Interesting Alternative Show with Kavus Torabi (Max Tundra Special) 23.04.12

April 30th, 2012 by admin | Posted in Music | No Comments »

With main host Steve Davis away talking about “that funny globes game” Kavus Torabi hosts another two hour Max Tundra special on the Interesting Alternative Show. This is apparently the third time Max has appeared on this show although I have only heard what seems to be his second visit to Phoenix FM.

There seems to have been a bit of a mix up over recording the show which you can normally download from the Phoenix FM website. It popped up in the end though and although the sound is a little sketchy the content seems to be all there.

This time Max Tundra glues a series of quite short tracks together and I particularly liked the O.L.D. and George Duke efforts. Max Tundra read the lyrics to Football Match England The Netherlands 1-1 by Harry Merry which I thought were quite amusing. I’m sure if you listen to that track you will find them funny too…

The London Classic 2012

April 2nd, 2012 by admin | Posted in Cycling | No Comments »

It really is a pleasure to be involved in the 3rd edition of this excellent London cycling event which continues to raise a stack of dough for Evelina Children’s Hospital.

After being based at the (now gastro pubbed up) Alma Pub in Crystal Palace in 2010 and 2011 a new home was found at The Gipsy Hill Tavern. The staff and regular punters were incredibly welcoming to the 350 riders and bent over backwards to make sure everyone had a great day.

I picked up a lot of admin duties this year as boss man ‘Het Cobblemonster’ had just had a baby cobblemonster. One my tasks was to inform the residents of the awesomely inclined Canonbie Road (picture below) about the event and ask them to support the riders as they struggle up the gradient. I’m very grateful to hear that some residents did come out on the day and event and even offered sweets and other treats to the riders!

I was also desperately trying to get some raffle prizes from some of the big cycling teams and riders. Mark Cavendish’s agent sent me an e-mail:

Dear James, I’m sorry but Mark is not available to attend your event on that day. Good Luck with it all.

I must admit to finding this pretty funny! I e-mailed him back to ask for some dirty socks or anything I could get but to no avail.

I am very grateful to the ITV sports broadcaster Ned Boulting for coming through in a big way for us. Ned managed to get Team Sky to donate a jersey signed by all their riders including Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish. This prize was probably too valuable for our raffle so Evelina Children’s Hospital plan to auction the jersey during the Tour de France later this year. Thanks again to Ned and Gemma from Team Sky for helping us with this great prize.

Our official photographer Louise Heywood-Schiefer had great fun zipping around the course this year on the back of a scooter allowing her get some great action shots as well as some brilliant rider portraits. Thanks to Louise and scooter man Stan for their excellent work.

Steve Davis Interesting Alternative Show (Max Tundra Special) 05.09.11

September 6th, 2011 by admin | Posted in Music | No Comments »

Former Snooker World Champ Steve Davis has a cracking radio show on Monday evenings where he plays all sorts of random stuff from his huge music collection. On the 5th September 2011 he asked Max Tundra on to his show for a two hour special.

Some cracking stuff was played. Perhaps surprisingly to some my favourite tracks were by Todd Rundgren and Wigwam rather than something like Larry Fast which might have been up my normal alley.

ITU WCS Triathlon London 2011

August 8th, 2011 by admin | Posted in Triathlon | No Comments »

The time had finally arrived to test myself over the same Hyde Park course which will be used for the London 2012 Olympics.

I had worked very hard in the months leading up to this event with several build up races to try and refresh my mind on what it was all about.

The swim has always been my weak spot so I lined up with the usual mixed feeling of fear and excitement. Due to the very early 07.40 start the sun was very low over the water which made it very difficult to see where I was going. I lost some time as a result but overall I improved by about 4 minutes from 2006. I’m still miles behind most people so I really need to keep working on my swimming if I’m going to get an ‘average’ level.

The bike leg was a bit trickier than I would have liked as I hadn’t done enough specific cycling training and I found it tough going – 81 minutes is pretty disappointing by my standards.

By the time the run came around I was trying to push hard but I was finding it hard going. I ran the 10k in 48 minutes which is probably about par.

Overall I have to be very happy with my performance. I can still improve a lot but I’ve never been fitter and healthier.

I would like to thank everyone who sponsored me for New Life Mexico. NLM are a British Charity that supports children and young people in Mexico who have been physically, sexually or emotionally abused. I hope the money raised can make a real difference.

Watch a video of me crossing the finish line below:

Splits – Full breakdown on the official website

Swim 00:40:10
Trans 1 00:04:11
Bike 01:21:08
Trans 2 00:02:20
Run 00:48:23
Total 02:56:10

Team Outrageous Saturday Sprint Triathlon 18.06.11

June 20th, 2011 by admin | Posted in Triathlon | No Comments »

As a build up to ITU Triathlon in London I chose this sprint distance triathlon as a warm up. The race is part of a series organised by the excellent Team Outrageous at Leybourne Lake very near to where I grew up in Kent. Although I’ve taken part in a few duathlons and aquathlons recently this is the first Triathlon I had taken part in since 2006.

It doesn’t matter how many times you take part in a mass start swim you still get nervous. The swim itself was a ‘triangle’ around the Lake. Many people in front of me didn’t seem able to sight properly and were swimming in zig-zags which made it a bit disorientating but I quickly focused on the buoys so I could swim in a (fairly) straight line.

The bike course was on a dual carriageway early on Saturday morning, but there was still a fair bit of traffic coming past at high speed. You can feel the extra momentum you get when a lorry comes past but I also find it pretty terrifying. With that and the very bumpy road surface I didn’t feel confident to get in to the tuck position on the tri-bars. I should go faster on the Hyde Park course as it will be much flatter.

On the run I linked up with a chap who suggested we run together. This worked out pretty well for me as he was faster and really pushed me. It turned out that he was a P.E. teacher at my old secondary school. I can’t imagine running 5km with one of my old teachers from back in the day who were very much P.E. in your pants sorts.

Overall I considered my performance to be very much ‘par’ and I still have a few weeks to improve before the Hyde Park race.
Swim+T1: 0:20:01
Bike: 0:39:20
T2+Run: 0:24:30
Total:  1:23:51

Why I went for Tumblr (on this occasion)

June 2nd, 2011 by admin | Posted in Interweb | No Comments »

When asked to create a really cheap website I’ve always plumped for something open source like WordPress or Drupal as a CMS. I was asked recently to put together a sustainable, fully custom themed website for a local music festival with no budget. I started to investigate Tumblr as a possibility.

I’ve always thought Tumblr was a bit of a fad and a half way house between traditional blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger etc) and Twitter as many Tumblr blogs seem to be a splurge of images, video and animated Gifs with seemingly no order or point to them. I still kind of think that but maybe because I’m getting old and I’m not “down with the kids” anymore! Tumblr recently overtook the number of published WordPress.com blogs so it must be doing something right.

Tumblr offers a package of features which suited the brief perfectly (first and foremost) but also offered amazing bang for the (zero) bucks. I’ve listed some of the best features below.

• Large collection of themes available and CSS can be fully customised. This was the big one which persauded me to go for Tumblr. I also looked at WordPress.com which makes you pay for customising CSS. Posterous lets you customise stuff so that was also a possibility.
• Hosted. This project has to be sustainable and there might not be any money for hosting costs in year 2 or 3 so buying hosting myself and installing WordPress.org was not an option.
• Free URL redirect. Again, WordPress.com will let you do this for a fee. I had to pay £6 for a domain for two years (the only cost of the whole project) but it makes your site seem so much more professional.
• Easy Google analytics and Feedburner integration. In therory you can use these two tools with any site but Tumblr makes it so easy to set up.
• Author retains copyright on all own material. Copyright of own material on hosted blog platforms seems to vary. Quite a small point but an important one.
• A number of social functions which can increase your reach within Tumblr itself. You can follow other Tumblr blogs, ‘like’ individual posts and reblog the posts on to your own blog. It meant I’ve been able to connect with people I might not have connected with on Facebook or Twitter.

Tumblr is by no means the best platform in all circumstances but it has some good plus points especially if you want to keep things simple and spend hardly any dosh.

The site I’ve put together is for Oxjam Islington Takeover (image above) which is a music festival taking place on the 22nd October. It’s part of Oxjam a nationwide series of music events to raise money for Oxfam. I’m volunteering to help with marketing. Along with the website I’ve also kicked off the Facebook and Twitter pages.

There will be more to come before the event too…

Kingfisher Aquathlon 2011

May 9th, 2011 by admin | Posted in Triathlon | No Comments »

This was my second pool based Aquathlon this year after London Fields Aquathlon in April. It took place in Morden and was organised by Kingfisher Triathletes. It was the 10th running of the event formerly known as Morden 6n6. The fact that this event has been going for so long was reflected in the quality of the people taking part and generally I thought the standard of participant was very high.

I thought I my swim was even worse than at London Fields. I find it very difficult to start cold as I’m used to swimming a few hundred metres as a warm up. My plan now is to start a training session with a decent effort and no warm up. There won’t be much time to warm up in the Serpentine in August so it’s better to try and get used to that now.

Note to self: understand the difference between 6 miles and 6km. After finishing the run in 48 minutes I couldn’t understand what went wrong until I figured it out later. The run took place in the adjacent park and was running mostly through woodland which I didn’t really like as I couldn’t tell where I was most of the time. The marshals all had lists of entrants and were shouting our names in encouragement as we came past which was a nice touch.

The winner covered the 400m swim and 6 mile run in 36:53 which gives you an idea of how insanely good some of these people are. It’s quite a good early season event and I would definitely think about taking part again.

Speedy J – De-Orbit speed debate

May 2nd, 2011 by admin | Posted in Music | 4 Comments »

Recently I noticed a friend had posted Speedy J – De-Orbit on to his Facebook profile and was waxing lyrical about what a classic piece of early 90s nostalgia it was and all that jazz. I couldn’t agree more but I was a little surprised as I didn’t think it would be his sort of thing.

I noticed that the YouTube video he posted was said classic played at the faster 45rpm and being referred to as a ‘pirate classic’ as LTJ Bukem apparently used to play it at raves in 1992 at that speed. Most of the comments below the video refer to buying the Ginger album on Warp Records and so presumably listening to it a 33rpm. Personally I think this is crazy and having listened to the original so many times I think it sounds pretty silly at the faster speed.

Make your own mind up as I’ve included both versions below including the ‘chipmunk’ 45rpm one.

Speedy J – De-Orbit (33rpm)

Speedy J – De-Orbit (45rpm)

London Fields Aquathlon 2011

April 19th, 2011 by admin | Posted in Triathlon | No Comments »

As part of my preparation for the ITU Triathlon in Hyde Park this August I took part in the London Fields Aquathlon.

An aquathlon is basically a swim and a run, in this case a 400m swim in London Fields Lido followed by a 5km run around London Fields itself. The event was organised by the friendly London Fields Triathlon Club.

I estimated my swim time to be 11 minutes which gave me with a modest ranking (the people with the fastest predicted times head off first) of 101 out of 116. As each competitor set off 20 seconds apart I realised I would be waiting half an hour before I could start. Many people had finished the event before I even got into the water!

Despite my recent work to improve my swimming I still think I have a long way to go before I’m any good. I can certainly swim a lot better than I did here as I think a combination of nerves and an early start made the swim feel quite tough. In practice I have been swimming under 10 minutes for 400m but that was in a 25m pool with the advantage of the push off the side much more regularly than this 50m lido. I made up a lot of time on the run to finish 81st. I can certainly run faster but I’ve got a lot of work to do before August.

Swim +T1: 11:53
Run: 23:42
Total: 35:35

The winner Danny Russell clocked an impressive 22:29 including an incredibly fast 15:40 for the 5km run. Former World Triathlon Champion and Great Britain No.1 Alistair Brownlee has a known PB for 5km of 15:30 which gives you some idea of how fast Danny was going.

The event was really well organised and I have to pay tribute to LFTC for keeping the costs down. Many events are prohibitively expensive which is one of the reasons I stopped doing Triathlons a few years back. Entry for an adult was £12 and by not issuing swimming hats or bad t-shirts (with sponsors logos all over them that nobody wants) they kept it nice and cheap.

The London Classic returns!

April 12th, 2011 by admin | Posted in Cycling | No Comments »

After a hugely successful debut year The London Classic returned for a second year of bone shaking cobble and lung bursting hill action.

The London Classic is a fun cycling event based on the cobbled classic Paris-Roubaix and incorporates a number of cobbled London streets and hills and starts and finishes at The Alma in Crystal Palace. After the ride everyone settles down for a few beers to watch the pros in action in Paris-Roubaix on the pubs big screen.

The new and improved route featuring some new pave sections and a couple of new hills wound its way around 37+ miles of London streets. This time there was a stop off at Look Mum no Hands a cycling café in Clerkenwell where the riders could get a stamp on their route guides from the friendly staff. A number of ‘bergs’ had to be climbed on the way back including Canonbie Road which has already established a reputation as the deadliest climb in London with its 18% gradient.

The event was designed to raise money for Evelina Children’s Hospital. This year there were some great London Classic t-shirts and also some natty retro cycling shirts for sale. The raffle was especially strong with generous donations of Halo rims and some Brooks Saddles amongst the prizes. The star prize was a frameset from The Light Blue worth about £500 which was won by lucky London Classicist Ryan.

I myself was volunteering with the organisation of the event on the day. Mainly I was assisting the event photographer Louise Heywood-Schiefer. Louise took some superb shots on the course and also a great set of rider portraits once we got back to The Alma. Somehow the test shot of me even sneaked in there! A London Classic 2011 Flickr group has been set up so if you took any pictures please add them to this group.

The feedback on the event has been really positive and with over £4000 raised for a great cause the 2012 London Classic can’t come quickly enough!