Europe needs to get real on defence; Britain needs to get real on Europe
13 February 2025
Post
18 April 2009
2 minute(s) read
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Can’t ride a bike as I’ve no sense for balance. Seems like a very involved hobby but I’d need a trike if I took it up. Maybe there’s a big future in this?
We don’t want to talk about wattbikes. We want to talk about Damian McBride, Red Rag, Labour List, Derek Draper and whether you think the ghastly Millburn and Byers are waiting in the wings.
Oooh nice piece of kit. You’d be disappointed if you didn’t get an improvement.
Better efficiency is all very well but for me the idea of going faster is getting somewhere sooner – not just going further. Cycled with a friend in the Lake District the last couple of years and improving a bit anyway just from fitness and mental attitude / expectations.
I notice a cheap exercise recommended by a tri-athlete site for improving technique is practicing one-footed cycling, they also recommend pushing technique toward higher cadence. As in most fields, brief but focused repetition of the exact right thing is better for adaptation than longer periods of training which lose the focus and re-inforce a bad habit.
You’ll no doubt miss the bens of Argyll.
cheers, @jayprich
The best static bike I’ve seen was at the Exploratory in Bristol (now, alas, no more). It was connected to a generator which powered a television – the TV would only stay on if you pedalled quite vigorously. The exhibit neatly illustrated that powering even a small black and white set takes quite a lot of energy.
Perhaps we could help to eliminate obesity by making it illegal to power a TV or computer by any other means!
I disagree Caroline — we don’t all want to talk about that, again. I thought Alastair’s two blogs on McBride were enough, and they seemed to make an impact. I also think that even if some of the papers like to lump all so called spin doctors together, the team that helped Blair would never have been as crass as McBride seems to have been. Also I am not a cyclist but I think the occasional non political blog is no bad thing. There is plenty of politics around elsewhere any minute of any day
There IS such a thing as ‘muscle memory’.
It is referred to as ‘neuromuscular facilitation’ and that describes the process of how the neuromuscular system retains/remembers motor skills.
See http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/207/1/11 for more info.
More accurately, it’s really brain-muscle memory or motor memory but “muscle memory” is the phrase often referred to, in studies.
What REALLY is interesting though….is that there is no such thing as a bicycle seat that does NOT act as a bacon slicer on anyone weighing 16 stones or more.
Mike
A reformed, and buttockly crippled, bike rider.