Self Righteous Cyclist

What travels at 100km/h, has 4 heads, 12 wheels, a kitchen sink? Stephen Saunders' Kombi on the way to Balliang for the Northern Combine Pop Stewart, Alf Walker and Norma Adam's Handicaps. Never mind how we fit 4 bikes into and onto a Kombi, all I can say is that I was rewarded with the most leg room in the back. Needless to say that I was "on the rivet", "in the wheels" and "chewing bars", and we hadn't even left Melbourne. Business Class in the Kombi: Tom, Roger & Steve Welcome to bucolic Balliang where thanks to global warming the weather just keeps getting better each year. The late autumnal weather was turned on as about 60 riders from as far afield as Portland and Warrnambool fronted up for three torturous threshold laps, including a challenging climb, corrugated gravel and a stiff northerly headwind. Before the race, Bella Gadsen (limit) came over to me and asked me to take care of Liam Vaughan who was riding his first race. Happy to...

Time to get my review of 2025 out before 2026 gets away. 2025 has been a year of learning, which I feel is incredibly relevant as someone in their late 50s, because as they saying goes, if you are not learning, you are going backwards. That said, 2025 has been punctuated with many personal breakthroughs as a cyclist and a person. Lots of racing across a range of disciplines and clubs. Taking an active role in organising the Apple Crumble gravel crits at Petty's Orchard and giving people a chance to race a different kind of crit racing has been a lot of fun. There's that word again, fun. Bike racing is often referred to as type 2 fun. Filled with pain and suffering during but when you look back you think "that was fun". I will use the word fun again from a " game theory " perspective, where I strategise before, during and after a race. How to place well in a bike race by being smarter, rather than riding harder? Rarely does the strongest person win the bike r...

RADL GRVL , what's with all the missing vowels? Don’t worry, they didn’t lose the vowels, they just put them on low‑weight gravel wheels to save grams. For one week each year Adelaide turns into a cycling mecca as thousands of cycling enthusiasts, pro-teams and aspiring pros turn up for the Tour Down Under and the myriad of support events around the week. RADL GRVL is one of those events and came about through the commitment of Adelaide local and current pro cyclist  Tiffany Cromwell and her partner Valteri Bottas of F1 fame, to create an event that captured the essence of the varied terrain and the beauty of the McLaren Vale region from a different perspective. The event is now in its third year and caters for professional, elite and age group riders, has gone from strength to strength. With over 100 elite men and women racing, the field represented the strongest ever assembled in Australia for a gravel race.  The event gathered even more cache, when it became the inaugural ...

I love to climb and have always wanted to do the 7 Peaks Challenge  so why not add another 5 classified climbs to the list to create my own version of the 12 days of Christmas, get some solid training in over the festive season and call it the 12 climbs of Xmas. I am not going to review each climb because that's already been done by the Climbing Cyclist , who breaks down each climb and has some very solid advice on how to approach these climbs. While Omeo to Dinner Plain does not have a climb classification, the  42km of staircase like climbing with 8 category 3 or 4 climbs over 2 hours, was one of the toughest assignments of the lot. Taking on this excessive load over the course of two weeks, provided me with an ideal supercompensation training block. In the process, I accumulated a Training Stress Score (TSS) of  2,072, about 25% above my 6 week average total and produced some record power number numbers, so there's a lot to be said for going a little overboard. Superco...