9B Blog – Page 10 – Two Degrees of Separation

Riding to work

I love my daily commute to work. It’s 2 x half hour exercise sessions that don’t take any time out of my day. All of the stress of the work day has evaporated by the time I get home. It’s faster than driving or catching public transport…and I’ve reduced the number of times I’m almost killed to less than 3 per week!
I’ve ridden to work for about the last 12 years, and there are more people doing it than ever before, so I thought I’d share a bit of what I’ve learned over this time and provide some basic etiquette tips for the potential commuters and the new commuters alike.

Don’t just jump in the deep end
People will happily tell you that riding on the road is dangerous and that you could be killed. There is a very good reason for this…it is dangerous and you could be killed. But there is plenty you can do to lessen the danger. One of these things is to get to know your ride before you start commuting.
I really noticed this over the last 6 months of living as a gypsy in a few different place and having to adjust my ride to work. The first couple of times you do a ride, your senses are overloaded; there are new things to look at, new smells, new sounds and a litany of other things that your brain is trying to process…adding peak hour traffic to this is not a great idea. This year I worked through the Christmas – New Year period, and I realised that this would be the perfect time to start riding to work. There was hardly any traffic and so you could really get comfortable with the ride itself; learn where the big bumps are, learn where the hills are, learn roughly how long it will take, all without having the stress of cars going past at 60km/h.

Learn the flow
Once you’re comfortable with your route, then learn how the traffic works on it. Where does it all slow down? (you’re more likely to get people pulling into the bike lane to get around other cars)? Where are the slip lanes? (cars rarely look for bikes if they are merging onto a sliplane…and they tend to start drifting across the bike lane as they approach it) Where are the schools? (there will be a lot of parked cars with doors opening) Where are the tram tracks? (for those not living in Melbourne, a tram track is a long piece of metal with a hole the same size as a bike wheel running along it. They are strategically place so that if you have to swerve around a car door opening or a pedestrian stepping out from between parked cars your wheel will hit it and you will be sent crashing to the ground. The only thing more dangerous than a tram track is a wet tram track…and possibly BMW X5 drivers). What are the traffic light sequences? (if you’re in the far left lane, and there is a left hand arrow, it’s better to position yourself right near the gutter, rather than in the middle of the lane…that way people behind you can still turn left).
The more you ride, the more attuned you become to the way the traffic works…but only use this a safety mechanism to protect you…not as an opportunity to make up time. Just because that light normally turns green 3 seconds after the turning arrow turns green, doesn’t mean hitting that intersection at full speed assuming that the light will change is a good idea. Sometimes lights use different sequences…and suddenly you’re hurtling towards moving cars.

Be aware of what’s behind you
Just as a good driver checks their rear-view mirror regularly, you need to make sure you take the occasional look behind to see who or what is behind you. Obviously you will also be using your ears to hear cars coming up behind you, or to hear another cyclist letting you know that they are coming past you, or any number of important cues…so I highly recommend against wearing headphones.

Basic etiquette
As with many things, there are a number of unwritten rules that you only tend to discover when you transgress them…and then get yelled at/publicly shamed. Here are a couple:

Don’t roll to the front of the queue at lights This is acceptable if you are a very quick cyclist and will leave everyone else for dead when you take off. But if even one of the cyclists who you have just rolled past is faster than you…then you may as well just have served them a decaf coffee for how poorly they are going to think of you.
The ‘Commuter Cup’ is just a joke. It’s not a race. Some people are going to be slower than you…but you do not need to make a big show of how much faster you are than them. And you certainly don’t have to swerve wildly into traffic to get around them.
By the same token, if you are a slower rider, have a regular look behind to see if you’re holding anyone up. If you are, give them enough space to pass…no-one likes that prat with the caravan that is holding up all the traffic on the way to the beach.
Use your hands You may know you’re about to stop, or turn, or that there is something on the road ahead…but the person behind you probably doesn’t. So where possible, use hand signals to let them know. For example
– put your arm out in the direction you’re turning
– put an open behind your back to let people know you’re slowing or stopping
– move a pointed finger around your back to let people know there something ahead to swerve around
– point your finger at hazards…or wiggle your fingers if there is glass on the road ahead
People should be sufficiently aware of their environment, and shouldn’t be riding too close to the person in front of them. So these aren’t essential…but you do get a lot of people thanking you if you do use them.
Written laws There are of course quite a few written laws as well as unwritten laws. Laws like stopping at red lights. Stopping for trams. Stopping for pedestrian crossings.
Just sodding do them…nothing sh!ts me more than watching a cyclist cruise through a red light. You give cyclists a bad name, and you give fuel to the fire of every ‘they shouldn’t be on the roads’ wanker out there.

‘Remember, everyone else on the road is an idiot’
My Mum used to say this to me every time I went to go for a drive during the glorious P-Plate days. It was true then…and it’s true now that you’re on your bike…it’s just that you are no longer surrounded by 100kgs of metal and numerous safety features. So never ride in a way that relies on other people doing the right thing. If that car could pull into that side street without indicating, then slow down so that if they do, you can stop in time. If that pedestrian could step out from the curb, then check behind you to make sure that if you have to swerve to the right, you won’t go straight in front of a car or tram. If that cyclist is riding unpredictably, then give them enough space so that if they stop suddenly, you’re not going to crash into them.
At worst you get to work or home a minute or two later…at best, you save yourself a lot of grief.

You will crash
No matter how attentive you are, no matter how careful you are and no matter how much you do to mitigate against having a crash…if you ride often enough, you will eventually fall off. It may be at the hands of car, a pedestrian, another cyclist, a tram track, a wet drain grate, or an ill-advised track stand…but you will come off. Andy from Fyxomatosis wrote an awesome post on Cycling Tips about what to do if you have a crash…I suggest you head here and read it…I’ll wait.

The good stuff
Yes there are negatives and downsides to commuting on a bike, but never underestimate the sheer joy of riding a bike. A bad day commuting on a bike, still sh!ts all over a good day commuting on public transport. You will get fitter. You will arrive at work invigorated and return home relieved of your day’s stress. You will ride past portly people sitting angrily in their cars and resigned people squashed into trams and know that you are not one of them. You will see and experience things on your bike that people in cars and trains wont. You will save money and help the environment. But best of all, you’ll be getting back in touch with that 4 or 5 year old version of yourself that first felt the exhilaration and liberation of riding a bike…and you can blow their mind by telling them that the bike you are riding is worth roughly 18,000 weeks of their pocket money!

Guns n Roses at Calder Park

Come gather around children and I’ll take you away to a mystical time called ‘the early 90’s’ and I’ll regale you with a tale of one of the most memorable concerts I’ve ever attended…Guns n Roses at Calder Park.

The early 90’s were a very different time. Your ability to get good concert seats was determined by your willingness to sleep out in the carpark of Doncaster Shopping Town rather than by the speed of your internet connection. Young men in Commodores blasted heavy metal out of their speakers and felt nothing but disgust for people playing doofy dance music. And the hottest ticket in town was Guns n Roses. I had done the requisite wait in the cold at Doncaster and had got my ticket, and was pretty much like Charlie on his way to the chocolate factory (however I did not have some octogenarian tagging along for the ride).
I was 17 and was going to start Year 12 the next day…so the concert had a real ‘final fling’ feel to it, and I was a pretty massive Guns n Roses fan. So the fact that we had to wait for about 2 hours in the city to get a bus out to Calder Park in 38 degree heat didn’t seem like such a problem. Similarly, when we arrived at Calder Park and security threw out all of the food and drink I had brought with me (a packet of Monte Carlo biscuits and an eggflip BigM) I was willing to tolerate it…after all, surely there would be food inside…and I had mistakenly purchased the eggflip BigM because the yellow ‘M’ looked like the yellow ‘M’ on the banana BigM. What wasn’t so good, was that somehow during all of the bag searches and pocket emptying, my ticket had disappeared. The ticket I had spent cold hours of the morning lining up for, the ticket that a scalper had offered $100 (roughly equivalent to $1.3Billion in today’s money) for just 10 minutes ago was gone! It was hot, it was windy, and I suddenly had to face the reality that I may be heading home without even entering Calder Park.
Just then, I saw a spindly tree about 20 meters away, and wedged in the fork of one of its branches WAS MY TICKET! It must have blown off the table when I emptied my pockets. I bolted over and grabbed it before it blew any further and walked into Calder Park.

The support acts
From memory Rose Tattoo were the first band to play…but I don’t really remember because I spent their entire set lining up for some food from one of the 3 food vans that were there. There were at least 10,000 people in the ‘A reserved section’ where I was (the remaining 60,000 were restrained behind a cement barrier) and none of us were allowed to bring in any food or drink…so yeah…I reckon 3 food vans with 3 people working in them was just about right.
Next up were SkidRow. From all accounts when the lead singer (Sebastian Bach) did the triumphant hands in the air salute to the crowd after one of their bigger songs, the drummer snuck up behind him and pantsed him…and I think the guitarist was heading off to join the army and so had his long ‘metal’ locks shaved off on stage. I say ‘from all accounts’ because I was back at the food van explaining that my dim-sims were still frozen in the center, and that I would kind of like some cooked ones.

The weather
We had already sweltered in close to 40 degree temperatures for most of the day…then an enormous wind storm came through. I can still vividly remember all of the people on one of the hills at Calder Park throwing their polystyrene cups in the air and the wind catching them and creating swarms of white cups…ah, then I think a few people threw some plastic chairs…which only flew a few meters…and didn’t end so well.
Fortunately the wind storm only lasted for about 10 minutes…not so fortunately we then got rained upon from a great height for about half an hour. It was an absolute deluge, and suddenly the guy selling ponchos for $5 who I had laughed at during the extreme heat, seemed like a freaking genius.
Then the lightning started.
Legend has it that the reason the gig was out at Calder Park was that Axl Rose (the enigmatic lead singer) had been told by his clairvoyant that if he ever played in a town starting with ‘M’ then he would die. Technically Calder Park was outside of Melbourne at that stage…but the wind, rain, lightning and massive scaffold structure, probably had Axl checking a few local council boundaries.

The actual gig
By about 6pm we had gone from stinking hot in shorts and t-shirts, to drenched in shorts and t-shirts…and then inevitably cold and wet in shorts and t-shirts. The only water we had access to had come from the sky, we hadn’t eaten, and Angry Anserson hadn’t even arrived in the Batmobile as he had done at the 91 Grand Final. So I think it’s fair to say that the general consensus amongst the crowd was ‘Well I sure hope Gunners put on a good show…or we are going the riot the bejesus out of this place!’
Well they did put on an awesome show. They played songs off their new double album, songs off Appetite for Destruction and even a Misfits cover. They were freaking awesome! My personal highlight was when Axl threw his wireless microphone out into the crowd. There was at least a 5 second delay between him throwing the mic and the sound engineer turning the signal off. So you got to hear the mic sail through the air end on end, then land in the crowd…then the sounds of at least 8 bogans beating eight shades of shit out of each other in order to get it. It was beautiful.
Then after an encore of ‘Paradise City’, the gig was over.

The Aftermath
We walked back to where the buses had dropped us off, only to find that the buses taking us home were in fact on the other side of Calder Park. Then we heard that all of the buses were full and had gone.
So we all started walking along the Calder Freeway back to Melbourne. It’s hard to describe the sight quite of 10,000 thousand sunburnt, damp, hungry and exhausted bogans walking along a the side of highway. But if anyone has seen the episode of the Walking Dead where all of the zombies were walking along the highway…you’ve got a pretty good reference point.
Some of my strongest memories of the walk were:

seeing a guy in a Mr. Whippy can auction his final can of soft drink, for about 15 times more than he would normally have charged
hundreds of people converging on the BP in Taylor’s Lakes, and simply eating the food right off the shelves…as a helpless service station attendant just looked on
spending my last 30c on a phone call to my Dad to come and pick me up.

So Guns n Roses are back in town…do I think this could all happen again?
Not really…and if it did, there would be so much righteous indignation and whining on social media, the internet would probably need a cup of tea and a lie down.
But I’m so glad that it did…and that I was part of it.
And if I have one last parting piece of advice I wish I could have passed on to myself, it’s that spending all day in the sun headbanging leads to a both sunburnt and very sore neck…but no matter how sore your neck muscles are, forgetting you’re sunburnt and rubbing deep heat in is a really, really, really bad idea.

8 renovation tips

When I was training for the Shepparton half ironman, I remember telling myself that once I completed the second of three laps of the run leg, then I would be fine. The hard yards would have been done and all I had to do was grit it out to the finish. To a large extent this was true, but what it didn’t take into account was the just how freaking hard that last 7km would be.
At 5 months into our 7 month renovation, I think I am at that ‘second of three laps’ stage. The finish line is in sight…but it ain’t going to be easy.
So here’s what I’ve learnt so far.

Debt
I had braced myself for the inevitable financial indebtedness that embarking on a renovation would bring…but not the other forms of debt.
I’m indebted to my parents for letting the whole family stay with them in their house and for them helping out with the painting; I’m indebted to my father in law for all of the work he is doing on our wardrobes; I’m indebted to my mother in law for the number of times she’s looked after the kids so that we can work on the house; I’m indebted to the kids for the number of times we’ve handed them off to other people so that we can work on the house; I’m indebted to the various friends and family who have come around and helped us paint; and I’m indebted to my wife for moving in with my parents.
With this level of debt, even Greece is looking at me and snickering.

Architects
A good draftsman will give you exactly the house you want…a good architect will give you the house you never knew you wanted.
What our architects (Breathe) have done is nothing short of amazing.

Builders
We dropped by the house on New Year’s Eve at 4pm and our builder was there working…we went there the next day, and he was there working.
There’s nothing worse than a tradie who doesn’t conform to my stereotypes!

Architects vs Builders
This is a reality series just waiting to be made!

Don’t watch too much ‘Grand Designs’
You will be tempted to project manage the thing yourself and will become convinced that it’s OK to be $200,000 over budget.
You should not, and it is not.
Also, it will not all be done in 42 TV minutes.

Unexpected costs
Oh sure I was expecting some out of the blue costs…but $600 for a permit to build a deck?…Oh, City of Darebin, you pranksters you!

Exercise
I actually decided not to cancel my gym membership, as the guilt of paying the monthly fee would be sufficient to motivate me to get to the gym. In five months, this has happened 4 times. Sound investment, Chris…sound investment.
I’ve also had to cancel a bike ride I’d booked in for as I just haven’t done any training.
I ended up walking to work on one of my runs to work, because it all just got to much. And if you’re thinking ‘well there are other ways to get exercise’…let me assure you that living back under your parents roof, with a child that is now sleeping in your room and two other children in the bedroom next door may lead to your virginity growing back.

Free babysitting
In theory, the parents that you are staying with will say ‘Hey, leave the kids with us. You two go out and have a meal/watch a movie/have a conversation that last more than 18 seconds’.
But in reality, they are helping out with the kids in little ways all the time and are probably just as keen for a break as you are.

Now I know that this all sounds very ‘First world problems’. I know that people all over the world are living without homes, and that there are people in Melbourne who would love to have to deal with a renovation if it meant they could afford a house. I know I’m being whiny and self-centred and churlish. But hey, take away our ability to be whiny, self-centred and churlish…and you take away 98% of social media.
With any luck the next blog post will be when the painting is all done, and wardrobes are in, and the council has found time in their busy schedule to approve our deck permit, and I have found $50K in a briefcase by the side of the road. Ha ha ha! Just kidding….we’re never going to finish this painting.

Creativity…I want to get me some.

If you’ve ever read the Dr. Seuss story ‘Oh, the places you’ll go!‘ you’ll know about a feared destination called ‘The waiting place’. It’s basically a place where people are waiting for things to happen, a form of limbo if you will…and I think it’s fair to say that 2012 has been pretty much a year of ‘The waiting place’ for me. Waiting for the renovations to be finished, waiting to see if I’ve been successful in applying for my own job, waiting for our eldest child to start going to sleep without 2 hours of coaxing, waiting for our youngest child to just go to sleep, waiting for the chance to get back into exercise, waiting, waiting, waiting.
But the whole point of the ‘Waiting place’ in ‘Oh, the places you’ll go!’ is that’s it’s very easy to get stuck there and wallow in your self pity. If you want to get out, you need to put in some effort. So I have decided to break free of my wallowing, and declare 2013 my year of creativity!

So what the hell does that mean?
Good question. I’ve worked with, and been dazzled by, genuinely creative people, and I do not include myself in their number. When I worked in film and TV I was the Producer or a Production Manager, which is basically a nice way of saying I was kept as far away from the creative process as possible. And with good cause, if there were ever a battle between the chaos and anarchy of creativity and the structure and organisation of order…I will be there with my ‘Hurray for structure’ banner.
However, I have always admired the end result of creativity and have always harboured a desire to be more creative. I love music and film and photography and various other things where people have ignored the beautiful structure of order…and just been creative. The challenge has always been to get involved in the actual process of being creative rather than just admiring what other people do. But this is not easy, because to be truly creative you need to have a singular vision and belief in what you do…which is very tricky to have when you’ve never really done it before.

For all it’s ‘Waiting place’iness, this year has actually been a really good year for me creatively. I’ve started really getting into photography, and I’ve started trying to do new stuff with my video work. But I think I’ve treated it as a pleasant distraction from the more mundane work…rather than something to focus my attention on.
So for the next year, I’m going to actively embrace the creative process as an opportunity, rather than an entertaining by-product.

That was sufficiently wanky…what does it really mean?
Well for starters I’m going to do some singing lessons. If I’m willing to be seen in public in a triathlon suit…then I can no longer claim that I refrain from public singing out of a sense of common decency. Plus I really like singing…it’s just that my preferred venue is an empty beach where the only thing that can possible hear me is the unfortunate dog I’m walking.
I’m going to pester O’nev into giving me a photography masterclass…and I’m going to try and take some photos that I can enter in a few competitions…and I’m going to set aside time to go and take photos, rather than trying to fit them in around some other activity.
I’m going to finally shoot my short docos on Melbourne people I admire and get them up on YouTube.
But, most importantly I’m going to start putting my work out there…and wait for the internet to tell me how much they hate it. After all, there’s no one’s advice you should take more sagely than an anonymous loner with a keyboard.
So here are my favourite photos that I took this year, let me know your thoughts.
Unfortunately WordPress isn’t playing nice with ‘media’ at the moment…so for the time being you’ll have to click through to Flickr to see all of them…but here’s five to get you started.

2Degrees_2012-4 — Scarlett O’Hurta at the Rollerderby

My Movember reflections

I’ll keep this one short and sweet. A massive thanks to everyone who supported me for Movember…whether you donated money, took a photo of me every day, or you just resisted the urge to snigger until I had walked past…Thank you!
Here’s a 30 second video of my progress:

And another big thanks to the other members of Comms Comancheros.

Eug you looked terrifying. Brendan, your hirsute abilities are beyond compare. Matt, you would have made an awesome extra in Deadwood. And Luke…well at least we tried…now let’s get this 70’s themed Christmas party out of the way so we can shave these sodding things off!

Movember…an update

In 1998 I travelled to Ireland. Both my Mum and my Dad can trace their ancestry to Ireland and I genuinely thought that when I arrived there I would feel some sort of connection…some sort of ancestral calling. Not surprisingly, I didn’t.
Movember has been similar. I won’t lie, as much as I played the ‘I’m going to look ridiculous’ card going into this, part of me genuinely hoped that I would actually look good. That it would suit me. That it would redefine me. In short, I really hoped that I could rock a mo. But, like Celtic ancestry, some things work better in the realm of imagination.
But here are some things I have learnt after three weeks with a mo.

People are so unkind
After the initial week of justified sniggering and pointing. People began to delight in taking the piss. A few people at work told me that I ‘looked like Cary Grant’. Which I took as a compliment until a quick Google images search revealed that the man never had a moustache!
Then my brother-in-law took to Twitter to tell me that if I just moved my eyebrows to where I wanted my mo to be, I would look like Magnum P.I! While this may be true…I think it’s fair to say that his Christmas present this year is going to be remarkably crap…or entertainingly flammable.
Then people on Instagram started to tell me that I looked like either Gomez Addams or Burt Reynolds. While this did lead to some pleasurable audio memories of the band Gomez, it also lead to some less pleasurable memories of…well…Burt Reynolds.

Movember is the equaliser
As a man you live in constant fear of accidentally asking a non-pregnant woman if she is pregnant (which roughly translates as ‘you’re looking a bit tubby’). It really is the ultimate social faux pas. So much so, that even if a woman is clearly in labour in front of me…I will avoid asking if she’s pregnant, just to be safe.
Up until now, I could never find a female equivalent. But with Movember, women feel quite comfortable coming up to you and saying ‘Oh, you’re doing Movember?’ (which roughly translates as ‘Oh Christ there is something that looks like a caterpillar under your nose. Please don’t let that be serious!’) So all you have to do is look innocent and say ‘No, I’ve been growing this since October…I really like it’, and you can sit back and enjoy a lot of conversational back-pedalling and desperate attempts to extricate themselves from the situation.

A moustache is not particularly comfortable
Perhaps in time this will change. But after three weeks, my Mo is itchy and scratchy…and not in the good Simpsons way.

Some people are very generous
After my most recent post, three exceptional human beings donated to our Movember team. So thank you very much Julie, Karen and Marta. It is really appreciated.
But for those of you who don’t see me regularly, and who want me to prove that I really am growing a mo…here are some progress shots

If this isn’t enough to shame you into a donation…then you are dead to me.

Movember week 1

Like most men I’m not afraid of having a moustache, nor am I afraid of not having a moustache. But what I am afraid of is the horrible limbo that exists between having a moustache and not having a moustache…at best you look like the bass player in an average rock cover band, at worst you look like a teenager trying to trick the guy at the bottle shop that you really are over 18.
That’s the beauty of Movember, you get 30 days to try and work your way through this limbo with relative social humiliation impunity. So I’ve decided to give it a go… Now I’m No Expert But here are my experiences thus far.

What mo to go with?
It’s not until you consider growing a mo that you realise just how enigmatic they are. On the right person they can convey power and authority (think Dennis Lillee, a policeman, or my father in law). Combined with rock stardom they can convert a not so attractive man into virile stallion (think Lemmy from Motorhead or Freddy Mercury). They can even define a man (think John Waters, Adolf Hitler or Boony).
But they are also the domain of the second hand car sales man, the creepy PE teacher and bikie gangs. And if you want to be a captain of industry or the leader of a country (one that hasn’t been taken over in a military coup), then no moustache for you!
So when it comes to choosing a mo for yourself, what do you go with? I’ve seen both my cousin Austin and fellow Movember teammate Eugenio converted from friendly and approachable to ‘underworld standover man’ simply by having a handlebar moustache. I’ve seen photos of my Dad when he had a mo and was affectionately known as ‘Shifty the Pimp’. I’ve seen men walking the streets with mos and thought ‘Yeah…nah. That doesn’t work’. And of course I’m also painfully aware that genetically I am not pre-disposed to growing facial hair. So as much as I would like to go with something intimidating or something ornate that requires wax…I’m just going to settle for something Clark Gable-esque.

How to grow the Mo.
A dodgy beard or a dodgy goatee will always look better than a dodgy mo…so for safety I recommend you grow out a beard and then trim it back to a mo once you have sufficient growth.
But if you are doing Movember, then you are morally obliged to just grow the mo. You may look like a dodgy teenager. You may get wry smiles or stifled sniggers…but that is burden you have to bear.

So how’s my progress?
Well here’s my progress from day 1 to day 7

I think it’s fair to say it’s sketchy at best. But there is potential!

What have I learnt in my first week?

I have a very tolerant wife
I will need all 30 days to come up with something half decent
There are some grey hairs in my beard…GREY HAIRS!
Sometimes you forget you even have a mo, until you catch your reflection or you see someone sniggering
Nobody respects a man in his late 30’s with the moustache of 16 year old

I’m fascinated, how can I find out more?
You can head to my Mospace page , check out the daily photos…and ideally donate some money towards men’s health. At the very least, get me above $0!

Around the bay

About 10 years ago I did my first Around the Bay bike ride…and having done the 210kms swore I would never do it again. But last weekend, in what can only be described as a brazen example of just how little my word is worth, I did it again. If nothing else, it showed me just how much I’ve learnt about cycling and nutrition…and perhaps more importantly, it showed me just how stupid I was 10 years ago. So Now I’m No Expert But, here’s my guide to doing Around the Bay.

What is the Around the Bay bike ride?
Ok, first and foremost all the cool kids call it ‘Round the Bay’…so I’m not going to argue with the cool kids, I’ll call it that for the rest of this post.
The Round the Bay ride is a 210km ride with 2 options, Melbourne-Sorrento-Queenscliff- Melbourne or Melbourne-Queenscliff-Sorrento-Melbourne. The main difference is that when you have done about 180kms and your are in a world of pain and just looking something..anything!…to distract you from just how sore your arse is, you can choose between looking at the seaside and breathing in the sea air…or you can choose Werribee. Not surprisingly the ride home along Beach Rd sells out a lot quicker than the industrial back blocks of Melbourne version. There is a ferry that takes you between Queenscliff and Sorrento, but if you’re really keen you can try to get a good run up and jump your bike over.
There is also a 250km version, but that is just basically the 210km ride with an additional 40kms thrown in to make the people who choose to do this think long and hard about the decisions they’ve made and where that’s left them.
And there are also a range of rides that cater for people of all abilities.
But I did the Melbourne – Queenscliff – Sorrento – Melbourne ride and here’s what I learnt.

It is about the bike
Ever notice the way very few formula 1 racing teams use station wagons for the Grand Prix? This is because a racing car is much better suited to driving at 300km/h, whereas the station wagon is much better suited to picking up the kids after school. Similarly, a long ride like the Round the Bay is best suited to a road bike, due to their light weight, their aero position and the fact that this is exactly what they are designed to do. This would appear to make perfect sense.
So why the Christ I did this ride on a Mountain Bike 10 years ago is beyond me! It was freaking horrible. The bike weighed a tonne, it had big tyres that meant more resistance, it had suspension which meant part of every pedal was absorbed by the suspension rather than making me go faster, little things like your gears and your hubs that only make a few % difference…make a big difference over the course of 10 hours.
In my defence, 10 years ago I’d never ridden a road bike and so had no idea what the differences were…but the fact that every other person was a) on a road bike and b) going past me, probably should have been a subtle hint that I was ‘doing it wrong’. For me the defining moment was when I was riding out of Geelong heading home and just well and truly in the ‘hurt locker’, but convincing myself that I was still looking strong. Two guys rode past me and I heard one say to the other ‘Gees, he’s doing it hard’.
Indeed I was…Indeed I was.

You are what you eat
Which means that the first time I did the ride, I was numerous packs of sugary lollies. My reasoning was sound. Sugar gives you energy, and I was going to need a lot of energy…so every time I got tired I would just eat some lollies. Genius! This of course meant I swung in sporadic bursts of energy and lethargy. I’ve you’ve ever learnt how to drive a manual car and spent an hour in a car park lurching forward and then stalling the car…you’ve pretty much got how I felt…for 12 hours!
This time around I made sure I had plenty of food that would provide longer term, slower release energy (aka the sesame bars from the Preston Market), as well as about 4 gels and some electrolyte drink…and plenty of water…and a hot dog in Geelong…and a coffee in Queenscliff…and…look, I’m not saying it was the perfect nutritional plan, but it worked a treat.

Ride with good people
No matter how good your nutrition is and no matter how much you’ve trained, there will be times when you feel flat or when you you can’t maintain the pace of the group you’re with. A good group can recognise this and make sure you are protected from the wind until your energy levels return. Similarly, there will be times when you feel really good and could travel a lot faster than the group…but surging off into the distance leaves the rest of the group either exhausting themselves by trying to maintain your pace, or dropping off and having one less person to work in the group. Instead, if you have a lot of energy, you can spend some additional time at the front where the wind resistance is the strongest. That way you get to use your surplus energy…and the rest of the group benefits.
The group I was with (and a big shout out to Lach, Regan, Marty and Sam) were sensational like this and made the ride all the more pleasant.

Training
Ideally you would have spent a couple of months training at least once a week and have built up to a ride at least 75% of the total distance. But if you have small children then your sleep patterns are probably similar to that of a night shift nurse, and your ability to just ‘duck’ out for a 150km bike ride is slim at best. So if you have trainer at home, then I can’t recommend the Sufferfest videos highly enough. In the space of an hour you can get a really good workout…and you can train your kids to be domestiques by getting them to refill your water bottles.

On a sadder note, in the time between starting this post and finishing it…some unsavoury person has stolen my bike. So if you see or hear about someone selling an Argon 18 Plutonium with Mavic Aksium wheels and Speedplay pedals, Taser them in the genitals and let me know. Then I also will Taser them in the genitals…and then take back the bike that has got me through a half Ironman, the Alpine Classic, numerous triathlons, the Murray to Moyne and the ride to and from work for the last 6 years!

My night at the roller derby

On Saturday night I headed to my first ever roller derby bout, armed with a media pass from The Victorian Roller Derby League and got some of the best photos I’ve ever taken. So I thought I’d spend this blog talking about some of the things that worked…and of course a few of the things that didn’t.

Get good talent
I’m a great believer that you can take a great photo of anyone, it’s just that some people need a little more coaxing and effort before you can get a good shot. Of course the flipside to this is that some people are just naturally outgoing, naturally engaging and generally up for anything…a number of these people play Roller Derby.
I was pretty keen on getting some shots that actually reflected their personalities, so I literally just gave them the chalkboard prop, told them to write their name and then just let them do whatever they wanted. Sometimes this sort of lack of direction drives people back into their shell ‘But what do you want me to do?’…I was blown away at how quickly the players adopted a range of poses I would never have thought to have asked them to strike.

Have a plan
I knew that I wanted to have a consistent background for the photos, but not knowing what the venue was like I didn’t want to be reliant on finding something that would work. So I decided I would use a big roll of white paper I had used a couple of times as a background. I also knew that the players all had awesome roller derby names (‘Pony Slaystation’, ‘Mon U Mental’, ‘Calamity Maim’ etc) so I thought it would be cool to have them write their name on a small blackboard and then have them hold it so that the photo was somewhere between a mugshot and a school photo. The final part of my plan was to shoot a wide shot and a close up and convert them all to black and white.
I think that going in with a vision was great as there are basically hundreds of ways I could have shot them, but when you only have a person for a minute or two, you need to know exactly what you are after. To once again quote General George S Patton ‘A good plan executed violently now is better than a perfect plan executed next week’.
Of course you also need some leeway, and when I started working on the shots in Lightroom I realised that a lot of them looked a lot better in colour.

Take a risk
A couple of years ago Veeral Patel quit his comfortable IT job and decided to go and photograph the Tour de France. It was a massive risk and I really admired his dedication. Since then he has won awards and his photography has gone from strength to strength. Clearly going to take photos of roller derby players isn’t in the same league as throwing in your job to follow your dream, but this was the first time I had decided to call myself a photographer and put all the focus on just my photos (rather than having them as an incidental part of a video).
The risk certainly wasn’t huge. If the photos had been appalling, there probably would have been a few people who were annoyed that I had wasted their time, and the person who helped organise everything (Monica Campo) would probably have been annoyed that she’d wasted her efforts.
But it was still a big step up on the previous level of risk, which was ‘Nan doesn’t like the photos’.

You can see all of the photos here

But what didn’t work?

Action shots
Without a flash it was always going to be difficult getting good action shots at the speeds they were travelling. This was one of the best action shots I got, and that’s just because someone else’s flash went off just as I took the photo.

Also, not knowing anything about the sport meant that I was always just off with my timing or I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I tried to make up for this by taking a number of photos of things that weren’t moving. But this lead to my second problem.

Batteries
I had no idea when I would get access to the players, so I just headed around taking photos of the games and the audience…for 4 hours. So suddenly after the second game when a whole lot of players came over to have their photo taken, the battery light on the camera was flashing furiously. Which meant I rushed the photos of the last few players, which meant I didn’t get the shots I was after.

The viewfinder
I know this is going to make any real photographers reading this throw their hands up in the air, but I find the LCD screen on the back of the camera a lot better to use than the actual viewfinder. But the LCD screen also chews through the batteries a lot quicker. So when I switched to just using the viewfinder for the last couple of shots to preserve the batteries…I ended up with shots that were at best ‘soft’ and at worst, out of focus.

But ultimately if you can come away from an experience like this with some photos that you are really happy with and a few lessons learnt…then you can chalk it up as a success!
So a big thanks to my Dad for coming along and being my camera assistant. An even bigger thanks to Monica for giving me the opportunity. And my biggest thanks to the players from the Dolls of Hazzard, the Toxic Avengers, the Rock Mobsters and my team the Dead Ringer Rosies for taking the time, and being so damned photogenic on and off the track.
The VRDL Grand final is coming up on Nov. 24, I suggest you be there!

2degreesofseparation’s photostream

2degreesofseparation’s photostream on Flickr.

My Brother is totally rad