Arthur Lamy gives some early Christmas cheer!

With Christmas fast approaching, and the advertising for the festive period getting earlier and earlier, I feel no guilt whatsoever in giving you some post Christmas training tips.

I thought that one of the best ways to focus on your regime, even before a morsel had passed your lips, might be to give you a rough guide as to how much cycling would be required to burn off the Christmas calories.

Don’t forget that I am not a dietician, a doctor or a personal trainer, so please don’t take this too seriously, it is merely a very rough guide. Also don’t forget if you decide to do some exercise, it’s a good idea to get checked over by your doctor before you start.

The times given below are examples of how long it should take to burn off the following foods, based on a 10 stone person riding at 12 mph for one hour.  One mince pie-60 minutes; portion of turkey-30 minutes; sausage roll-45 minutes; bag of crisps-35 minutes; portion of gammon-45 minutes; clotted cream-80 minutes.

Using these figures, I’ve worked out that if you eat well on Christmas Day, you could still be cycling at nightfall on Boxing Day!

Braking News

Europe bans unsafe bikes
Following on from last week’s report on the BBC Watchdog programme that dealt with the safety of ‘assemble-it- yourself’ bikes in a box, I see that the European Union has decided to ban the sale of five different models of bike  and this is despite laws that insist that bicycles are fully assembled before being sold. The principal fault with the majority of the bikes, there were four different brands and four different countries of manufacture, was brakes that didn’t work properly. If that wasn’t a daunting enough problem, several models had handlebar stems and frames that were likely to crack or crank assemblies prone to fracturing.

Reprise time
Here are a couple of happy endings to some stories that I ran a few weeks ago. Firstly, Andrew Ritchie, the inventor of the Brompton folding bike, has indeed won the Prince Phillip Designer’s Prize. This is an award given in recognition of a lifetime in design. Among the nominees for this Design Council award were such household names as Jeff Banks CBE and Wayne Hemmingway MBE.

And Guido Kunze, the German adventure cyclist, who was attempting to break Richard Vollebreqt’s Perth to Sydney record has succeeded by no less than 16 hours. Using a Ghost carbon fibre racing bike equipped with Shimano Dura Ace Di2 electronic gears, Kunze rode the 4,200 kilometre route in 7 days, 19 hours, 5 minutes.

Ello, Ello, what’s going on here then?
How many of you read the news in the press and on television this week about the two volume, 93 page cycle training manual for police cyclists? Called the ‘Police Cycle Training Doctrine’, it addressed such challenging issues as balancing your bike, eating enough because you’d get hungry and wearing padded shorts.

The book was ridiculed in the media and the Association of Chief Police Officers said that they won’t be’ taking it forward’.

Sprint Bonuses

• Raleigh is resurrecting the Heron head tube badge again. This will be seen globally on all 2010 models.

• Rumour has it that the 2009 Tour de France winner, Alberto Contador will stay with the Astana team next year. He has apparently been offered $12 million a year for the next four years. He has yet to sign!

• British wholesaler Fisher Outdoor Leisure is once again the top distributor for Met cycle helmets in the world.

• Switzerland Mobility, an online guide to car-free travel, has won the ‘Globe’ award at the British Guild of Travel Writers’ annual gala dinner held on Sunday 8 November.

• Popular Australian pro-rider, Stuart O’Grady was recently released from a Spanish hospital after suffering a seizure at the Valencia MotoGP circuit. It’s thought that the seizure was caused by an old head injury that O’Grady had sustained after he had been attacked in Toulouse in 2000.

And finally,
Good luck to the intrepid Bedell Group Ecuador Challenge cyclists who are now in Ecuador, and cycling! No doubt many first timers will come back committed cyclists and many seasoned cyclists will come back with a taste for adventure.

• Arthur Lamy is the manager of Boudins for Bikes, in Sand Street, and author of Jersey Cycles. He has spent 15 years as a tourist guide and writer, and is also a keen photographer.

More information can be found on his website: www.arthurlamy.com