Cover Girl

I recently wrote a bike review for NZMTBR here in New Zealand, and was asked to do a photo shoot with the bike for the review. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they used on of the photos for the shoot for the cover of the magazine!

If you want to read the full story you will have to go and buy the magazine, but until then I leave you with a photo of the cover so you can find it easily...

Captain Awesome: The Winter Athlete

"Most of the Endurance community don't believe he exists. The ones that do call him The Winter Athlete. He's a Ghost... You'll never find him."

Out in the early morning gloom, a shadow whizzes past. Witnesses often describe an occasional whirring, clicking sound, often followed by a "thunk!" and then nought but heavy breathing from the direction of the noises. They also report a light gust of wind as the shadow comes barreling past, and catch a glimpse of red and white stripes on a background of blue before the figure accelerates out of sight.

Some report the figure to be on a bicycle. This always correlates to the sightings where the noises are heard. Other encounters are more silent, and the apparition is usually reported to be either on foot or in a self propelled water craft of some description. In these instances, witnesses have had more of a chance to build an image of the apparition, and report it to be of moderate build, average height and most probably masculine in build.

The are a few things that all these sightings have in common. In all of them the figure is moving very, very fast. He, assuming the figure is a he, is also seen predominantly during the Winter, and often appears at athletic events with some level of casual atmosphere, such as local race series and races with a reputation for killer spot prizes. He has, however, also been sighted at prestigious events such as Regional and National Championships in multiple sports.

No-one knows exactly who The Winter Athlete is, but one thing is for certain; he is training for something, and he definitely looks fast...

Keep an eye out for The Winter Athlete on a trail near you...

A reconstructive artist's precis developed from witness reports of The Winter Soldier.

Coming Soon: SHOTS!

Coming soon on Turning Pages:

SHOTS!

What are shots, you may ask? If you asked different groups of Mountain bikers what  SHOT was, they would all give you different responses; XC riders will open yet another fruity tasting energy gel, downhillers will wave small glasses of spirits at you and photographers will scramble to their portfolios to show you some of their "shots". And all the while the Enduro riders will sit aside from all of this shaking their heads, with a fruity smelling alcohol soaked photo of their latest race run stuffed into a back pocket...

But here on Turning Pages SHOTS means something a little different.

Standing for Short Hard Out Testing Sessions, SHOTS reviews will be a collection of reviews where I haven't had a product long enough to get a long term reliability report or explore every nook and cranny of a product, but feel that I have enough information to give an opinion on it. This will be ideal for situations such as Demo days where I will only have a limited amount of time with a bike or piece of equipment, or as a precursor to a long term review to keep you guys updated.

Look for them soon in a blog near you this winter...

-Robin





Note: SHOTS: Short Hard Out Testing Sessions, is a term I devised late one night for Turning Pages. As such, I reserve the rights to this term under New Zealand Copyright law. Please communicate with me directly if you have any queries.

Human Psychology

I recently took a look through the archives of this blog, which by the way has over 50 reviews, articles, reports and other memorabilia of my past few years as a "semi-pro", when I noticed something about the view count. It had to do with the most viewed posts here on Turning Pages. First of all, my second most viewed post was about my Merida 120 that I raced at National Secondary School Champs a few years ago, and which I sold a few months ago to make way for something with slightly more travel. The second thing was the most viewed post I have; it was not a review, as I may have expected, but actually a race report... 

This confused me somewhat, as race reports are only usually read by a select group of people, and now even less since I stopped interacting with a large number of said individuals. If you haven't guessed already, that post was the Nationals 2013 report titled "Tarnished Glory," which covers the positive aspects of what was a very eventful race.

This confused me slightly, I mean, who wants to read about half a race? I personally thought that everyone would flock to the second part of the story, as that was where all the drama was. But that was not the case.

So what does this say about people? Firstly, a lot of people knew that I would be writing a post about that particular race, and as such were probably expecting a lot of drama to unfold in that particular piece and wanted to read about what happened. But when given the two pieces, the first received 10 times more views than the second, nitty gritty piece. This gives me some hope for humanity, as with two options to choose from most people were going for the more positive piece.

But it doesn't stop there; there weren't just ups in that mix. Not only did these posts get the most views, they also opened up the most comments...

That is another aspect of Human Psychology: The Anonymous Function, and it is one that destroys some of the faith the previous point creates. This is the ability of people to speak their mind, show their true colours and generally behave in an appalling manner simply because they believe that no-one knows who they are. It is something that has become more and more common with the advent of sites such as the notorious askFM, the various forums around the internet and unfortunately also here on Turning Pages. That race opened me up to a torrent of abuse from anonymous individuals taking the chance to vent their frustrations and take some cheap shots under the protection of the internet. This is part of the reason that the Anonymous Comment option no longer exists on Turning Pages, with comments requiring a log in and name before they are published.

This brings me to my third point, people like to think that they are smarter than everyone else, and anonymous commentators are no exception. Fortunately, if you know what to look for, everyone leaves clues behind no matter how anonymous they think they are. I now know exactly who those "anonymous" people are and choose not to associate with them any more.

Problem solved.

So, running a blog has revealed some strange things that I didn't quite know about people before. It had brought out some of their best, some of their worst, and I have had a great time unraveling it all and putting it together. I never would have thought that I would find myself here in this position simply from running a blog, and yet here we are.

It's fun being Human.