Category: Words

Last night on the way home I hit every single traffic light on green. No stopping. No slowing down. Just a flat out, quad burning, big ring turning, sprint from the office to home. Boy did it feel good.

Today my chain fell off again on the way into work. All I can think is that my immense power has stretched the chain or that once again the twin chain tensioners have failed to stop the bloody thing trying to escape. I swear this bike doesn’t like me and to be honest, I don’t really like it anymore either.

I suppose from a marketing perspective, some one, some where thought that calling an energy drink Pussy was a good idea. After all most 16-24 year old men wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to drink from the furry cup if the prospect was that it might lead to better things. Thing is this doesn’t promise any such thing, but it does contain milk thistle. Which sounds to me like something that you’d find usually being eaten by Highland Cattle.

One of my students gave me some of this and told me to try it. They said it was like Red Bull, but tasted better. They were wrong, it doesn’t. The initial taste was of coconuts and became worse. I have a word of advice, avoid this drink. I suspect that drinking stagnant peat bog water might be a more pleasant experience. You certainly wouldn’t want to drink that twice either.

I’ll be sticking with Red Bull when I need an energy and caffiene boost.

A great day of riding with Tyrrell and Simon around Llandegla Forest Park in North Wales. We had sunshine, warmth and dusty trails. First timers at the trail centre my Cape Epic, South African team mate Tyrrell and Simon who’s the husband of a work colleague both made it around in one piece. Well there was a brief tree hugging moment, but no loss of limbs. More photos on Flickr.

The riding to and from work today has been bizarre. The day started cold and damp, so I ended up doning the same warm and waterproof combo that keeps me comfortable through most of spring and autumn. The afternoon saw the sunshine warming things up, so that the Endura waterproof 3/4s and softshell jacket were decidedly overkill and I was too warm riding back. The forecast is for the better weather to stick around, which is no bad thing, the summer has been later arriving and a bit of warmth won’t go amiss.

Drivers seem to have been reasonably sensible recently. The ride in is fairly chaotic nearer the office as there is a major operation underway replacing gas mains on various key routes. The outcome is that roads are randomly shut, others are now one way and lots of drivers are getting confused and lost. Which of course means plenty of last minute lane changes and cutting up of the bicyclist. I’ve been anticipating silly moves in most cases, so I’ve yet to loose my cool. The Cotic commuter is coming up for a year old now, so I’m going to sell it on as soon as the Bike To Work Scheme officially makes it mine. Any one want to buy a bike? One large, long Cotic Roadrat for Sale, one careful owner…

3 Gold Star Climbs in one day in North Wales was enough for me. I had to get off and walk part of the last climb, my legs just didn’t have the power left in them. Wayne and Lardy blitzed it and the fitness they’ve retained through the winter by their regular riding is really showing through.

Poor Neil was nursing a cracked rib from an off yesterday, but joined us for lunch. The weather was fine and it was a great day to be out. I was riding Bonty Big Earl wet tyres for the first time today. Fantastic tyres!

Today after almost two months I finally managed to get the Singlespeed back on the trails. The post mount adapter to expand the disc size from 160 to 180mm eventually turned up after about a four week wait, but then with the wedding and other things happening it wasn’t a high priority. So last night I thought I’d try and get the front disc on. Someone might have forgotten to actually check the disc hose was long enough to reach between the fork mount and the handlebar mount.

This morning I eventually managed to track down some hose from Bicycle Doctor. Now when fitting hose I’ve nearly always been able to reuse the olive and insert. Of course today when I just wanted to get out and ride one of the olives split in half. It was back to the bike shop to get a new olive and a spare. Then I just had to rebleed the system and get out on the trails.

By this point it was half four so I decided to just rip around the Goyt Valley and loop back via the bridge. I’d forgotten that the council had sanitised some of the trails in Reddish Vale, but I managed to find a few new trails on the way out. The loamy soils in the woods on the side of the valleys are pretty poorly drained, but the weather has been so dry recently that I decided to revisit some secret garden singletrack. It was great to find bluebells still in flower.

Tonight some guy who probably hasn’t seen his penis in the last 15 years becuase of his enormous fat gut tried to kill me. I was getting ready to stick a “Warning! Driver of this vehicle is a…” sticker on his Bentley when an even great feat of driver idiocy nearly took me out. A little Micra doing lane changes without the signalling or checking elements of mirror, signal, maneuver. Just as I was still contemplating the desire of the Nissan’s owner to trade paint with pretty much anything else that moved, they then slammed on the anchors and did a right turn across the flow of traffic into a junction. This was pretty intense, but that fact that they went through the traffic island on the wrong side of the road and continued to drive into the oncoming traffic for as long as I could see them, just rammed home the point. I was now back in the UK.

It’s not all work, work, work. Sometimes it’s great to get out and ride. This ride however was a honeymoon ride around part of a stunning Caribbean island. In some ways cruising around stopping off at every beach was a bit like being back on Guernsey, but the difference here was that at every opportunity we wanted to get in the sea for a swim and we knew it’d be warm!

We hired bikes from the great little shop we found near where we were staying called Tri Sport. In terms of friendly staff willing to offer help and advice, we couldn’t have asked for more. Suitably kitted out with matching Trek hire bikes we went out for a day riding around the Caribbean’s largest lagoon – Simpson Bay. The fact that half way around this featured an area called the lowlands might have lured you into the false sense of belief that it was going to be fairly flat chilled out riding.

This turned out to be a bit misleading as more than once our flip flop shod feet were pushing the granny and the lowest gear combination the Shimano setup offered. Still it was a great opportunity to see what this part of the island had to offer and we knew that this was a much easier ride than the one we would have faced had we opted to tackle the mountainous Eastern half. If it ever became too hot, it was fairly easy to find a beach and chill out or stop underneath a palm and get some shade.

In the end we made it to Marigot and checked out the hilltop fort that had been built by the French to keep the pesky British from continually disrupting the colony. The ride back home was interesting. The border from the French half to the Dutch is distinct in that one minute you on a bike lane with clear road markings and a smooth surface and the next the road markings have vanished and you’re riding on the dirt of the verge. Still when you know that shortly afterward’s you’re going to be kicking back with a cool beer and checking out another glorious sunset, little details like that don’t really get you too worried.

After too many moons of almost no serious riding, MacPuppy admits that he’s lost a wee bit of form and admits that he’s said that too often to tooo many people …. So he’s decided to do something stupid to restart the engines and the old faithful breakfast and bivvi squad isn’t really local enough to drag my sorry arse back up to warp speed.

The Marmotte was the obvious choice, but it’s already full so he hunted around a bit and came up with something altogether stupidererer.

He spent a bit of time thinking about it, realised it was like riding the commute to and from work 10 times in one day or just a double Marmotte lap and now seem to have burned a few hours setting up a blog to force himself towards the 18th July 2010 ;o)

Yup he just hit the button that says “inscrire” …. rider number will be with him soon

http://mission-tourdumontblanc.blogspot.com/

Oh and another thing …. the entry form wanted to know what club he rode for so he just invented “le Velo Club Bruichladdich” in honour of those of you who know why ;o)

Please give him a suitably hard time if you don’t see that he’s putting in enough riding over the next 86 days