Roberto

Scores on the doors......
 
Douglas    22.25
Carol         21.59
Dave         21.30
Alan Mac   20.08
Charlie      19.31
Lucia         19.29
Robbie      19.04
Gerard      18.48
AlanT        18.06
I Couttie    17.15
 
Well done to all on a chilly breezy night... forgot to ask for PB's, please post up if you had one ..
 
All seniors paid, so £21 for the club coffers...Thanks to PaulL, & DavieC for timekeeping...
 
Ian.....

Well done to All the riders(looked like a bit of hail on the way home) and Ian McGinty, Kenny and David C for pushing/timing/shouting .  took a few snaps at the finish line, gurns and all.
 

Graham, re the Volunteer Rota - tuesdays are always a backshift for me but I hope to assist in future if on annual leave etc, cheers

Could the author of this topic please do the honourable thing and correct the punctuation of the last 2 letters in the title,
Many thanks
Your sincerely
OCD McDonald
 

On the Westferry, so it's a home race and a warm up for the Sam Dooley.
Set my PB on this last year.

100 TT are only for nutters

Stunning day! And some photos to prove it!

It's amazing what a little bit of sunshine does to swell the numbers in a bunch :-)
 
I counted 11 head out this morning with one whole bunch doing the intended route - Alex, David C, Eric (new chap) Graham, Gerard, James, PaulC, Paul Levy, Ritchie, Tom (on his new bike - class) & myself headed off 9.15am.
 
Like a true reliability run, we had to have a few mishaps - a couple of mechanical, a puncture, someone riding onto a grass verge, dropped lights (that was me by the way) & mangkie mudguards. However, that did not spoil the fun at all, unbroken sunshine, no real wind to speak of & a good size bunch was a what makes a great wee run indeed.
 
We picked up Len on the way into Largs, then some opted to have a coffee stop at Largs (the evening trackies) while the rest of us carried onto round the coast to fulfil the West Kilbride route, but a wrong turn at Dalry meant we skipped a bit out .... oops :-)
 
Anyway, manage to rejoin the café bunch while back on the cycle track heading home & made our way back to the clubroom for some hot beverage & Gerard's lovely tart :-)
 
Thanks for wheels today guys & looking forward to next weeks Don Smith then :-)
 
Cheers
 
Chung

The first of the 2016 Reliability rides, the Tour of Renfrewshire, 40 miles, is on Sunday 7th February.
 
All rides will leave from clubrooms on Miller Street.
 
As per previous years, there will be three bunches with the slower bunch leaving at 9:00am, the second bunch leaving at 9:30am and the fastest bunch at 9:45am.
 
The route http://www.mapmyride...e-route-1730016
 
Tea, coffee, soup, rolls, cakes will be served in the clubrooms at the end of the ride, donations of food gratefully accepted, please indicate what you will be bringing in your posting.  One contribution per person across the 4 weeks of Reliability rides will mean a hearty snack for all at the end of each ride.
 
A non riding volunteer please to heat the soup, etc. for this first week.
 
 
If you don't feel ready for the full 40 miles at this stage in the season, don't worry there will be others in the same boat and there are various shorter options available.  Just come along and work up an appetite for the soup!

It's not my intention to post updates for every event on the forum but, in order to point members in the right direction whilst this gets up and running
 
KennyS
 
-------
 
The first CTT event in Scotland will be the Velopreda 10 mile TT on the Westferry course on March 26th organised by Geoff Smith. This event is now live on the CTT online entry system and Geoff is keen to see the entries rolling in
 
http://www.cyclingtimetrials.org.uk/event/21896
 
Can you advise your members that when entering an event on the CTT on line entry system when it asks for "district" they should use "National" for the time being until the system is changed to recognise Scotland.

Thanks and regards  

Bill McMillan

CTT Scotland secretary

Finally got round to rejoining after an "extended rest period" shall we say.
 
Anyway looking forward to increasing my fitness levels and catching up with some old faces (not literally obviously!!!) as well as meeting some new.
 
Richard Binnie

Good day out with the Wheelers, sorry about missing the café stop in Balloch, but I was meeting family to go ten pin bowling for my brother's 40th birthday in Edinburgh, which I won (just had to mention it!).

Assisting Andy G with his test can do two more three at a push post below
 
You will need Heart Rate monitor nod or Power meter or turbo that does power
 
Those who just want a turbo can play as well 60 minutes roughly but the test is only 20 good hard session

Well, that was a good bunch with a good run today!
 
A group of 11 with a mix of Jets - Charlie, Matty & Hamish, along with the senior citizens of AlanT, Darryl, Emma, PaulC, Paul Levy, Robbie, Robbo & myself, departed from the clubroom this morning.
 
Picked up a few more bodies - Campbell H, Gerard, Jess & Lusia (2 more Jets) at the Bridge, at the same time Darryl & Paul split from us to do a shorter route as they were time constrain. It was good to catch up though even though it was a short spell.
 
The remaining 13 headed round the planned route with the Jets putting in some strong shifts at the front, sometimes too strong :-)
Obviously, once we got to Sinclair Street, we couldn't hold them back. They made an early attack but thankfully Robbie stayed with them, if only to make sure they're all ok :-)
A regroup at the car park at the top followed by what should have been a fast decent was slowed by the constant strong head wind.
A wee mechanical for Hamish on the Lochside road meant for once he was at the back :-) But not for long.
 
Teas & coffee in Ballochs Corrie Cafe for everyone (except for Gerard & Robbo who skipped it as they had to be back before 12.30 & Matty, who had a lift from his mum as she waited for him in Balloch)
 
Everyone crossed the bridge except for me as I stayed Northside to head home, I hope everyone got home safely despite the wind!
 
All in, a good day on the bike, at least it stayed dry if a bit dull. But I cannas ask for more.
Thanks for the wheels & company today, Jets & Wheelers!
 
Definitely a good start to the year, more of the same please :-)
 
Over & out
 
Cheers
 
Chung

a solo spin with my misery for company is my plan.

Thanks everyone for the uptake of my bike fit offer. Can you all come prepared with with your full cycling kit, shorts & tight cycling top also shoes as we will do pedal/cleat alignment as well. For TT bike fits please remember your TT helmet. We should complete each bike fit within a 2 hour time frame but sometimes we can run over this but I'll try and keep this to a minimum. Look forward to seeing you all at the weekend.
 
 
And remember your bike...

Robbie
See times under announcements

Yes Robbo, I've got you booked thanks

bike fitting at the clubrooms on 28th and 29th November, normal price £160 but we are taking pre bookings at £90. Limited space so be quick
 
Best regards
 
Drew Wilson
www.visualbikefit.com
 
Professional bike fitting and wind tunnel testing

Johnstone Jets Youth Cycling is delighted to announce its new sponsor, Dooley's Cycles of Paisley. Dooley's will sponsor the Jets until the end of season 2018.
Dooley's Cycles, established 1951, is Renfrewshire's longest established cycling shop and has a great history of supporting local, regional and national teams and events.
 
Owner Ian Dooley said "I'm really looking forward to helping support the Johnstone Jets. The club is doing great work at the grass roots of cycling as well as identifying and developing talent to a national level. Our shop caters for beginners, amateur and professional cyclists, so I believe this is going to work well for Jets members and their parents."
 
Johnstone Jets secretary James Simpson said "This is fantastic news for the Jets. Dooley's financial support is great, but it's also great for us to have a partnership with a local bike shop where members can go for help, specialist advice and member offers"
 
http://www.dooleys-cycles.co.uk/
 
Note:
Dooley's Cycles joins Tarmac as sponsors of Johnstone Jets Youth Cycling

All, please see below, I received this from Dave Moss at TLI Cycling. May well be of ineterst to some,
 
For the last three years I have organised a week long supported tour of some of best cycling routes in Scotland. I'm taking expressions of interest for our 4th annual cycle tour of Scotland, June 11th to 17th. Being fully supported, this may appeal to anyone wanting to tour with a lightweight bike without the hassle of carrying all your luggage, having accommodation sorted for you and meals cooked for you have a hard days ride. You also befit from a route selected by a fellow cyclist who knows the best way to get round Scotland on a bike. Starting and finishing in Stirling, the 2016 tour takes us through the Grampian Mountains, across to Fort William and onto Mull via the remote Ardnamurchan peninsula visiting Iona before returning to Stirling via Loch Awe. Fully supported with baggage transfer, on ride snacks and van support, high carb meals prepared by our own cooks and great company make this a fantastic cycling experience. see www.tearfundcycling.btck.co.uk for details. I just charge the actual costs of the tour, all the support staff are volunteers. I then ask you to raise funds for the charity Tearfund. ( www.tearfund.org ) Dave Moss Regional Secretary Scotland

Usual route:
Stewarton Kilmaurs Crosshouse and back via Long Drive Kilwinning Route 7.
Cafe stop at the Blueberry.
About 60 - 65 miles - steady pace.
9:00 Miller St.
Who's in?

Alans post on the club run section about the Drum up over to Loch Eck on Sunday reminded me of this article from a few years ago, worth a read if you have a spare 5 minutes.
 
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12607829.Old_boy_racers_get_on_their_bikes/
Old boy racers get on their bikes

In a clearing in a small wood, just off a narrow lane a few miles outside Glasgow, a group of men sit talking around a wood fire. They’re wearing shorts and the brightly coloured tops of cyclists everywhere. Expensive road bikes rest against trees, and laughter and banter rise up with the smoke from the fire.

The men have craggy, worn, lean faces, but every one has a sparkle in his eye. Some are in their late seventies, some older. One man, Bobby Brodie, is 89. All have ridden here, some covering more than 20 miles. Later, they’ll ride home – and next week they’ll do it all again. Sometimes someone is unwell, or the weather is so foul not everyone can get out, but there are always some of the group pedalling along the lanes on their swift, slim machines. They descend on this spot, a few miles south of the city, light a fire and then talk bikes, tell old stories and rib each other endlessly.

I first come across them after a chance encounter with Bob Mair, a retired tax officer. Bob, from East Kilbride, is on his bike climbing a long hill across a moor; I’m out for a walk in a brief bit of autumn sunshine. We stop to talk, and he mentions there’s a fire lit at a spot down the road. A little later, I make my way over a stile and into the trees to find the group. The welcome is instant, the men are relaxed, and there is the feeling that laughter could break out at any time. I think of my own parents, around the same age, cooped up in a nursing home with locked doors and constant care, coping with the awful decrepitude of stroke and dementia, and I hope to heaven my old age is like this.

From somewhere or other, blackened tin cans, wires threaded through their rims for handles, are produced and propped up among the embers. The water boils and I’m given tea. Then someone takes pity on me for having no food, produces a couple of sausages and cooks them for me. Listening to the stories the men tell, I ­realise I have stumbled on a piece of a world that is almost gone.

There was a time, starting after the First World War, when men and women poured out of cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen every weekend, to escape the factories and foundries, offices, shipyards and docks, and the smells and smogs of town. They didn’t come in cars, ready to drive back as soon as they got wet or hungry or needed to sleep, but on bikes, in buses, by thumb and on foot, with rough camping gear, old cans for kettles, and battered penknives.

To begin with, many were walkers and climbers. By the 1950s, hundreds of others would cycle out from Glasgow and the surrounding towns, part of clubs such as the Nightingale, St Christopher’s and the ­Glasgow or Glenmarnock Wheelers. They would race, time-trial or just enjoy the long, looping rides around the Campsies, Loch Lomond and Strathaven – and often further afield. The men I meet were among them.

They talk of lighting campfires on the shores of Loch Lomond, where smoke could once be seen rising from a dozen such “drum-ups†of a weekend. Sunday night meant a return home for work the next day – and if you were slow packing up, the rival clubs would ring their bells as they passed, challenging you to send out your best men for the weekend’s finale. The groups would start to cluster on the road, and with the first lights coming on at the edge of the city, the unofficial race, or habble, began.

Eighty-year-old Charlie Donnelly joined the Gilbertfield Wheelers as a young man in the 1940s. “After a run, we’d be coming down the Loch Lomond road and we’d meet the Douglas Cycling Club,†he says. “We’d be talking nice to these guys as we rode along: ‘How did you do in your 25-miler?’ ‘Oh, very good, and how was your 50?’

“Then one of them jumped [raced ahead] – and that was the habble. Two racing clubs, the whole road, and it was a race into town, heads down and arses up, to Anniesland to see which club was top.â€

Donnelly is a former shipyard worker, and the sheer physicality of his life when he was in his twenties is startling. Every day, after doing a manual job, he was cycling on track or road, weightlifting or indulging in his other great passions, ice hockey and skating, before Sunday’s racing finale. He and his friends would think nothing of pedalling down to Blackpool for a holiday, sleeping in barns on the way. “It was the freedom of it we loved: the bikes could take us anywhere.â€

Now this weekly gathering is probably the last of the drum-ups. Landowners have become stricter and cafes more popular. The hordes of riders have shrunk away and there are not so many who remember those hard, happy days.

Tales of war and industry

Over the next few weeks I pass by the drum-up a couple of times, and call in to chat. There’s a steady core of eight or 10 men there, but there are also younger cyclists they’ve met on the road, and acquaintances from years back. Tales of wartime Glasgow spin out, the bombing and fire-watch duties; then later of working in the foundries, and the old days when Springburn was a centre of the rail industry. Then there were the races and the time trials, from Port Glasgow to the Cloch at Gourock and back, and the long runs to the Highlands or the Borders and into England, and the trips cycling in America and Europe.

Camping by Loch Lomond on the way to Inverness in the late 1940s, one man put all the soaked leather cycling shoes to dry by a fire. The heat shrank them to the size of ­children’s shoes, so they cycled barefoot to Fort William before they could buy more.

I’m sitting next to Jimmy Docherty, and he’s telling me about a new Cannondale bike he’s acquired, and how he still has the cycling shoes he bought in 1948. He’s 78, and says he often cycles about 20 miles to meet up with the gang, coming up the long way round on a good day. His wife wants him to carry a mobile phone, but he’ll hear none of it. Her concern would be understandable given his age alone – but the fact he was half-paralysed by a stroke 22 years ago, and still has limited use of his right hand, makes it rather more so. “You won’t stop me cycling,†he says with a smile.

Eddie Brown, a former steel worker aged 77, has been riding since he was a teenager. He shows me a photograph of himself – a shy-looking, dark-haired boy – out on the road in the early 1950s. He still gets out cycling twice a week. “It doesn’t make you live longer,†he says. “But it does make you happier. When I got to my fifties, lots of fellows I knew went down with heart disease and strokes, and I could have been one of them. But I was able to keep going. Doing things like this makes you enjoy life more, makes it worthwhile.†A few weeks ago, Eddie tells me, he caught a salmon on a stretch of his local river. “Getting out, doing stuff … that’s the secret.â€

The others feel the same. Bob Cunningham is 80 and works two days a week at Tunnock’s confectioners in Uddingston. Bob Grieve is the same age and still plays ice hockey. Jack Maguire, another 80-year-old, is an old friend of the gang from New Jersey and has turned up on his bike. He’s on holiday, but that doesn’t mean sitting around doing nothing.

Bob Mair, the man who introduced me to the group, is 70. In the summer, he completed a 550-mile trip to the Highlands, setting off from Glasgow to Ardrossan, taking the ferry to Arran and crossing to Kintyre before ­reaching Oban and taking the ferry to Barra. He cycled half the length of the Outer Hebrides, caught a boat to Skye, cycled to Glen Shiel, climbed half a dozen Munros, then pedalled back home.

He’s done Land’s End to John O’Groats twice, the last time seven years ago, and marked the start of his retirement by riding around the coast of Ireland. The only difference from his younger days is a little caution: “When you get older you don’t want to fall off because it takes time to heal. I cracked some ribs in a fall and it took forever to sort out. You don’t want a broken hip now.â€

The ‘baby’ at 65

A few weeks later I borrow a good road bike and, on a bright autumn morning, join a little peloton climbing up out of Glasgow, behind the seemingly tireless legs of Terry McGee. The baby of the bunch at 65, he is a former council worker and merchant seaman who began his retirement with a ride across Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. He smokes roll-ups and I think this might mean I have a chance to keep up with him.

After tea brewed on the fire at the usual spot, we head out again for another 10 miles, across the hills, with one glorious descent of about three miles. The target, a cafe, is a mile or so off – so McGee, who now captains the Glenmarnock Wheelers, announces a sprint finish and I take the lead. Fifty metres from the line, I’m panting – and my 65-year-old rival sails past, arm aloft in mock triumph, not even pedalling.

On the way back it’s mainly downhill and I begin to revel in the speed of the bike, cornering fast and feeling its responsiveness. Then I hit a pothole at about 25mph and come crashing off, skidding along the road and into the verge. A bit bruised, I lag at the back on the rest of the ride home. We’ve covered 40 miles, a fairly easy day by the standards of men 30 years older than me, and that evening I’m bone-weary. But the thrill of taking the light, fast machine out across the hills stays with me. I think I begin to understand what this cycling game is all about.

As winter approaches and rain and frost gain the upper hand, I expect the ranks at the drum-up to be thinned, but these men are made of sterner stuff. Out come the fleeces and the waterproofs, on go the warm hats and gloves, and the wet, the wind and the cold are just another small problem to be overcome.

Eddie Brown is a vision in a pair of ripped overtrousers, waterproof top, woolly hat, helmet and wraparound sunglasses to keep the low-lying winter sun out of his eyes. Apart from that, there are few concessions to the season. Perhaps they’ll put a few more logs on the fire and build it a little higher, and maybe they’ll fit winter tyres with a slightly sounder grip.

On my last visit to the spot, I speak to Bob Mair and tell him I want to write about the days I’ve spent with the group. He is happy to have it recorded: like the rest, he treasures these days on the open road and by the smoky fire. But he makes me swear not to reveal the locations of their meetings, for fear someone, somewhere will object.

I say it seems like a little piece of history, from a time when the idea of escape from the city burned bright in the minds of people whose everyday existence was a struggle.

“Aye, they’re the dying embers, though,†he says.

That may be, but it seems they’ll be a long time dying. And as I head home I wonder what will finish these men, what could ever stop them climbing on their bikes and ­cranking up the hills, into the wide blue, wherever the hell it takes them.

To mark the end of the season and the start of winter time, here's a whole club run to Largs and the Bagel Basket.
 
Starting from the Club Rooms at 09:00 (winter time, the clocks go back the night before).
 
As in previous years for this run, the intention is to set of in groups of 15 to 20 with members mixed from the regular Sunday bunches, proceeding anticlockwise to the Bagel Basket, via Kilmacolm and Gourock.  After the stop we can reassemble into different groups to depending on who want to take which route back.
 
The outbound leg is 32 miles from Miller St., the return can be anything you want it to be, including the train if required!  The minimum return cycling is 20 miles via the Haylie Brae and Kilbirnie.
Nearer starts are possible for anyone who may not feel up to cycling all the way.
 
Remember the clocks go back, so you get an extra hour in bed, and mudguards on please! (but lets hope it's not wet)
 
Please post if you will be riding, then I can warn the BB how big an invasion to expect.

Fellow cyclists,
I will be on my travels again, and heading to Kazakhstan to work for the foreseeable future, so obviously will not be out on club runs. I will attempt to join you if there is a run arranged, anytime I'm home over the winter. I'll envy you riding in the 'mild' Scottish winter as I freeze in -40 Deg!!!
 
Stay safe and we'll catch up some time.
 
Ken