# Time Trial Records



## Sharky (17 Mar 2016)

Anybody got one of these?






This one was my Dad's and must have been an offer from Cycling Weekly from about 1952. It's a great little log book and contains all my Dad's rides from 1937 to 1954 when he packed in racing. I find myself still comparing his times to mine and still trying to get close to his, but I'm now giving away too many years. I took over the logs when I first started racing and eventually filled it up, before switching to spreadsheets. Don't think Strava will ever contain the functionality to compare times across 75 years!

I'm updating all my manual records onto a spreadsheet and going down memory lane at the same time. I'm already up to row 372 and another 6 years to add yet. I'll post a summary of highs and lows when I get to the end.


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## Yellow Saddle (17 Mar 2016)

What a wonderful keepsake. You raise a pertinent point there - our archives we create right now may not survive the future at all. Think about your digital photographs, your letters in e-mail, records such as the ones in your blue book, etc etc. I can read my grandmother's letters and look at her photographs, but I can't access my own writing from the 1980s because they were stored on floppy discs. I can view my father's 8mm home movies but my own recorded on Betamax in 1990 are lost forever.
I find it disturbing that a box of photos can survive for 100 years with just about no degradation but my digital photos....I don't even know where they all are.


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## Sharky (17 Mar 2016)

Agree there. Digital copies are great for the person who put them there, but not visible to others. Cloud storage is even a worse concept. Suppliers come and go, will they be around when our children/grandchildren inherit our possessions, will they even know what was stored in the cloud and will they have the passwords?
We have photos and diaries from great, great aunts & uncles etc. and it's comforting to know that they once held the actual piece of paper themselves. Old computers and digital stuff will probably end up in the skip.


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## Sharky (17 Mar 2016)

Back to my Blue Log book, my dad has an entry in there
- 9th June, 1940 - Southport Road Club 25 - Scratch man Larry Ross (a well known Liverpool rider of the time) - Time 1:6:40 on a 85" fixed - winner GT Bradshaw in 1:3:51

I'm always impressed by some of the times they achieved in those days - I would be happy with a "6" nowadays. But what is even more staggering is that the race was only won with a "3" and I think going "under" for a 25 had only just become a reality.

The saddest thought on this is that this was the last race my dad rode before being called up and spending the next 4 years in India. It was another 8 years before he got to the start line again.


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## Smokin Joe (17 May 2016)

I still have a 1970 CTC diary somewhere up in the loft with all my times and road race results detailed, plus club runs, training rides, even commuting mileages etc. Must dig it out some day.


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