A Nice Cup of Tea

That's the first thing I have when I get back from holiday. Not very exciting, but a necessary evil when you've been drinking coffee in California for 10 days.

So my holiday to the SingleSpeed World Champs in Napa California was great fun - great friends, great wine, great conversation, great laughs, great beer, great whisky sour, great trails, great weather and the most amazing food I have ever, ever eaten!

I'll write more and put some pictures up on my adventures page when I get some more time. Due to flight delays and time differences it was a full 28 hours between leaving San Jose aeroport and arriving home Friday afternoon. A 4.30am start this morning has plunged my body clock into meltdown.

For now, just to show you how awful the weather was so you're not too jealous, here's a picture of us riding in Wilder Ranch, Santa Cruz on Tuesday.

That's Chris's backside, Jessica, Laura Bontrager, me and Raquel.

You see, the sun was so bright we could barely see the Pacific ocean in the background because of the glare! It was so hot I kept having to stop to reapply factor 30 sunscreen, and the dust was really getting in my throat as well. Damn NorCal trails...

Not in the Saddle, Just Sleepless

And so Endura Sleepless in the Saddle is wrapped up for another year and it also marks the end of my trail crew duties for 2008. Sadly it also marks the end of an era for our regular and most experienced endurance Commissaire, Anton Florek.

Anton has been working with Pat Adams from the very start of 24 hour racing so knows more about the sport than most people. He's been fantastic to work with over the years and everybody has learnt a lot from him, especially me. It's an absolute pleasure to work with somebody who is so passionate and insightful about your sport without the slightest hint of arrogance. He'll be missed by all of us.

Obviously with this being Anton's last event, it was going to be the most eventful. The weekend threw everything at us! The weather was atrocious, again, and there were other totally random hiccups occurring. (I won't go into some of them here, they're those secret little problems that most people at these events don't know about, mainly because the organisers don't want people to know about them, so I'm not going broadcast it here.) But it basically meant the trail crew spent the whole of Saturday running from one problem to the next.

The main problem was the rain. It started raining Saturday morning, it rained for most of the morning. The course turned to wet slop and riders were coming back a consistent shade of brown but still riding their mud spattered bike. Then it stopped raining and the course started to dry out. This turned it into a 7 mile death march slog that many were comparing to conditions of the Somme. I don't blame them. I saw the bikes as they crossed the timing mats: I saw the now 4 inch wide muddy tyres that weren't turning; I saw the dangling rear mechs and a lack of chains; I saw blocks of mud where chainrings should be; I saw the tears of riders who had just slipped, trudged and battled their way around the treacle filled course dragging their broken, heavy, mud covered bikes. It didn't look fun. In fact, it was bloody miserable.

Just as the course started to dry out enough to be rideable, it rained again. More hassles and problems to sort. Some 'course grooming' as we call it to try and re-route some of the more problematic areas. It had been a tough day for all of us, it was getting dark and we weren't even a third of the way through. It was going to be a long weekend. The rain stopped, the mud got stickier. It rained again, the ruts got deeper. (Repeat this pattern throughout the night.)

Still, no matter how bad things got, some people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Some people actually found it all really good fun and very amusing, a real test of endurance. Each to their own I suppose...

I managed to get a couple of hours interupted sleep around 2am but was still answering the calls of the Marshalls from my tent. Sunday was a lot quieter and just involved the usual finish duties and tear down at the end. It had been a very hard weekend - Friday had been very hard work doing the course preparation, Saturday was out to prove Murphy's Law and by Sunday I'd really had enough. The things you do for the love of mountain biking...

Urban Cycling Stories

I caught an episode of The Montel Williams Show this morning, (an American chat show on ITV3 for the majority who have probably never heard of it - and it's my job to watch it ok!) and as a picture of two women on mountain bikes was shown, I turned the sound up. We went into the commercial break and I noticed the theme of the show was "When Animals Attack", hmmm, this could be interesting.

When I first went out to ride in California I heard a horrific story about a mountain lion that had attacked some cyclists on the trail - this couldn't be the same story could it?

Back to the show and Montel was talking to Anne. She'd been out riding with her friend Debbie one day on their local trails somewhere in America. Anne had ridden ahead slightly and came across a man who had stopped in an inconvenient place on the trail and was holding a second bike. He asked Anne if she knew whose bike it was because he'd just found it lying by the side of the trail. Anne thought he was joking and that his mate must be somewhere in the bushes answering a call of nature, and rode on.

A hundred yards on, just around the next corner, a 120lb mountain lion pounced on the back of Anne and bit down on her head and cycling helmet, dragging her to the floor. The cat was constantly readjusting its grip and grabbed onto Anne's cheek, tearing it partially off. At this point Debbie came around the corner and heard her friend's screams. A 'tug-of-war' ensued, as they described it, with the lion trying to drag Anne down into the gorge by her face, and Debbie desperately clinging onto her legs! Some more people came to help and threw whatever they could find at the cat to get it to let go. Finally it did, and ran off.

Anne was air lifted to hospital, and as the helicopter took off the pilot spotted another body, the owner of the abandoned bike. The mountain lion was hunted down that night and shot, only to find that it had attacked and killed the other rider, Mark Reynolds, earlier on that morning before the attack on Anne.

It's easy to forget just how easy we have it riding bikes in the UK sometimes; apart from our own stupidity and maybe the odd nutter, there's nothing we really have to worry about. I often pop out for a ride, especially in the summer, in shorts and t-shirt with just a water bottle and a basic tool kit safe in the knowledge that my life isn't in danger.

I'm sure this complacency will bite me in the arse one day. It's come close a few times (especially the Downieville incident a few years ago!) and for a while I will make sure I take food, a long sleeve top, first aid kit, space blanket and other sundry essentials with me on every ride. A dozen rides later and I'm back to the minimum.

I'm heading out to California again in a few weeks so this was a poignant reminder to retrieve a few survival essentials from my winter walking rucksack and throw them in my Camelbak. You never know what might happen...

Bontrager Twentyfour12

So I popped down to Newnham Park near Plymouth this weekend for the third Bontrager Twentyfour 12. I've had a good run of success with this event; 1st place 24 hour solo woman in 2006; 1st place mixed team in 2007. For 2008 I would be going solo again but only 12 hours this time. ("Only" 12 hours...)

I quite like Newnham Park and raced there for the first time last year at the NPS. I'd never been before but had heard a lot about it as the World Cups were held there in the 90's. The course was absolutely blinding and the weather was excellent. All in all it was a really good weekend and seeing as I finished racing at midnight it gave me chance to catch up with a few people over a mandatory glass of vino (or two).

My full race report is on the Races page here. (You see, I've purposefully not told you where I finished so you have to go and look!)

Satisfaction

I like DIY because there's always a real sense of satisfaction, a sense of pride in your work, a feeling of instant gratification and noticeable results; the feeling that all the hard work you've just put in has all been worthwhile and time well spent.

Today was a DIY day and in honour of Joolze Dymond's birthday, I have named my pantry after her. Dymond's Pantry: Before and After. (After hours of filling, sanding and painting.)



You see! A job well done and a day well spent!

Balance

I'm a great believer in the natural balance of life. Similar to a commercial that was on TV a few years back, I believe that for everything good that happens, something equally bad will happen; for every high in life, there will be a low of equal proportion.

My life is full of fantastic experiences and exquisite moments of fun and happiness, there's never a dull moment. But it did take me a while to figure out that every time I was having loads of fun, at some point this would come crashing down and plummet to some very low places; 'heading for a fall' is a phrase I often hear. Still, you can't have the highs without the lows, so I wouldn't change it for all the world.

Anyway, I've digressed slightly and this philosophy stuff can all get a bit heavy. But the theory is also carried over to intelligence - for every moment of genius, there follows one of equal stupidity: my boiler broke down during the week and I didn't have any hot water. I called some plumbers and heating engineers and after 2 days none of them had returned my call. So I looked up the problem on the internet and within 15 minutes I'd saved myself a call-out charge and fixed the boiler. I also bled the radiators and balanced the system. Oooh, look at me! I was very pleased with my new found plumbing skills and carried a rather smug grin for the rest of the week.

Fast forward a couple of days to the morning of Saturday the 19th of July (i.e. today) and I jump in my car early this morning to drive to work. Turning out of my road I can't quite remember whether I normally take the main route or the windy back route to the A41 when I drive to work. As I drive down the road and join the A41 dual carriageway, the reason why I can't remember which route I normally take suddenly dawns on me: I don't actually take the A41 to work. I take the M1, which is on the other side of Hemel Hempstead. I was going the wrong way!

All local road knowledge abandoned me and it took a good twenty minutes to find the M1 and get on my way to work. I smiled to myself with the calm realisation of what had happened; my moment of boiler genius had been equalled by getting lost half a mile from my house and going the wrong way to work.

Balance has been restored.

Fair Weather Cyclist?

The elements were against me today. The non-Summer was determined to get the better of me.

After quite a long lie in (I'd forgotten just how tiring being back at work and doing double shifts actually was) I had brunch whilst watching yesterday's Tour de France highlights. It spurred me on to ride my bike - a pleasant spin on the Surly Cross-Check around the usual loop was in order. Or so I thought.

I put my cycling shorts and jersey on, filled a water bottle, got my bike out of the shed, pumped up the tyres and went back upstairs to get my helmet and shoes. No sooner had I shut the front door than it started to pour with rain, and I mean really hammer down; sheets of sideways rain drops were blown viciously across the green in front of my house. I bought my bike inside and went back upstairs to wait it out, it would only be a shower after all.

Five minutes later and the rain was battering against the window. I took my helmet and shoes off and sat down. I wasn't going to be beaten and I'd put the time to good use by popping to the Post Office, wearing head to toe waterproofs!

It had stopped raining as I walked back from the Post Office, the 'Summer shower' was over. it was time to go for a ride.

Back upstairs and put on 3/4 length tights and a long sleeve top, grabbed a light weight showerproof coat, turned on my GPS, put my headphones in and fastened my helmet. I turned my back to the window to walk down the stairs and heard the familiar sound of rain hammering on the window. It was 3.30pm and I thought I would wait until 4pm. If it stopped any time before then I would go for a ride, if it was still raining at 4pm I would give up and do something productive.

4pm - the trees were bending sideways, the raindrops were bouncing six inches back up off the ground and the thunder rumbled down the valley. I put the kettle on and gave in, my motivation had gone. I tidied the huge pile of junk in the dining room instead (so THAT'S where pedals went!)

By 5.30pm I was proud of my new tidy dining room and it hadn't rained for half an hour or so - aha! I shall squeeze in a sneaky hour! Maybe the clouds heard me but I didn't even finish planning the proposed route in my head before it started bucketing down again. When the Gods are so blatantly against you like this it's best just to cut your losses and save your energy and enthusiasm for another, drier, day. If ever we get one of those...

The Love of Cycling

So it's been a while since I last posted. Partly because I've been busy, but mostly because I've been avoiding everything to do with the internet, emails, computers and cycling. There's a reason for that - Mountain Mayhem.

I've been working for Patrick Adams for 9 years at Mountain Mayhem and it has always been a fantastic week, the highlight of my year and something I always look forward to. This year was different. I wasn't looking forward to it. I'm not even sure why. There were various reasons but nothing in particular, just the amalgamation of lots of issues.

As many of you may know disaster struck on Friday before Mountain Mayhem when Patrick was taken to hospital leaving his beloved event, the biggest 24 hour mountain bike race in the world, in our hands. This made an already bad week, worse. But we got through it. (I'm not going to dwell on all the ins and outs of this week, it just wasn't as fun as usual.) There was the usual torrential rain on Saturday evening which turned the course to unrideable sludge and then gail force winds on Sunday morning tearing the arena and the campsite to pieces! But we got through it.

Two days tidying up and litter picking and by Wednesday I had totally lost my enthusiasm. Niggly things were getting to me and there was too much residual bad feeling hanging around. There's just too much politics involved in cycling some times. I've been saying this all year and Mayhem is no different. I'd had enough.

Then when I finally got home I made the fatal mistake of reading the forums about Mayhem. I always tell Paul Davis the course designer not to do this and I have no idea why I did, maybe because I had more input this year and just wanted to know what people were saying. Still, it wasn't a good idea and I got even more fed up! This was when I stopped looking at the internet. It was either that or go off on a big rant. But the damage was done. I didn't want anything to do with cycling.

Now I'm sure my indifference to cycling would have continued to fester if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a slack cyclist and when I unpacked the car I put Olive the dekerf in the dining room. There she sat all shiny and beautiful: incredibly neat welds, the trademark dekerf seatstays, stunningly designed XTR components, precision engineered beauty of Hope Mini calipers and the neat, slimline stiffness of the Rock Shox Team SID suspension forks. How could I stay mad at her?! It wasn't her fault after all.

I resisted for a couple more days - grumbling and moaning and being generally fed up with the world, and cycling and cyclists. Then I cracked. A cosmic alignment of circumstances occurred with Cyclenaut coming over for a few days from America, Deano popping over for a couple of beers, the funniest waitress in the whole world warning me about the 'blue cheese burger' and a beautiful day; I just had to ride my bike.

And it was ace!

I love cycling!

Malvern Meandering

Went for a quick spin over the Malvern Hills today in Worcestershire. It's somewhere I've been intending to ride for years now, but every time I'm in the area I get caught up at Eastnor or just end up passing through.

My new dekerf, 'Olive', is urging me to ride though. I can hear it taunting me from the back of the car: "Let me out... let me out to do what I was built to do. Get off your lazy fat backside and justify the astronomical price you paid for all of these shiny new bike parts you flamin' idiot!"

With that kind of motivation, how could I resist! I had to drop some bits off at Back on Track bike shop in Malvern. I should also say a great big thank you to Paul at Back on Track for doing a fantastic job of building my new bike at short notice a couple of weeks ago. And for letting me take over the whole shop for the 2 hour discussion involving four people and three members of staff to figure out what forks and wheels I should have. I swear Posh Spice, Paris Hilton and Jennifer Lopez could have picked an outfit for the Oscars quicker! But you have to get these things right, right? And it does look ace now! (Photos coming shortly by the way.)

So I parked in the car park just above the shop and asked Paul for some route advice, bought the waterproof Harveys map he sells and disappeared into the hills. It's fairly hard to get lost to be honest. The Malvern Hills is just one ridge line a few miles long encircled by roads - you can either traverse along the hill or climb up to the top, descend to the road, then climb back up another track and repeat. When you get bored, you just head back. Though it would be hard to get bored here. Even looking at the map there's a myriad of legal bridleways to be explored, and who knows how many unmapped trails!

A couple of hours playing on a wide variety of trails - gravel, stoney, grassy, rooty, muddy, steep, steady, technical, tight, wide and fast, the Malverns seem to have it all - and I decided to head home. Olive had done me proud again on her second outing and I'd had a blast riding new trails. Can't wait until I have another spare day to get back and explore some more. I think I have one in October sometime...

Dogs Resemble Their Owners?

I'm dog sitting this week for my Mum who's gone on holiday. I'm actually dog sitting my dog Sox, at least he was my dog when I lived at home. Then I moved out and having a pet when you live on your own is quite difficult, so he stayed. But he's definitely still my dog.

People often say that dogs look like their owners and I've always thought this to be true in a majority of cases. I'm not sure whether Sox looks like me. He's a 16 year old Border Collie, so he's black and white but greying. He's also fairly rounded now thanks to foot & mouth a few years back when the dog walking field was closed. I'll try and get a picture at some point, you can judge for yourself.

But it has been said that he has my personality too. Again, I will let you judge for yourself:
1) When he's fed in the evening, he stands and looks at you with a "yeah, and..." look. Then promptly wanders off somewhere for a while and returns when he's hungry. He does things at his own pace, not when other people want him to.

2)He barks at everyone who comes to the door and will continue to growl at most people who make it into the house. It's only really some family members who can stroke him without him constantly growling with a mad look in his eyes. He doesn't do that thing where he shows his teeth and gets really upset, it's more of a low grumble growl, just to let you know he's tolerating your presence, but doesn't really like you.

3) When you tell him to go down the garden to do his business, he just lies down outside the back door. He lies there and watches you as you walk down to the bottom of the garden, and when you call his name he looks the other way. He certainly has the ignorance to back up his stubborn streak...

4) We thought he was going deaf due to his age. He's not. He's selectively deaf. And brilliantly so. Stand and call his name to get him in, or to send him out, or to move him from one room to another, in fact any kind of instruction, and he won't listen to you. But every single evening, when the truck pulls up outside my Mum's house, just before it pulls into the driveway, he barks. He can actually distinguish the sound of the truck arriving amongst all of the other traffic on the busy road. And he can hear the scraping of his food bowl as you pick it up off the floor. He can even hear the distinct tone in your voice during the word "Sox" that means 'come here I'm going to give you a treat'. He truly is ingenius.

5) Last, but by no means least, and the thing that I most admire about good old Sox, is his ability to hold a grudge. A 15 year grudge. 15 years! The story goes that 15 years ago, only a few months after we got him, there was an incident involving my 5 year old brother. We're not sure what, but they were both in the car, there was a yelp, a bark and then some screaming, then the dog ran off and hid. Sox had bitten my little brother on the cheek, narrowly missing his eye (personally I think he was provoked and was defending himself, but we'll never know. I know). He got the beating of his life as a punishment and never went near my brother again. My brother kept his distance too. It was only after about 10 years my brother could actually get within a foot of him without Sox growling and walking away. And still, to this very day, 15 years on, Sox will growl every single time my brother touches him. Now that's a grudge.

God I love that dog! And all his familiar quirks...