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A bit delayed, mostly because I forgot, but also because I've been ridiculously busy: last weekend, I joined in with the Friday Night Ride to the Coast clan again, this time for Manchester to Morecambe, largely on account of it being somewhat more convenient than any of them there London ones, but also because a YACFer passed away last year having had a heart attack on the Manchester-Morecambe last August, and I wanted to go along to pay my respects, as whilst I only vaguely knew him, I did remember him being extremely kind to my family and I years back following my dad's death.

Ahead of the ride I offered to do a 'ride-in' from Stockport to the city centre; one person took me up on it, and we met halfway from my house to the pre-meet meeting point of the pub on Piccadilly station - conveniently, he even suggested a spot very close to where I was planning to remove myself from the main road, so as to avoid cycling through Longsight on a Friday evening (which, for those who are fortunate enough not to know, is a free-for-all: motorists will stop suddenly and open their doors without looking in the mirrors, not even at the side of the road; pedestrians emerge from behind parked cars wearing clothes not terribly suitable for lighting conditions, also without looking where they're going. Drivers will pull U-turns, without using their mirrors, and absolutely nobody except bus drivers treat traffic lights as anything more than an advisory. It is generally best avoided.)

After an hour or so in the pub eating chips and watching people arrive from various bits of the country, we negotiated the traffic of the city centre and headed to Albert Square, the start point of the ride, getting there at about 23:40. There was a short safety briefing about riding in groups and along unlit country lanes in the middle of the night, and then not long after midnight, we all saddled up and headed off into the night…

Apparently the road up to Bury - our first stop, for a moment of silence for Alan and laying flowers in his memory - was "a long uphill slog", though I can't say I really noticed. Which was a really nice thing, given I usually profess how much I abhor hills :)

We took a rest there and were warned about the long hill to follow; this was more noticeable, though not as difficult as I was expecting. Up to that point, I'd been in the very front group of riders; I did slip behind a little here, but was far from the last to the top. Almost as if all the cycling this year has actually helped me get fitter, or something ;)

At the top of the hill, there was a regrouping, and the phrase "Quick health and safety announcement. We have a steep descent now, with a 90 degree bend at the bottom… good luck." was uttered, to most people's amusement. This was one of the things that got texted to various friends and my mum who had asked for or who usually get/send me texts during their silly bike ride adventures; one of whom was damerell, who texted me back to whit: "The great Jobst Brandt said to me once "you descend like a maniac" means "I could not match you". So it is praise when I say it, you descend like a maniac." My reply, to him and the others, was a simple: "Nailed it."

Of course, what wasn't mentioned (or perhaps it was and I was too busy texting to hear - more likely, if I'm honest) was how after the 90 degree bend, the road went directly uphill again, in the fashion that you can't use any speed you built up descending as momentum for climbing, so it's a tough job getting up there. I also nailed that, however :)

At the top of this third climb - and we're talking somewhere between 2-3am here, there was a pub in the middle of nowhere, with people outside it chattering away, one of them trying to control a large dog which I had initially thought was gunning for us cyclists - only to be informed later by one of the other riders that actually, it had its eyes on a wild roaming sheep who was being very daring and standing stock still on the other side of the road as if to say "I dare you!" to the hound. It definitely added something to the final push up the climb…

That one was more difficult. In fact, just as the person I was riding next to was saying "kimble is fearsome on the downhills, but we all catch her up on the… oh." - she calmly and silently powered past us… on a recumbent.

By the top of the moors, we stopped for a longer rest and to admire the views, and then hammered down the main road to the middle-of-the-night stop in shape of a McDonalds, where I confused the staff by asking for hot apple pie rather than something… less vegetarian. I'm guessing they're not used to serving apple pies at 3am.

The ride was… bumpy, after that. Up but then down, up again, down again… all on pitch dark country lanes, often in silence, just enjoying the ride and quiet company. In Longridge, we regrouped, caught our breaths, did some casual astronomy, and made friends with a black cat who was quite curious about happening upon 23 cyclists at 5am.

We hammered on, pausing again to regroup in Inglewhite, where I picked up another answer for the British Cycle Quest - incredibly, the planned route took us right past the location and when I emailed the ride leader ahead of time to say "soooo can we have a rest there so I can write down the answer?" his response was "actually, we usually pause there anyway…" (and all that despite not knowing of the BCQ!)

The next pause point was a short discussion over sticking to the route or following a coastal cycle path, which I ducked out of to hide behind a conveniently placed wall for a comfort break. Cue, as we saddled up again, my regular complaint following such breaks about how wonderful bib shorts are for comfort and warmth, and yet awful when it comes to a need to relieve oneself mid-ride, and more importantly my cycling wardrobe's awful lack of halter-neck shorts, a newish invention by dhb that make me go "why didn't I think of that?!" and "why are dhb so damn expensive?!" - and they aren't too bad, compared to, say, Rapha, but still rather out of my price range, on the whole.

The group had decided that the coastal path was likely to be dry and not muddy, and thankfully were right, as that's the route we took from that point most of the way to Morecambe itself. The views across the bay to the fells in the Lakes as the sun rose above them were utterly stunning, and frankly, I would cycle all the way back to Morecambe again just for that view.

From there, we rode along the cyclepath to Morecambe, and the final kilometre of the ride along the promenade to the infamous Eric Morecambe statue, which I was informed I had to pose not just next to, but climbing on, for the "forumites on a statue" thread:



(Thankfully, it was not a con!)

The final 7.5km were ridden from Morecambe back into Lancaster, where I ate breakfast from a plate bigger than my face, and then sped off to the station to play bicycle jenga with kimble (who showed me that, much to my amazement, it is possible to hang a recumbent up on the daft bicycle storage space on the old Virgin Voyager trains).

The journey back home from there was fairly non-eventful, despite a slightly antagonistic fellow passenger, who looked directly at me as we got on the train in Preston, before parking himself down on the quite uncomfortable fold-down seats positioned in the bicycle space, leading to the following conversation:

"'scuse me, please could I put my bike there?"
*grumbles unintelligibly, doesn't move*
"This *is* the bike space… and this is a bike. You're not a bike. Please can I put my bike there?"
*shuffles over one seat, grumbles unintelligibly again*
I put my bike in the bike space, strap it in, and take a seat on one of the nicer, vastly more comfortable seats opposite.

(And, an hour and a half later, this conversation:)

"Why can't people just RIDE their bikes anyway? They're not ACCESSORIES."
"Mate, YOU ride 120km through the middle of the night and then resist the urge to get a train home, I DARE YOU."

After that, it was… really quite peaceful. I slept the remaining 10 minutes into Manchester, cycled across the city centre, and then hopped on another train home, just about staying awake, walked in the house at about 2pm, and went to sleep on the sofa leaving my brother to explain to his friends what I'd been up to :)

(CN: obesity, body negativity)

Someone on a friend's repost of this journo request posted to getinthesea claimed: "obesity is not a disability, it's a life choice".

My reply was to tell them they were wrong, followed up with:

"What about people who have to take medications known to cause obesity in order to control other health problems? Look up: chlorpromazine, clozapine, amitryptyline, aripriprazole, olanzapine, quetiapine, risperidone.

What about people with diabetes? Did you know the insulin that some diabetics need to stay alive causes obesity?

What about people who are paralysed and CAN'T be active, who instead have muscle wastage that turns to fat that they can't easily get rid of? For that matter, what about people with degenerative muscle-wasting diseases?

What about people with hypothyroidism, the very definition of which is not having the hormones required to maintain a good metabolism and burn off calories well?

What about people who became obese as a result of a disability rendering them bed-ridden and unable to live their life, now unable to function "normally" because of the obesity they've ended up with through no CHOICE of their own?

What about people living on or even below the poverty line, unable to afford "good food" that keeps them healthy?

No, not all of these things cause obesity in all people - but there is peer-reviewed evidence backing up everything I've just said showing that your statement "obesity is not a disability, it's a life choice" is nothing more than bigoted rubbish. But then I should have expected as much from someone who openly admits to agreeing with Katie Hopkins and thinks women's magazines do no harm whatsoever to the mental health and self-esteem of women who see glossy magazines staring down at them instructing them to be skinny in order to be a good person.

Some people have become obese through overeating and inactivity, yes. And they may be quite happy about that, or not. The important thing is that that's their choice and unless they invite it, nobody else's business."

He also complained that said friend using sarcasm in response to the suggestion that women's magazine journalism is unimportant was patronising; I *may* have said it's no wonder some people feel the need to post such comments.

…why do I always get into arguments like this at bedtime?!

Written end of July 2015, post-dated to the day of the ride for some kind of historical accuracy.

The website I use to log my cycle rides, Strava, has monthly challenges one can enter, which include km-per-month (starting at 250km and increasing in increments of same up to 1250km) and also a "Gran Fondo" - usually 100km in a single ride, but during the summer months, they encourage you to get out on your bike more by progressively increasing the distance to 115km in June, 130km in July and 150km in August. In June, I hit the first one by adding the extra distance onto the end of the Great Manchester Cycle, but for July, I invented my own ride: getting myself from home, across the Pennines and to a lovely cycling café I discovered in York last year.

I set off at about 9am, and immediately my GPS began to worry me, telling me that Strava's estimated ride time of 5.5 hours was out by an hour and that I should have left at around 8am instead in order to get there at the same time as the Yorkshire-based friends I'd planned to meet. Indeed, a quick bit of mental arithmetic as I made my way to the main road, and I began to realise the GPS was probably right; I usually ride at about 20kph, so I was looking at 5 hours just for the first century, never mind the final 33km after it.

I figured, nothing I could do for it except update the friends and say I'd just let them know when I was about an hour out of York, so they could make their respective ways to the cafe.

About an hour later, I realised things had gone slightly wrong again: as I passed a sign labelled "Woodhead", I realised that I wasn't on the right road. I mean, I was, in that my GPS was telling me that I was going in the right direction - but my grand plan for crossing the Pennines was to use the utterly beautiful Snake Pass, not the HGV-filled Woodhead Pass.

Thankfully, I struck lucky with the traffic - I guess that's the perk of riding on a Saturday morning.

In the end, I think I probably made the right call route-planning over Woodhead; it was actually remarkably not-very-steep at all, more of a windy and slow ascent, and quite pleasant on a quiet morning.

There weren't many photos for the rest of the ride; I was conscious of time creeping along, so my only records between then and the café were a video of some roadside chemistry in the form of sachets of electrolyte drink and 1500mls of water, with the recording stopped rapidly, as I realised I was shaking my bottle too hard and it was going to explode - and a celebratory snapshot of the sign welcoming me to the County of North Yorkshire.

I texted shortly after, from Selby, giving the one hour warning to friends and my mum, who had decided when I was somewhere near Barnsley to hop on a train and see if she could beat me there - she did, although I think TransPennine Express gave her quite the unfair advantage! - and almost exactly an hour later, I pulled to a stop outside the café, and looked down at my GPS/clock just in time to hear Kieran say "And what time do you call this?!" - to which I happily replied: "5 hours and 11 minutes of moving time since I left home, so about 20 minutes earlier than expected!"

(OK, so I was also about an hour later than planned; I blame the Yorkshire hills and my faulty lungs for that. The "moving time" is the important figure to me!)

So then there was all the food, fruit juice, delicious cake, and a celebratory photo at York station before getting the train home:



Next adventure: Dark Peak Grimpeur, a 106km randonneur with many many hills - my first Audax not on the back of damerell's tandem. Hoping to take the camcorder out that I received last Christmas with the intent of video-blogging my time in Finland, and doing an on-the-move ride report...

Quote to sum up my most fun conversation today: "He only died once!"

(As much as I would love it if my stepdad had come back to life since 2008, it's just not scientifically possible. You'd think that, a) the NHS would know this; and b) seeing the death certificate once would be enough…)

Everyone is home this weekend for a change, so we are all sitting down for a roast "like a family". It's my job to acquire the chicken. I was told to go out early before butcher ran out; I knew this wouldn't go well because I didn't sleep until 1am... but I didn't realise how little my brain would function.

Me: "I'm looking for a chicken."
Butcher: "What kind?"
Me: "…a dead one?"

He meant medium or large. I need coffee.

I've been thinking this week, about being a Londoner.

I wasn’t born there, and I no longer live there, but I experienced a weird feeling of being home when I stepped off my coach at Victoria on Saturday. I first declared that city my second home half a decade ago, and it feels like nothing and everything has changed.

I was so engrossed in my book that I hadn't noticed our pace slow as we left the motorway, and I looked up and out of the window somewhere near Finsbury Park, and seeing a familiar red bus, and roundels everywhere, and I felt this sense of... happiness, and calm.

And when I think about what people say "makes" a Londoner, it's the daft things.

It's knowing where to stand on the Tube platform, so that when you get off the train again you can make your escape quickly.

It's instinctively knowing where your Oyster is at all times.

It's knowing that if you want to change from the Victoria to Northern line, you should avoid Euston at all costs and go for Warren St instead.

It's looking at the lights lining the Thames after the sun has set, and loving them like you would stars in the country.

It's being defensive about which side of the river is better - south, obviously. Even though there's dragons.

It's the comforting rumble of the Tube trains you profess to hate (and your Twitter app remembering the hashtag #TfaiL, for ease of making your friends in other cities cringe and sigh...)

I'll always be a Manc, but I reckon I'm still a Londoner too, in a small way.

Even if I do make eye contact with people on the bus now and again.

Yesterday, I arrived home from my night out at 5am, slept for five hours curled up in the armchair downstairs, and then went out cycling with my mum. MADNESS.

It was actually quite relaxing - apart from the new traffic system in Poynton, where a motorist took pedestrians, cyclists and cars having shared priority to mean "if I have to wait, then you have to wait too" and suddenly pulled over as mum tried to (entirely legally) filter past his stationary car - causing her to stop just as suddenly, and me (having just clipped into my step-in pedals) to fall over sideways... he then drove away the moment the traffic cleared, leaving me lying in the road trapped under my bike as my leg spasmed with cramp, and mum and a kind stranger trying to unclip my foot from the pedal.

I love motorists, I really do.

Other than that, though, it was all lovely - we got to Pott Shrigley with no further bruises or bashes, and I made it up the hill to Green Close chapel without stopping, which has always defeated me before now.

We met Dan there, had coffee and a baked potato each (well, coffee cake in the case of mum) and then shared a mahoosive bowl of fresh juicy strawberries.

Then, I said to mum, "why don't we take a different route home?" - so she fished out her A-Z and said, "well, there's always the old brickworks..." and Dan said "isn't that Kettleshulme way? It'll be a bit lumpy..." but I said "that's fine!" figuring I fancied testing myself.

So we turned the other way out of the Coffee Tavern car park, and headed for the brickworks, and mum began to tell me about how it was a popular training ride amongst Manchester cyclists, and one which she had avoided for around 20 years. I began to feel full of confidence (and a hint of sarcasm).

The route completely redefined "a bit lumpy" with one climb alone gaining us over 1000 feet - and yet I managed to do all the climbs without stopping to walk once. (We won't talk about how many times I hopped off at summits to sit down and wait for poor old mum.)

It was hard, hard work, but so worth it, for the view as much as getting to the top and looking behind me and seeing what I'd achieved. Fitness: I has it!

On the way back down from the summit, there was a hill that I was zipping down at 36mph (with brakes on!) and then I saw the climb back out of the valley on the other side and began to pedal... and there was no friction. My chain had slipped off, and I'm still going at 30mumble miles an hour thinking "oh shit oh shit oh shit" ... I managed to freewheel up about three-quarters of the other side before I had to unclip to avoid a second tumble. (OK, so that was one hill I walked up part of.)

By the time we got home, we'd covered 22 miles and 3008.5 feet of ascent. (The extra six inches is vital when you're talking these kind of numbers, evidently.) We're both a little sore today - surprisingly my arms and back the most, presumably down to standing on some of the climbs to power up them faster. In fact, I was going to go swimming this morning, but have decided that perhaps I should nip into the pool on the way home from my work induction tomorrow instead... :)

Favourite moment of university so far is my anatomy lecturer's scathing criticism of vampires seen on a TV documentary:

"These self-described vampires, they use anti-clotting agents when they phlebotomise their mates, so that they don't end up like flat-cap wearing Lancashire blokes chowing down on a black pudding... the mix of intelligence and sheer stupidity is astounding."

Student life continues to be excellent. The workload is intense but manageable, I'm maintaining a social life both in and out of uni, and I'm utterly knackered but still very excited.

Tomorrow I find out where my first placement will be, which means that although I'm on a self-directed study day, I will probably be awake at an ungodly hour so that I can type up last week's lecture notes continuously hit refresh on the Blackboard site.

Huzzah!

My houseguest just walked into the kitchen and said “Katie, can you think of a good reason why there might be a dead fish in your toilet?”

I replied, "Well, it wouldn't be the first time. I assume whoever put it there intended to flush it away, so I would just... go about your business, and flush, and..."

...and then I couldn't continue talking, because we were both laughing too much.