Next year................

[Cheddar George]

If not a literary endeavour, then perhaps a cinematic endeavour.

I googled "what starts with a kiss", apparently Hot Chocolate's biggest hit did.

 

[dellzeqq]

Christ ... its only a bike ride.

In the dark.

Get over yourselves

yeah. Is that why you're scared to go on it?

Cheddar George and Thom are, of course, smack on the money. Instead of doing something and then describing it, I'm trying to describe something that we can do. It's just that the description is a little imprecise. Obvs.

 

[Steve Jones]

I suppose you could put time itself on trial for producing all that entropy. What's its excuse? Is it going to call Boltzmann as an expert witness? Which way will the arrow point?

 

[User482]

I suppose you could put time itself on trial for producing all that entropy. What's its excuse? Is it going to call Boltzmann as an expert witness? Which way will the arrow point?

So you're not just an evolutionary biologist!

 

[dellzeqq]

OK (**** this is difficult). Think this thing through as a branding exercise (see post above). First you develop the brand. Then you fit the product to the brand. Which is, by the way, an entirely legitimate exercise, in that the brand will represent the wishes and hopes of the participants in a far finer, more immediate way, albeit that the images (which, to repeat, may not be images at all) might be entirely disconnected with anything that any of us would associate with a time trial, or even a bicycle ride.

It's a different way of giving people what they want before they know they want it. Now.........is that so very difficult?

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/26/reviews/980726.26silmant.html was the book that prompted me to stretch what was the Harwich ride on to Southwold. No bikes involved, and I doubt that more than two of us on last week's edition had read it. Was it worthwhile? Did that inspiration affect the experience of the other thirteen? You bet your buns it did.

 

[redfalo]

You really must stop sniffing glue, Dell

 

[Tim Hall]

Umm, dellers, in my line of work I occasionally stumble across websites promoting architectural practices. Paradigms are scattered around like petals from a pottpouri. Hidden buttons have to be clicked just to gain access. Synergy features quite strongly. You get the picture.

I have to go and ride my bike just to to clear my head afterwards.

Can I just turn up and ride next year, once you've rebranded sufficiently? I can bring my own ice cream if necessary.

 

[thom]

One clear difference with FNRTTC is the freedom of destination.
Literary destinations within reach of London.
London itself ? It must be great to cycle the city on quiet roads.
Team time trial treasure hunts !
Murder mystery on wheels - Oxford & Morse ?
Canterbury tales - a pilgrimage through Kent

 

[srw]

Assuming you've read Sebald, then at least three of us had.

I think I get where you're going, but the time trial references elude me - they're about pain, and individualism, and competition. Maybe if you talked about a Lairt Emit you might be clearer.

The interesting thing about branding (he says, as his employers develop a UK brand for the first time in 10 years) is that's it's a curious mix of fluff and numbers that somehow adds up to more than the some of its parts.

 

[dellzeqq]

Assuming you've read Sebald, then at least three of us had.

I think I get where you're going, but the time trial references elude me - they're about pain, and individualism, and competition. Maybe if you talked about a Lairt Emit you might be clearer.

The interesting thing about branding (he says, as his employers develop a UK brand for the first time in 10 years) is that's it's a curious mix of fluff and numbers that somehow adds up to more than the some of its parts.

quite. But what if a time trial could be about joy and friendship? What if the time was neither here nor there? What if the act, the excitement, the now was the purpose and joy of it rather than a number on a list after the event?

I've done two time trials in my life. They were no fun. I cannot see the point in sportives. But I do like to ride as fast as I can. And I especially like to ride as fast as I can when all the cares about where and why are taken away. So that's my intention - or at least the actual rather than the not-so-actual. We get to rush, one after the other, down a road. It's a load of fun, because the road is a load of fun. We get to scream along a road as fast as we can for a distance that is sufficient to raise the spirits, to make our breath demonic, but not so far that we are grinding our teeth away. And we're there for each other - we send each other off with a cheer. We arrive to cheers. Along the way people with flags and lights encourage us. It's wild and uncouth and yet, if the truth were known, not particularly testing. A time trial without helmets, or silly wheels, where you can wear lycra or not, ride a Brompton if it pleases you, and not worry about energy drinks. And have a party afterwards.

But............we are imaginative beings. We imagine ourselves whizzing down a road, turning a corner at speed, the wind in our hair (or whatever). We fix our sensations on to images in order to memorialise them, or to make them part of us. The image lasts when the sensation is over. So, if a few numbers on a bit of paper representing a time is a paltry image, an unworthy image, what form should the images that we are left with take? And should they be images after the event or before? That's where the branding comes in - we've attempted over the last eight years to describe, in words and images, the story of our rides, but, increasingly I'm of the view that those after images don't actually tell the story, and that the story can only be ridden - heaven knows we've been trying to capture what we do in type on these very boards for long enough and, if we're honest that capturing is not so very wonderful. So why not have the images before the ride and use them to enliven and make more apparent our experiences on the ride?

So (once again).....when I'm whizzing along at night on my own, this might sort of describe the ride. There's a kind of rush, and yet a kind of stillness. For somebody else it would be something different.

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkVwJmwKQUY

 

[PaulRide]

I have long suspected I had the wrong avatar.

 

[Steve Jones]

So you're not just an evolutionary biologist!

Steve Joneses are like bosons, not fermions. We are, at least in principle, individually distinguishable.

 

[craigwend]

Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time is a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future, and also the measure of durations of events and the intervals between them.Time has long been a major subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars.[Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems
&
Trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial (In law) is a coming together of parties to a dispute, to present information (in the form of evidence) in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes.

 

[Steve Jones]

Beginning to think this might be the issue

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Full-English-Pedalling-Mid-life/dp/0955660203/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378400184&sr=8-1&keywords=pedalling through England, mid-life crisis

 

[PaulRide]

I've just detected a faint glimmer of light/recognition of what you're getting at here, DZ. But just as our images, memories and words fail, as narrow and mediated representations of what the ride was, won't there be a mismatch between the images, words and thoughts that we line up in advance of a ride and the ride itself?

Having said that, I like the idea that there's more to preparing for a ride than checking tyres for glass, buying another spare inner tube and ditching the mudguards, and it would be great if that expectation and preparation (homework?) could overcome the sense of embarking on an increasingly familiar exercise that involves arriving at HPC at the right time (unless you're User10571...) and completing the ride in purely practical terms as a bike ride.

Many of the places that you've led us through are infused with some sort of strangeness, usually accentuated by the darkness or half light or an unfamiliar quiet. I'm sure the military canal beyond Gravesend is a dreary stretch in broad daylight, but the timing of marsh frogs, reed warblers, nightingale, ISS and iridium flare and the mash-up of nature, history and human reworking of the landscape made it an experience that I know was intense at the time but I'd not hope to capture it or represent it in a meaningful way. You'll also recall my irrational delight in the descent to Arundel on one of your Felpham excursions. And also the rolling thunder of the West Wittering trip that GeraldC filmed, including the blast of A3 as well as the final attack on way to the boat at Itchenor. There's no way to bottle that experience, but also no way to direct in advance that it is going to happen in that particular way, not least because of the variability and diversity of the people involved.