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14th - 22nd June 2008 is National Bike Week.  During the week, people will be encouraged to ditch the car or that pesky walking and get on a bike - possibly for the first time since childhood.  This year organisers are promoting family-oriented cycling and there are literally thousands of great events to get families cycling together and enjoying the Great British Countryside (let's hope for good weather in the Great British "Summer"), and so there are rides for all ages and abilities.

If you want to know more, or want to take part, check out the website and find an event near you.  Go on, get on your bike.

I'm often amazed by how thoughtless, arrogant, reckless and downright stupid both drivers and cyclists can be - Yes: both cyclists and drivers.   We all let our minds wander at times when we're in the car or on the bike, and yes, we're often in a rush to get to our meeting, or get out of the cold, but for goodness sake, people...

As a driver and a cyclist, and someone who's been the cause and victim of various incidents both in the car and on the bike, I feel in a position to give my advice to you all. 

I'm lucky enough to live not only with a fantastic cook, but also one who cares passsionately about the food we eat and how it is grown and transported (and it's the same person!).  Not everyone lives with Sophie (our house just isn't big enough), so not everyone is constantly bombarded with facts about food miles, chemicals and animal welfare.  As I said, I'm lucky.

I'm also very lucky enough to earn enough to buy organic food at Sainsbury's.  Not everyone can do this, and because people have constant financial pressure, it's understandable that people want their two biggest and most important costs - mortgages and food - to be as low as possible, and they're always looking to save money. I can see why people think that cheap food - however it is produced - is a bargain. 

But if you're a triathlete, you'll know that cheap isn't always best. You really do get what you pay for.  And if you're willing to spend £1,000 on a bike to make you glide up hills, and £20 on a pair of goggles to help you see more easily, shouldn't you be interested in putting good things into your body as well?

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame recently been runing a campaign about chicken welfare, called "Chicken Out". He is trying to make people think about the chicken they buy and the life that the chicken has led for the 39 days from birth to death.   His TV show on Channel 4 has at times been shocking and very distressing. If you haven't seen it, please try to catch an episode or two.

Matthew Parris wrote a 'joke' article in the times over Christmas.  At the time I read it I thought it was a dumb article just aimed at inciting some comments and laughs at other people's expense.  I'm now not so sure and am grateful for the cyclists and non-cyclists that took much more serious umbridge over it and responded.  The Times has now issued a (small, discreet) apology, although Matthew Parris has yet to be decapitated.

Some of the comments are fantastic fun to read, and will either make you laugh or make your blood boil.  Some of them also make you appreciate just how stupid people some Times readers really are (AK from Swindon, I'm looking at you).

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article3097464.ece

Now you've read that and had a chuckle, try this one (mentioned in one of the comments)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1637173.ece

My employer has recently started offering discounted bikes using the government's Bike to Work scheme. Under the scheme, employees can effectively buy a bike tax-free, therefore saving 30-40% on the original cost of the bike.  It works like this:

• The employer buys the bike
• The employer allows the employee to use the bike
• The employer deducts the cost of the bike from employee's salary, over a 12 or 18 month period
• The deduction is made before tax, meaning no tax is charged on the amount paid for the bike
  
• At the end of the 12 or 18 month period, the employer can sell the bike to the employee for a nominal fee

I'm in Eynsham this morning for my first 10k run - at least my first one outside and with other people.  Eynsham Road Runners describe it as a '10k Road Race', and the fact that there's a £100 prize for the first person to finish in under 30 minutes suggests that other people see it as a race too. I see it more as another milestone (10k-stone?) in my ongoing efforts to work up to an Olympic distance Triathlon.

It's a cold but calm looking day, and the sun is just poking through some wintery clouds. Looks like it should be a good morning for it.

I've had my porridge, got my kit ready, studied the route and I think I'm ready to go.  I'm very nervous. Normally when I'm competing I know I have a good chance to outperform other people on the swim and bike but today I know I'm competing against serious runners.  I understand that I have no chance to really compete, and honestly I'll be happy with just finishing (although 55 minutes would be a dream!).  But at the same time I want to feel I'm doing my best, so not having a swim or bike to fall back on is a bit worrying.  I don't want to come last!

Sophie tells me I always feel a bit wonky on race days and she's probably right, but I still feel like this is time it's worse than normal. 

Ah well, at least it'll be over in an hour. 

Like everyone else, I get a lot of spam. Google mail generally does a good job of filtering it out, but even so 2 or 3 items of spam get into my inbox each day, and on bad days I'll find 200 emails sat waiting for me.   I also keep getting grief about the amount of spam generated from websites I help manage, so when I heard about reCAPTCHA -  a system that's designed to reduce website spam and help digitise books at the same time - I was interested.

Since most spam is automated - spammers send millions of emails at the same time - a good strategy to avoid spam is to try to prove that the person sending it is not a computer.  CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Tests) are designed to do exactly this. You'll have seen CAPTCHAs all over the place - they're the warped, sometimes colourful text at the bottom of the page which you need to identify before you can sign up to the latest and greatest website or post comments on your favourite blog.  The idea is that the website offers you a word which is designed to be hard for a computer to read.  If you can see the word and type its letters into the box accurately, you're more likely to be a human than a computer.  Although spammers can occasionally beat CAPTCHAs (e.g. if the word is not warped or disguised in some way, a computer can use Optical Character Recognition to decode it), they're generally pretty effective at stopping spam.

Compression technology has been popular amongst serious athletes for quite a while, and has now started to become more popular amongst less serious athletes like myself.  A lot of athletic clothing claims to be designed by boffins with the sole aim of improving your training and racing performance, but I think most people just buy fancy "technical" clothing because it looks good or has a swish on it (I know I do).  The fact that compression clothing  does appear to be backed up by 'science' really appealed to me - I can look good and get an easier life when exercising!

Nike are just one of many companies that produce compression clothing.  I chose this Nike Pro Vent Tight top when I was I was in the Nike outlet store in Manchester's Lowry shopping centre.  The tops were on offer at around £15 rather than £25 so I decided to give one a go.  As you might know, I am much more motivated when I have something specific to work towards, so the fact that the tops were tight was also a great incentive for me to lose a few more pounds.

I've made a "Natural Language" BMI calculator which understands Imperial and Metric values for height and weight.  Go and try it out.  Edit: The styling doesn't work well in IE6 or IE7 - sorry, as a Linux user I find it harder to test in these but I will try to make it work better soon because I know most people use Windows. Now works in IE6 and 7 too!

The Oxford Tri club's event is on next Saturday morning, starting at Cassington Lake and involving a 1200m swim, 29km ride and 7.2km run.  This is about half-way between a sprint and an olympic distance, so will be an interesting extra challenge for me.

I decided to give it a try today to make sure it wasn't going to completely kill me next weekend.