- I didn’t know that potato meant aerospoke when I first made my account, I just like potatoes…
- My post count really doesn’t give an accurate measure of how long I spend on this site.
I’ll send you one in the mail 
Sometimes I really regret packing up my life in Sydney and moving to Melbourne. Don’t get me wrong, Melbourne is an amazing place and I’ve met some really cool people, but I often find myself feeling displaced and struggle to find my feet. I guess in Sydney I had a good life and a pretty awesome job (something I’ve only realised in retrospect). Funny thing is, whenever friends and old colleagues quiz me on the subject I’m too proud to speak truthfully.
Last year when my bike was stolen I told everyone it was due to a faulty D-lock. In truth, I was so wasted that night I failed to loop it through the frame. I was so frustrated and angry at myself it took 3 days before I returned to the scene of the crime to confirm what I already thought. Sure enough, my D-lock was securely locked around a no parking sign.
I really hate my user name.
You can’t change the past, but you can change your user name. 
Na leave it the way it is… A reminder of silly things you’ve done
I rode brakeless without foot retention for a good year, and didn’t loose my feet or control due to that once. Disclaimer: they were grippy plastic pedals, metal track pedals would have been certain death.
Did you bomb any sweet hills during this time or just ride on the footpath?
Bombed heaps, lots of mad skids too.
You wouldn’t know it to look at me but I have titanium plates in my face from a crash I endured in London riding home early one morning. There were a number of factors leading up to this, but the primary one was alcohol as much as I don’t like to admit it. At the time the relationship with my giirlfriend of 3 years was in tatters, I was surviving on 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night and partying like there was no tomorrow. Until that happened I was feeling rather invincible.
I still thankfully remember nothing of the actual incident where I hit the ford transit stationary at the lights from behind, my mug breaking the back window. So it seemed One minute I was out on the town, the other I was waking up in accident and emergency with the stong metallic taste of blood and a wall of pain all over my face.
My lower jaw was broken in two places, my upper completely broken off my skull, a crack to my left hand eye socket, and a smashed left hand cheek bone. Amazingly I only chipped one tooth, and even then you couldnt really see it.
I had to stay all busted up in hospital for 3 or 4 days until the swelling went down so they could operate. Had a great surgeon though, kind of like a young professory type with an educated english accent, a total boffin. He fitted plates to allow the bones to knit together correctly but they cannot be removed for fear of further nerve damage to my face.
It took a massive toll on my body and I lost 10 kg’s in a week.
It took 7 weeks to get back to work and about 6 to 12 months to feel somewhat normal again.
My face has numb spots (from the surgery) which I notice sometimes usually only when I talk about it. My jaw sits differently, my teeth don’t quite fit like they used to, I have some scarring, alot of which is conveniently hidden by my beard which I had already. I doubt I will ever be able to be clean shaven again without looking like I had some sort of cleft palette.
My neck hurts sometimes and is a little rotated I think from the impact.
Out of all of this the hardest thing is realising that I did this to myself and no-one else is to blame. Its quite embarrassing and the fact that if I had been 1 minute ahead on my route earlier in the night I would have just got a kebab and gone home instead of having a random meeting with an acquaintance and deciding to go off to a house party and a bar. He was devo’d when he found out and I think blames himself for what happened to me. So many people came out of the wood work to visit me in hospital which was amazing, including many friends off LFGSS.
I guess in some ways I got off lightly. I am still here,I have an amazing and beautiful girlfriend who I never would have met if it wasn’t for all this, and we are expecting a daughter in september.
Mad skids? Without foot retention? How?
i’m excited to move back to melbourne!! living in the bush on a dirt road for 10 months with no phone reception has driven me insane!!
I’m sure we all look forward to more compulsory pics of ur knuckle tatts 
With great difficulty I bet.
Have seen/had the displeasure of riding with a few clowns over here ride around with NOBR AKES / Foot Rentention, and they can skid. It’s just sketchy as all fuck.
Balls to stem?
Or foot under pedal.
I have been to a gym twice in the last week. I have used those eliptical trainer things both times. I have reaffirmed my belief that gyms are the most awkward and uncomfortable place on the planet. But it’s sweet, it’s just a free trial thing, so I’m done as of tomorrow.
Damn that is sketchy, I have a no foot retention confession. Sometimes I ride to the shops on top of my time atacs in regular shoes brakeless. It is only 50m away but I still feel stupid doing so.
On my first tarck bike I had no foot retention and track gearing. But I did have a front brake.
I ruined a perfectly good road frame to build my first fixie. I mean I really fucked it - ground off the gear lever bosses to make it look slick, filed the dropouts so I could get hectic chain tension, squeezed in the stays to fit my sweet Deep V wheel set. I guess I somehow thought spacers weren’t necessary, but then after one epic whipskid too many, the frame cracked clean between the chainstay and the dropout.
My first sw8fixxay wasnt sw8 at all…
Dodgy road master conversion, filed off shit as above, and also squeezed the stays to fit in my sweet deep quando wheels.
The best part, not only was the half-toe-clip foot retention bad enough, I screwed the pedals into the wrong cranks stripping them. So I just wound them in even tighter lol!
I still don’t know how I fucked that up so bad, especially since I used to do things like the brakes and suspension on my car - something that will kill you if you fuck it up…
I was so proud of that bike HA HA