A fatbike nightride word picture

Thursday night is fatbike night. My night out on my own. The Scottish summer's late evening sunlit riding opportunities have passed for another year. To ride on a November evening is to gird yourself with onion layers of merino, lycra, Goretex. A headtorch precariously wrapped around the helmet. Mighty bright double beam lights on the handlebars, a veritable pair of arclights to cut the night ahead, and a flashing red bobtail behind. One minute to nine, daughter a-bed, dinner digested, dishes done, I roll down the gravel drive, fat tyres kicking out the stones that the neighbours and I so recently barrowed in and raked out. Pulling out onto the road and thankfully it's quiet at this hour, the tarmac ride a necessary evil to take me to the woods and trails. Four inch wide tyres thrum on the blacktop, fish out of water, not really meant for this environment, impatient for the soft, the wet, the yielding of the off-road world.

Crossing over the motorway bridge, I soar above lorries, vans, cars and even motorbikes (with smaller wheels than mine), then it's down the dip, across the first watercourse of the trip, and up the hill to Cambusbarron church. I look left at the junction, see the house where John Grierson, the father of the documentary, spent his childhood. The man who first turned real stories into reel stories, real to reel. Then it's past the pub (and incredulous voices from the smokers outside the door as they spot the size of my wheels and tyres) and then the primary school as I climb gradually towards the quarry gate, rolling by quiet cul-de-sacs, their houses with softly golden glowing windows. No one is out here except me, this winter evening world a largely indoor one.

As I approach the quarry gate, my lights pick out a constellation of reflections from stacks of stockpiled traffic cones, a shoal of silver flashes that slide left and right as my lights swing back and forth, and then past me in my journey's flow. No one's parked here. It looks like I have the place to myself. As I cross the threshold at the quarry gate, it feels like I'm escaping. But I am surrounded by aliens. Non-native, invasive Japanese knotweed dying back for winter on my right and snowberry to the left, it's crop of gleaming white berries like oyster pearls in the light cast sideways from my bike. And I know the small quarry just up on the left is infested with pernicious alien peri-peri burr, out of my sight for now.

I'm struck by how absolutely still it is tonight. Not a breath of a breeze, nor twitch of a leaf. Only the sound of my tyres on the small gravel of the path and the quiet roll of chain on gears and jockey wheels. And, behind me now, less than a mile back, the noise of many other tyres, the sound of the motorway like an constant low exhaling.

It isn't cold, not even cool but, with conditions this still, it must the light cloud cover that's preventing the temperature from plunging like an inappropriate neckline at a wake. I do see a few stars but even these slip from view for now as I enter the tunnel of trees. My headlights arc back and forth with my increased effort as the path's slope steepens, a little at first, then dramatically. I am forced down the gears, already on the small chain ring at the front but, pleasingly after months of riding nearly every day, still having a couple in reserve on the rear sprocket. This is the only serious climb of the night and I begin to leak a little sweat. I am overdressed for a steep climb but, soon enough, I reach the boulders blocking what was once a road for engined vehicles and, jinking past those obstacles, I reach the flat plateau of gravel into which the hanging valley of the upper quarry opens From here, it will be a pretty steady run down to the quarry plant and access road. As I pedal and freewheel across this dark plain, a moving cone of brightness, gravels crunching underwheel, I see the soft houselights of the hill farms gleaming off to my right, and flashes from headlights on cars negotiating the North Third road's bends, undulations and slopes.

Then... looking around with my headtorch, I see a different light, not illumination but two glowing points of my reflected torch, the eyes of something, I know not what at first but which resolves itself into a roe deer ahead of me, and which slips quickly and silently off to the scrub on the right. It's the first deer I have seen tonight but won't be the last.

The downhill run is pleasant recovery after the climb and, all too soon, after a little weaving to find the path and negotiate more bouldery roadblocks, I pass the tall and currently silent white tower of the batching plant and my wheels glide in relative smoothness onto the access road. During the day, huge trucks may trundle up and down here with dusty plumes and roaring diesel engines but, tonight, there's just me and my bike, its whirring freewheel and the road buzz from my fat tyres. Slipping past the old limekilns on the left now, steep enough downhill for me to need to brake, conscious of the large metal gate ahead, which I need to come down off the saddle to walk the bike past.

Another short steep downhill, now on the North Third road but only until I reach the bend by the river, where our ways will diverge. On the way down, I see a searchbeam of torchlight, obviously handheld from its movements, as someone from one of the farms up the hill goes about their business. Then, I reach the river and peel off left on the bend, across the wee bridge. I look down into the fast-flowing current as I cross, my headtorch a poor illuminator as the water seems to suck in the lightbeam, giving nothing back, an aquatic event horizon.

Off the bridge, I wheel into a huge black cavern of tall trees, and the only real muddy patch of the ride, then out into the open air. The farm track, one of my favourite sections of this ride, offers many possibilities. But not for tonight, the enticing delights of the North Third cliff and wood paths. Rather, my ride takes me straight on down towards the Swanswater Fishery. Before I reach the junction offering such choices, a gleam of eyes picked out ahead by my headtorch  presages the passage across my path of two more roe deer, their crossing rather panicked by my rattling, whirring cone of light. The farm track is dry tonight and the usual mix of hard-packed earth, cobbly stones and hollows, not puddle-filled tonight. It makes for a slightly weaving, slightly downhill run as I try to find the smoothest line in the view allowed by my lights. And it is a pretty smooth ride, the four inch deep tyres playing give and take with holes, rocks, bumps and buffeting from the track. As I reach the first ponds of the fishery, the sound of rushing, gurgling water reaches me with an odd doppler effect as I pass over small streams draining through the site. On summer rides through here, the pond banks are dotted with silent sentinel anglers, in their own bubbles of focus and concentration. Not tonight. The lights in the windows of the scattered houses by the fishery provide the only other signs of human life.

All too quickly, I reach another tarmac road and the occasional four wheel drive flicks by, headlamps blazing and windows dark, heading home into the hills. Again, my time on the road is brief, although here, the closeness of the motorway, less than a couple of hundred metres away provides the dominant soundtrack as I sneak along to connect to the next section of path.

Through a farmyard and past the 'big hoose', the path bends down to the Bannockburn, its presence heard and felt in the dark, rather than seen. As I descend the narrow path, the temperature falls some degrees, into a nearly frosty pocket along the burn side. Glistening dew is not far from freezing, if that sky clears a little more. I need to cross the Bannockburn to reach the next stage of the ride, Tinker's Loan, and roll cautiously across the old, narrow and frankly crumbling stone bridge, not the greatest fun in the dark. Another tunnel of trees and a steady climb up Tinker's Loan, my lights filling the narrow space of the path, hedges and tree'd ceiling. A pair of wood pigeons explode from a tree above me, battering out through the branches, their staccato machine gun wing flaps, the percussion instruments of fear.

Winding steadily up, I cross the road that runs down to Gateside and catch an eyeful of the night-time Forth Valley laid out before me. Streetlights, house lights, floodlights, car headlights, beacons flash on pylons pinprick on the retinas before I dip into the Loan again, downhill now and then a final short climb up to the other end of this narrow and surely ancient way. I can smell cows and see on the right, at path's end, solid darker blocks in the darkness, betrayed by odour. Now it really is all downhill from here as I whizz, woohooing, down the Polmaise Road towards home. My tyres fling off the detritus of the offroad world, a shower of flashes flaring in front of my lights. I reach the motorway again and streetlights and the ride feels like it is already over, so I extend the magic a little longer by cutting through the community wood, scattering rabbits from the pathside verges and rousing a late night dog walker from his quiet thoughts. As we exchange hellos, I realise he's the first person I've seen since I passed the pub and that's the first word I've spoken since leaving the house... And then, I'm home.

What's so special about riding alone and off-road at night? Maybe it wouldn't be your thing but, in reflecting a little on my solo bike trip in the dark last Thursday night, I realised that it put my state of mind in a special place. The description that sprang to mind was... Mindfulness. According to Wikipedia, "Mindfulness is the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment" It's all about being in the moment, observing, focussing on the now. And although it was a ride of only 50 minutes or so, not long by typical training ride standards, it felt longer in a good way, a flood of simple observations, awareness of my bike, my body, the environment I was passing through, and no conversation (until I was two minutes from home), leaving me feeling refreshed and relaxed. And all that on top of the physical exercise that was my original motivation.

P.S. What's a fatbike? This is mine!

A machine of magic

Yesterday's Guardian newspaper carried an obituary for one of Britain's great old cycling writers, Albert Winstanley, who had just died, aged 95. His contribution has been described thus, that it: "evoked his lifelong love of touring on his bicycle in a series of articles that stand comparison with the very best writing about the outdoors."

He seems to have been a remarkable character, who kept cycling until the age of 92, managed to remain living in his own home until his last year of life, and was still attending Bolton Wanderers football matches in his final weeks of life. We can only speculate to what extent his active cycling life helped him to maintain his admirably active older life (but it does seem likely to have helped, doesn't it?).

The title for this blogpost comes from a quote from his writing, used in the Guardian obituary, and a wonderful piece of prose. Reading this the day after two major cycling mass-rides (Pedal on Parliament in Edinburgh and The Big Ride in London), campaigning for better, safer cycling facilities in Britain, I'm sure this lovely prose will ring a (bicycle) bell for many:

"To me a bicycle is a machine of magic ... taking me on to the ways of satisfied happiness; giving to me the good friendship I enjoy with others, and to share with me the delights and ecstasies of the outdoors. It gives to me the pleasures of mingling the past with the present ... always discovering ... always learning. Above all it gives to me also, memories to cherish and store inwardly, as I wheel my ways on joyous days ... such a day has been today.

Cover of a Winstanley classic

A great title for a cycling book!

My 2011 in bikes

"I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride my bike

I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride it where I like"

Queen (who else?): "Bicycle Race"

 

I’m a cyclist and I’m proud to be described so. I don’t really race much. I do the (very) occasional short-course triathlon and I take part in the odd organised sportive ride. But mostly, I ride largely for fun, commuting and convenience. I love my bikes and, traffic and the state of Stirling’s roads notwithstanding, I love to ride. I have a few of my own bikes, none of them very flashy or new but each with their own strengths and uses.

In addition to my normal cycling experiences, I had a few encounters with interesting, unusual or odd bikes during the past year.

Le velo de facteur:

We were in Morzine in the French Alps in March and, on our last morning, we wandered around the village before departure and came upon the Post Office. Rather fantastically, there were four old yellow French post office bicycles leaning outside with little handwritten notes stuck on each, offering them free to take away: ‘a prendre’

Eh? What? No health and safety risk assessment? No cover-your-ar*e legal statement? But some of these bikes don’t even have functional brakes? Yeah. This is France. Refreshing, isn’t it? The coolest bike in Morzine? Darn right!

 

These bikes were obviously custom-made for les facteurs! They have a great parcel basket on the front, and a very solid-looking bespoke front-wheel based stand with little wheels of its own. The stand folds up under the frame. The one I tried was a bit stiff but nothing that a bit of oil wouldn’t sort.

The rear end of the bikes were pretty solid too, with a very robust rack and official French post office pannier bags:

Inevitably, the girls couldn’t keep their hands off the bikes:

Take one, get one free?

and it wasn’t long until they were test-riding them:

 I think if I’d been travelling with my own van, I might have brought one home. They were extremely solid and heavy machines (not one for the long climbs, I suspect) but one of these would definitely have been a unique bike for Stirling...

The recumbent tandem trike:

On our way home from helping out at our pals’ Apple Day in the South Lakes area of Cumbria in early October, we came on this recumbent tandem tricycle (not three words that you commonly see together) in a cafe car park.

From the decals, it appears to be a Greenspeed, not a manufacturer I've encountered previously. It was being ridden by a (fit-looking) couple who may have been in their 70’s and it had a Land’s End to John O’Groats sticker on it – that must have been an epic trip. It looks very stable and is probably very comfortable to ride but it is SO low down - I just can’t get over my feeling that British drivers are too uneducated in their dealings with cyclists for me to be attracted to riding a recumbent on the roads in this country.

First encounter with an electric cargo bike:

The low-carbon city project here in Stirling, Going Carbon Neutral Stirling (GCNS), has invested in a number of electric cargo bikes (trikes in reality) which it will lend out for people to use, attempting to replace some car trips in town with cycle trips. The large box at the front can carry a considerable amount, including a couple of children (a common sight in Copenhagen, where cargo bikes and trikes, electric or not, are very popular and widely used).

GCNS held a come-and-try event in the quiet residential Riverside area of Stirling on a rare warm summer evening. My wife O took one of the bikes for a spin and reported it as quite difficult to steer, especially around corners but this was her first attempt and I’ve seen the project staff riding one with relative ease on a gentle group ride around the town’s newer cycle paths. A friend, A, a massively experienced cycle racer, took one for a spin with his children in the cargo box at another open day at Stirling University and nearly turned over while cornering on a gentle downhill bend. He was probably going too fast but he did recover magnificently after cornering on two wheels. His children seemed to love it.

My wife’s old German racing bike:

 My wife bought a bike in Switzerland in the 1980’s which I’d never seen as it was stored at her mother’s. When we visited this summer, we dug it out of the shed to take a look at it turned out to be this splendid old Rudi Altig roadster. Rudi Altig was a German professional racing cyclist who, as well as lending his name to a range of bicycles, also won the green (points) jersey in the Tour de France, won the Spanish equivalent to Le Tour, the Vuelta a Espana, and became World road race champion in 1966, reflected by the addition of the World Champion colour rings on the bike’s down tube. You have to agree that they add a certain caché:

Note the unusual location for the early example of indexed gear shifters on the headset:

O rode this bike all over Berne, then brought it home to Blighty and it ended up in a shed. I just pumped up the tyres and oiled the chain and, despite the bike having sat in the shed for over 20 years, everything else on the bike (gears, brakes) worked so I took it out for a spin in the really hilly vicinity. I rode it for 30 minutes before, fearing that the old chain was going to snap under the strain of hill-climbing (they were REALLY steep!), I put it back in the shed again!

And as well as encounters with weird and wonderful cycles in 2011, it was also an unusually busy year as regards making the most of the bikes I already own.

Making do and mend – revamping my winter bike and my old hybrid:

 

I’ve had a lot of good experiences this year dealing with the guys at Stirling Cycle Repairs. Not the least of these was their advice and then hard work to help me reclaim two of my old bikes back into more active service. For the first seven or eight months of 2011, I was thinking about and researching possible option for buying a cyclocross (CX) bicycle. It’s not that I particularly fancied having a go at cyclocross racing (though if I had one, I might have had a go at a race or two as well), but it is more that CX bikes have become the new do-it-all road bikes in the past couple of years – tough, well-equipped, often for pannier racks and mudguards, they make for great general bikes for winter riding and there are many more on the market now.

I’ve been riding a bottom-of-the-range Giant OCR3 road bike as a winter bike for five or six winters and, having washed it conscientiously after most rides, it hasn’t rusted away or seized up as winter bikes often do (they are generally effectively bought as ‘sacrificial’ machines, to allow road racers, triathletes etc to preserve their expensive lightweight racing bikes for summer riding.

My Giant OCR3 has the most lovely light blue paint job and a very comfortable frame geometry that makes for quite relaxed road riding. But most of the original components had worn out. I’d already upgraded the brakes to Shimano 105 a couple of years ago. I was contemplating replacing this (and a mountain bike I never ride) with a cyclocross bike. But, given the current financial conditions, my dislike of disposing of perfectly sound equipment, and the fact that I do love that old OCR3 frame, I decided instead to investigate a refit. As I wasn't aiming for top-end components, the cost was less than I feared and so I went for it. Craig and Grant at Stirling Cycle Repairs did a great job of refitting it with basic Shimano SORA components (the gears, cranks and shifters), and finished it off with a very fetching and matching blue bar tape:

Look at the shiny-shiny! Didn’t the guys do a great job?

The wheels were still the same old wheels that originally came with the bike though and, after a week of riding, it was obvious that they were knackered (accentuated by how well everything else was working!) so I decided to replace them with a pair of Craig and Grant’s lovely hand-built training wheels – not so expensive, maybe not the lightest but light enough for winter training, pretty bombproof and likely to be usable well beyond the life of the Giant OCR3. And they are aesthetically pleasing too, with beautiful, curvaceous, silver Ambrosia hubs with Ambrosia rims. Look!

The final touch was a new pair of Continental Grand Prix 4-season road tyres with Continental inner tubes (funky yellow dust caps) to provide a durable partner for the new training wheels, and the package was complete for about a third the price of a decent new CX bike.

Chapeau to Stirling Cycle Repairs!

The final pleasing bike experience of the year was renovating, with my brother’s expert bike mechanic skills, my old Specialised Expedition hybrid, which has been stored in my brother’s garage roof for four years.

It was initially a disappointing insurance replacement for a much loved Marin Stinson hybrid that fell off a car bike rack. The replacement bike always felt heavy and clumsy in comparison to the Marin, was fitted with fairly cheap components (I constantly had to adjust the brakes, for instance) and I could never keep the wheels in true. They kept buckling and developing wobbles. I subsequently discovered from Craig at Stirling Cycle Repairs that the spokes had been incorrectly laced up when they were built and that there was no sensible way to correct that.

Luckily, my lovely brother donated a spare pair of used but good quality Cannondale 26x1.75 wheels (thanks lovely bro!). We fitted a new Shimano 8-speed cassette (that’s the rear gear cogs), a new 8-speed chain, and Stirling Cycle Repairs replaced the rubbish brakes with some good quality Shimano v-brakes.

My Old Specialised Expedition hybrid undergoing a facelift

 
I stuck on a set of Shimano SPD mountain bike pedals, Continental innertubes, a pair of Schwalbe Marathon touring tyres and some funky and surprisingly cheap SKS Beavertail mudguards (which needed some amendments with a hot needle and some zip ties) and I now have a tough utility bike with a rack(which I had fitted previously) and mudguards that’s ready for most of my non-training cycling needs – unglamorous maybe but helluva useful.

Oh, and it is in British Racing Green which is, as you know, very cool (like bow ties). Resurrecting and finally making useful this old Shimano Expedition bike was a fine end to a year of unusual and satisfying bike encounters and experiences.

Enjoy your own bikes in 2012!

The benefits of a bike (courtesy of Cycle Stirling)

 Join the cycle revolution - Cycle Stirling!

The Man who cycled the World and talked in Stirling

On Friday night last, I was privileged to be able to attend a sell-out talk at Stirling’s Albert Halls by Mark Beaumont, the 27 year old Scottish adventurer, round-the-world cycling Guinness World Record holder and recent completer of the first North-to-South cycle of the Americas also to take in successful summit climbs of Mount McKinlay (or Denali) in Alaska and Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest peaks in, respectively, North and South America. Both of these epic rides (and the latter associated mountain climbs) were the subject of multi-episode documentary series on the BBC, largely self-filmed by Beaumont. In fact, he only returned from his Americas trip a few weeks ago, which must mean that the BBC broadcast “The Man Who Cycled the Americas” almost as soon as he completed his journey (more on this later). I’d seen parts of the first series and all of the second and was curious to hear more, hopefully gaining more of an insight into the mindset of someone capable of pushing themselves, largely alone, for months on end, in these amazing feats of physical and mental endurance.

Programme for the tour, signed inner leaf and cover of The Man Who Cycled The World

Anyway, the sell-out crowd of over 700 were treated to an inspiring performance. Mark Beaumont is a fine public speaker, confident but quite humble in manner, with a nice sense of irony in his presentation style. His Twitter feed beforehand said: "Getting ready to go on stage in front of 750 people in Stirling. I know at about 50 of those which makes it that bit more nerve wracking!" Don't worry Mr B, you did just fine! And no notes - a really natural public speaker!

He used a mixture of photographs and video excerpts from his self-recordings. We were treated to over three hours (and were only expecting two), including a short intermission during which I slipped out quickly to miss the queue for the book stall run by Mark’s mum, events Organiser and chief logistician, Una. I picked up a signed copy of the first edition of his round-the world book (cover above).

During the longer first half, he talked about different aspects of his round-the-world ride. As well as what you’d expect in terms of incidents and people encountered on the trip, he also tried to describe the mindset or mental attitude that had allowed him to push himself to cover an average of 100 miles a day for 195 days. I found this particularly interesting as, I confess, my first impression from the first documentary episode I managed to catch was of someone rushing past experiences that you’d expect to be looking to enjoy if you chose to cycle around the world. I think it was in a restaurant in Pakistan where Mark was complaining about how long it was taking for food to appear despite promises of a quick delivery, and how this was costing him valuable time from his schedule. I remember being disappointed about this, considering he was 80 or so days ahead of the world record.


But on Friday, he explained the difference between what he had set out to do and what he described as the more usual “nomadic” approach to cycling around the world. He definitely wasn’t a nomad, had many friends who had cycled the world in a more leisurely, investigative way, but he simply didn’t have the mindset for it, and needed to be driven by a goal, working to meet some challenge. He also described how, in trying to ride the 100 miles a day that was necessary to beat the time target he had set himself, it was pretty important just to ride in “the now”, cycling for the present, focusing intently on that day’s ride, riding the rollercoaster of physical and mental fatigue that riding day after day (after day) brings. He said that, if he had set out to ride round the world in 6 months and had focused on that and tried to keep that in his mind, he would have burned himself out in the first few weeks. So achieving those daily targets was a supremely important part of keeping it all together mentally (with one day a fortnight scheduled off as a break) and it put into a better context for me why he came across the way he did in that particular scene.

Mark's mum Una hard at work

In the second half, he did, of course, talk about his trip down the Americas and described the scary summiting of Mt McKinlay (walking along a snow ridge, one foot in front of the other or straddling the ice ridge, roped to three other guys – if one fell off at that point, there was not enough space for the others to arrest his fall, so, someone was supposed to drop off the other side of the ridge to balance up the weight, and then both would have had to be rescued...). But perhaps more interestingly, he did it through the medium of describing the complication of doing this while self-filming, sending the rushes of the filming back to the BBC in London by portable satellite link, getting feedback from the production staff about that and what else needed to be filmed to make for a balanced programme, planning and executing the filming of scenes, while still trying to experience the spectacles he was seeing as a traveller and not just a documentary maker, all on top of doing the cycling!

And also there was the added complication of cycling through dangerous areas of Central and South America, laden down with expensive electronic equipment which he couldn't keep hidden away all of the time as he was making a documentary! On this trip, although he wasn’t on as tight a schedule (no time records were being chased) there were, of course, still massive challenges, both mental and physical. But it seems he was able to balance those more against other elements of the trip. I think the scene in the first programme where Beaumont stopped to enjoy a little impromptu motorhome music festival in Canada made me realise this was a very different beast from his world record attempt.

Mark talks about the climbing of Mt McKinlay

Like lots of the audience, I am a keen cyclist and have a variety of bikes to cover all kinds of riding and terrain. I was quite surprised that, although there were three bikes on stage, including the Koga touring bike on which he completed both rides, a Trek racer and a Koga mountain bike, these were never really discussed. But I guess the important lessons from these trips were always going to be more about mind and muscle than machine. Unfortunately, my close-up from the balcony of the touring bike is pretty blurry but here it is anyway.

Blurry shot of Mark Beaumont hard at work on the other side of his business. Given

the length of the queue when I left, he was there until well after

11pm, signing books and talking to people. His Twitter feed later said:

"WoW. Tonight was BIG! Pretty shattered now to be completely honest! It was great, enjoyed it, lovely people, just soooo busy".

So, on reflection, a fascinating insight into both the physical and mental demands of long, solo adventures (in this case, on a bike) (and, actually, on what happens both to put a trip together and what guys like Mark need to do afterwards to pay for both the trip and the next one). Also, a lesson learned for me on not making complacent judgements from the sofa about the motivations and emotions of others based on a few seconds of film!

To see such composure and drive combined (and in someone so young!) is unusual and, for an audience, quite compelling - the audience in Stirling, including yours truely, was pretty spellbound - I am looking forward to reading both the book above and, in due course, the one from the Americas trip, to see if he writes as well as he speaks (and rides...)! He is on tour - you can find out more here and he is on Twitter here - I'd recommend this as a rewarding night out, whether you are a cyclist or not.

So I'm not fat after all

I was reading a copy of Cycling Weekly from 17th September 2009 at a friend's house last week and I came across an article on BMI (Body Mass Index) and its applicability or otherwise to cyclists and other athletes. BMI You can read more about BMI here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index (sorry - having problems with hyperlinks)

The CW article's main contention was that, as BMI was developed in the 1830s and further in the 1970s as a tool to be applied to allow generalisations about statistics of large populatons where having a higher body weight (relative to your height) increased your risk of disease. When used on the general population (generally relatively sedentary and with average body compositions), BMI might have a role but, as a marker for regularly active people, CW concludes that it is irrelevant and atheletes should, instead seek to measure their body composition through estimation of body fat composiiton (and a number of methods for this are recommended). Hurrah for that!

Now, I've long had a bit of a problem with BMI. As a biologist, I was, quite correctly, trained by my biometrics lecturer and eventual supervisor to regard with suspicion any simple numerical index that was providing a single number summary of complex biological relationships. In the language we used, the reduction of complexity to a single-value index resulted in the loss of most of the useful information. And so it is with BMI, I submit. Were I to calculate my own BMI (for example), it would have remained almost unchanged for the last 5 years (you don't need to know what it is, to spare my blushes), despite having trained, sometimes trained hard, for triathlons over that whole period (or the bits when I wasn't injured or ill). I have changed shape (in a good way) but not weight in the last five years as a result of swimming, cycling and running a lot. But whereas I might have lost fat, I've also put on muscle (on legs from cycling and shoulders from swimming) and, as we all know, muscle is heavier than fat, volume for volume. So, I haven't changed height, I haven't changed weight, I have become fitter and healthier by all sorts of measures, but my BMI hasn't really changed and it says I am overweight for my height.

So, do atheletes need to worry about this? Maybe not, if they are content to obtain their own body fat measurements as above. But consider how BMI can be, and is being, used more widely in society. In one example, some foreign governments are already using BMI as an indication of the relative weight (and by extension, health, and again by extension from that, fitness of prospective British adoptive parents looking at overseas adoption. Given the proclivity of the insurance companies for simple measures of risk (ever wondered why your postcode seemed to attract higher premiums for house insurance, even when you live in a nice place? Somewhere else sharing the first part of your postcode may have more of a crime problem but you share their cost of incresed risk - mmm, insurance coompanies wouldn't generalise, would they?), would they see BMI in a society with rising obesity levels as a quick (quack!) measure of risk for setting life insurance premiums. One to watch! As for me, I need to have my body fat composition measured as a more relaiable guide to health and risk of disease!

PS I did hear a radio programme about diet and weight gain once which claimed (and I have no reason to disbelieve it) that simply eating 100 calories per day in excess of your metabolic needs was enough to bring about a weight gain of about a stone (= 14 lbs = 6.35 kg) per decade. It doesn't sound like a lot of calories per day. It isn't: a typical chocolate digestive biscuit contains about 80-90 calories. So a single extra biscuit a day over your necessary calorie intake might be enough to bring about the kind of weight gain with age that I saw in many of my sedentary elderly relatives. Scary!