Teschner rebadging a Dolan?  Given that Teschner's a small time frame builder in Queensland without access to an autoclave who specialised in other materials for a long time ....  Do I have to eat my gloves?!

A little background before I vent.  BBN (Blackburn Cycling Club) is the club I'm a member of, and aboc is a sponsor of.  BBN is, whether they admit it or not, heavily biased towards track riders - if you're not a tracky, you're out of the loop. The club fails dismally to communicate with its members.  Newsletters are once every 6 months if at all, the website is moribund since Alan Barnes (who to his credit, worked for a long time on it and it has some good content) got his new job and has lost time and/or interest in maintaining it. One of the reasons I started aboc was to look after riders who were being neglected by the club - the club is happy to have your money and membership and help at events, but unless you're a junior or a tracky, it makes little effort to communicate with you and help you.  Thus, aboc was borne!

One of the pieces of the solution puzzle is a CMS website, one that delegates and simplifies the addition of content and allows the club editorial control.  Just like the aboc site - the aboc site you're reading this on was created as a testbed of Plone, a CMS that fits the clubs needs pretty-much spot-on.

Clubs, being committee run (as they should be), take time to make decisions, but their latest one is a real corker.  Here's my draft letter to the committee after the latest bad decision to come out of the committee :

The BBN committee et al ...

The club faces an ongoing issue, which was clearly identified during strategic planning sessions in the summer of '05-'06.  A core problem the club has is retaining club members, and one of the key factors in this was identified as a lack of communication with club members.
There's not been a newsletter in months, and the club website is moribund.  Alan Barnes, as the current site maintainer, has lost
interest and the site is such that delegating this task to others is not feasible.  Fixing this is now no longer a background task, it is a matter of urgency.

Almost insurmountable barriers exist between club members with information and news and getting that information made available to other club members. If club members don't show up to track races in summer, they don't know anything about what's going on, and that is a clear and identified failure on the part of the club.  We know it's bad, and we need to fix it, and it has been the case for at least as long as I have been a member of Blackburn (some 5 years now).

At the planning meetings last summer, Tabatha Cole suggested that the club investigate the use of a CMS (Content Management system) to replace the current website.  The primary advantage that a CMS presents is the ability to easily add content and to provide editorial control over content in ways that suit the club's policies.

At present, there are two proposed CMS solutions in various stages of readyness for the club to consider.  Both proposed solutions are good, both solutions are suitable for the main aims of a sporting club website, which is that they offer easy addition of content and easy editorial control.  Additionally, both are mature and stable products.  There are technical and political differences between the two, but both are, in their current forms, far superior to the current site and capable of rapid deployment to a service provider site. I know I can get the proposed Plone site online at a professional service provider in a matter of days if given the authority to do so.  While there are healthy differences of opinion between the proponents of both sites, these are on technical and quasi-religious reasons, and should not, in my opinion, influence the decisions made by the club.

I learnt tonight that the club has decided to hire a consultant to determine the club's requirements and to make a recommendation on what CMS is most suitable for the club's use.  This is, in my opinion, an appalling and disgraceful waste of the club's money, and a further setback in terms of time. It will add at least another 6 months to the process and who knows how many thousands of dollars to the cost of the system, which can be done for free, now, with both Magnolia and
Plone.

As a club sponsor, I am very disappointed that the club has elected to spend precious time and money to hire a consultant when the club has expertise in this field available and willing to present solutions. A consultant will have to spend a lot of time determining the club's requirements and needs, which duplicates the work we did last summer and over the previous winter in evaluating CMS's and building experience with them in real world scenarios.

That is what I have done with Plone, after extensive testing with my own commercial websites. I didn't recommend Plone because I like the default template, I recommended it because it is a very good fit for the club's website requirements both now, and in the foreseeable future. It is not the only good fit, but it is a very good fit, and it is a well supported, stable and
popular CMS, which is used not only be many sporting and volunteer organisations worldwide, but also NASA and the United Nations.

As a club member, I'm surprised and disappointed at the club's lack of respect for the recommendations made to it by both the Plone team (myself and Rowan Geddes) and Magnolia, championed by John Nicholson.  Does the club not think that we did our homework? Is the committee so insecure and indecisive as to not trust its own judgement that it needs a report from an outsider to tell it what it already knows?  We need to fix the website, and we need to fix it now.  We can have a Plone or Magnolia site in place and running in less than 4 weeks, and can expand on what it offers as the demand for such expansion
presents itself.

I urge the club committee to reconsider the decision made to hire a consultant.  I urge the committee to make a decision between Plone and Magnolia and to let us get on with addressing the urgent need to communicate with club members.  While I think that Plone is a superior solution to Magnolia, in either case, I want to be able to contribute content to the site now, not in
another year.

Thankyou

Tonight, dusk, Westerfolds Park, in the CARPARK I crashed my MTB!  Showing off, I thought I'd ride through a pothole.  Front suspension was still locked out, front wheel goes in hole, bike stops.  I don't.  Right over the handlebars!
DOH!

That'll learn me to showboat!  Neil would indeed be proud, nice gouge in thigh from pedal I think, no damage to knicks, save for a bit of blood staining (rinsed out now, all good ...).  It's only superficial damage, not enough to warrant a bit of Mefix, but it does sure sting in the shower. 

I did get up the steep hill that I normally have to bail out and walk up though, and recovered from overcooking it into a tight corner with a bit of front wheel sliding(w00t!), so it wasn't a disaster of a ride.

I ordered one of these today, for winter night MTB fangs.  It'll be just like the old days with the old rally car, but cheaper and colder.  Mmmm, cross-training ...

Myself and a couple of other aboc'ers (Richard Grace & Nathan Larkin) piggybacked onto a Blackburn training session at DISC last night.  I'm not a real tracky, just using track as a bit of cross training and intensity work for road, but wanted to have a look at the place anyway.

First impression (I've seen track racing at Vodafone before, but never from a rider's eye perspective), wow ... that's .. um ... steep.
42 degree angle I think?  And wooden boards .. slippery? 

John Nicholson's advice - don't go slow!  Ok!

So I roll around the flat bottom of the track, looking up, work up a bit of speed and courage, and then pop up onto the track proper.  The first time around the bank I'm up on the blue line, and looking down ... it's a long way down!  I don't think I've been this tense on a bike ever?  Keep pedaling ... hold the line ... relax your hands ... ok ... made it around a lap.  I do a couple more laps up on the blue line, not daring to change lines, now, how do I get off the track?! 

On the flatter straight, I slow the bike as much as I can and drop down onto the duckboards. hoping the concrete surface will give enough grip.  It does, and I survive unscathed.  Back to the pits and relax for a few minutes.  Lucie's taking some photos, Richard is equally wired by the experience.  Nathan seems as cool as can be.

We do a few more laps, and work up a bit of speed, at one point I'm laying off the back of a rolling paceline and keeping my distance from them, HR up into high E2/low E3, and feeling the bike squat down into the banking around the corners.  This is kinda fun, but I'm not game to look around much or change lines just yet.  Next time, I think, my shot nerves are done for today.

We help the pursuit teams with timing and holding for a few of their practice runs, and that's it for the night.

I'm riding to Glenvale on Sunday morning, big tailwind down Springvale Rd, doing around 44km/h down the hill towards Wellington Rd.  There's a rider on the left doing maybe 30?  I scoot past, she's wearing a CCCC jersey, must be on her way to Glenvale too ... cool, if she wants, I guess she can suck some wheel.  My speed is considerably greater than hers, so I don't say anything as i go past, not that I necessarily would, I don't recognise her, just some random roady.

So I'm stopped at the lights at Wellington Rd, and she rolls up, and proceeds to ask me just exactly why I didn't say hello to her.  A little taken aback, I pause, and suggest that I was going a lot faster than her and didn't think to say anything.   She looks unimpressed and rides off when the lights change, sure enough, to Glenvale.

What's with that?  Do I somehow owe her something because we're both on bicycles?  Often I'll say hi to someone on the road if I feel like it, but when I'm going somewhere, and there's a big difference in speed, why would I? and what gives her the right to suggest that I should?