Cleaning, Locking and Jumping

If there are two big things that always get in the way of riding bikes it’s cleaning them, and the risk of having them stolen.

The issue with cleaning is why I have a bike that’s still spattered with sandy Afan trail mud hanging in the lounge (as opposed to a sparkling clean one) and the risk of theft is why the bike is in the lounge to start with.

It turns out that there are solutions to both of these problems. To clean my bike I should buy this Bike Floss from a company called Purple Harry, and then any tricky, fiddly and annoying cleaning will become a breeze. It occurs to me that I could just find an old toothbrush, or, perhaps some pipecleaners (which inspired the product in the first place), but that wouldn’t be in the spirit of making sure you have the right tool for every imaginable job. I hope if you do buy them then the chore of cleaning up a bike becomes as easy as just thinking about it. If not I might just continue to think about cleaning it until I ride it again and knock the mud off.

When it comes to theft, it seems that the way to prevent it is to make every day a PR stunt for an insurance company. Aviva have found that by locking some bikes in high theft-risk areas they failed to get them stolen. Thus proving that you don’t need bike insurance, you simply need a good lock. Well done Aviva. I will continue not to insure my bikes, but to lock them up well.

It can be easy to watch videos of far better riders than me on the internet and somehow start thinking that the tricks and jumps they pull are a bit on the easy side. This video from the Crankworx competition in Whistler certainly made me realise just how scary and hard it actually is.



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