So anyway, i check the stats to see what and how and why people are washing up on the esoteric and niche shores of traumfahrrad dot com. And low and behold, i was getting a bit of ‘traffic’ from some sort of ‘banter’ forum. You can read the thread here, or I’ve pasted it below. It’s comedy gold.
by Gnostic Ascent @ Thu Nov 01, 2012 11:31 am
This was last week up Ramsbottom Rake in Lancashire. People do some strange shit to their bikes to save a few 100grams.
by nakedninja @ Thu Nov 01, 2012 11:43 am
Why did I just watch all of that? And why did Paul Jones have a massive beard, surely extra weight and drag there. Interesting that people are doing this without helmets, I thought most competitions required helmets.
Careless Whisperer @ Thu Nov 01, 2012 11:53 am
The mudguards were just on a warm-up bike, that wouldn’t have been his race bike. I was juvenile and junior club hillclimb champion three or four years in a row BITD and can still remember the pain vividly. My first attempt was only a few months after I joined the club and was still riding an old gas pipe frame with downtube friction shifters! Over the years, experience taught me better approaches and I ended up basically riding my time trial bike with a single chainring and ratios specifically for the hillclimb. I couldn’t go too radical because we always used to ride out to the hill en-mass as a warm up – turning up in a car was considered being a wuss. Great fun, but lung-bursting, calf-popping, back-breaking stuff.
TKF @ Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:47 pm
Jose Pinon-Shaw has gone to the extent of making his face more aero.
by TKF @ Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:53 pm
Also, how aidsy do most of them look?
by Gnostic Ascent @ Thu Nov 01, 2012 3:45 pm
TKF wrote:Also, how aidsy do most of them look?
It’s all about power to weight ratio going uphill. The aidsy bloke with the beard has a blog. Read this article about dropping weight off the bike and then about dropping weight off himself. Extreme.
Ghost @ Thu Nov 01, 2012 4:41 pm
Gnostic Ascent wrote:
TKF wrote:Also, how aidsy do most of them look?
It’s all about power to weight ratio going uphill. The aidsy bloke with the beard has a blog. Read this article about dropping weight off the bike and then about dropping weight off himself. Extreme.
“The specialist nature of the task and the event appeals to that latent autism that all men possess.”
Like this:
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You will be featured in the Guardian at the weekend if you keep this up!! I have been telling to shave that beard off for ages
Hope you didn’t take offence at our comments? No malice was intended. As our humour can be very dry it’s easy to mistake it for abuse.
None taken. Made me laugh. There’s some fairly dry comments buried in here amidst the niche techno manorexia.
It’s actually a compliment to a hill climber if you tell them they look emaciated/ill/aids-struck. It suggests they’re on form.
Since Sunday I’ve put on about 70kg.