I had an epic ride today. Not because it was long, or particularly tough but because I braved unknown territory on my own. I was let down by some friends for a ride and was faced with a dilemma. ‘Run and road ride or mountain bike all on my tod?’ Well I braved the latter and left before dawn this morning for an unknown area of the Mendips - map in hand.
The ride started brilliantly and the slippery climb to the top left me warm and toasty in my rather optimistic baselayer-and-jersey get up. The views from the top were sensational, with clear wintry skies reaching toBristol to the North and over to Somerset to the South. I felt brave and free.
Taking another look at the map I decided to head to Cheddar, where I knew there were some really interesting and tricky trails: Unchartered territory (by me, anyway). I boldly pedalled onwards, unphased by the over-inquisitive herd of brutish looking cows and confidently bounding over rocks and battling against the whipping wind.
The trouble started when I came across a style. ‘A style?’, thought I. ‘What funny things they have on bridleways in Somerset’. You know what’s coming. Not only was it a footpath I was on – and apparently had been for some time – but it was path in the centre of a network of footpaths which got rockier, slippery-er and more wheel-adverse as they drew nearer the gorge. I was trapped. Every few minutes of riding I had to carry my bike over a gate or style, looking around warily for grumpy walkers. I tried to descend some steps only to be thrown into the nearest gorse bush (to the amusement of the holidaying Exmoor ponies). I was sick to the rear mech with kissing gates and footpath signs by the time I scrabbled down a fit-only-for-goats path onto the main road. Thank god. Serious sense of humour loss. Bloody map. Call myself an adventure racer?
So with tremendous navigational care I found my way back on top of the Mendips and had some safer open-moor efforts up and down the hills. I eventually stumbled back to my car after nearly four hours, frozen solid, still with the remnants of irritation niggling me but with a sense of achievement at having done it on my own. Windswept and tired I went home for lunch and to plan my next solo-adventure.

Fi

When, oh when are we going to get a proper winter?! Wind, rain, more wind, more rain.... no cold days, no blue skies, no clouds of breath on frosty mornings and no crisply frozen cheeky singletrack that's otherwise tell-tale muddy and off limits at this time of year. Grrrr. I am placing my bets on March...

Jenn

Hecklers

Bit of a change - as I was in need of a rest rather than a race and two broken friends needed an airing, we went over to Thetford to help out at round 2 of the Winter Series. Much fun had all round - we felt our heckling showed a marked improvement as the day wore on and was remarkably well tolerated by those doing the real work. Thetford races are always fantastic - the course looked brilliant, and the women's two hour category had a fantastic 25 riders! Next round is February 11th, and much as I enjoyed encouraging, coaxing and baiting riders with jaffa cakes, I can;t wait to be back out and racing there again...

Jenn

Some days you just have it

This is my first winter of ‘training’ for, as my boyfriend puts it, push-bike riding. He’s not a mountain biker. His idea of cycling is to the pub on his sit-up-and-beg Dawes which has a wonky pedal, ripped leather seat and 3 sturmey archer gears of which only 2 work properly.
Our relationships with cycling couldn’t be more different. He looks pityingly down on me as I struggle up the stairs to our flat with frozen feet and numb hands and then makes me strip in the hallway whether the neighbours are in or not, so I don’t get mud on the kitchen floor. He yells at me when I get bits of leaf and mud in the boot of his car. (It’s bigger than mine so gets borrowed rather a lot). He groans when I creep out of bed early on weekend mornings to get a good ride in before the day really starts and gets cross when I’m too tired for conversation (or anything else) on the evenings when I’ve done an hour of spinning before work and a run straight afterwards. He scowls when the washing machine clunks across the floor and floods the utility room through over work from muddy kit. He shakes his head in disbelief when I explain I want to move so we have a spare room to keep my bikes in.
But he never tells me to shut up when I describe that incredible ride feeling I have when it all goes to plan. This morning I got back from swift 45 mile a road ride with my local club. I was at the front from the start, trailing the boys up the hills, working hard into the headwind on the flat and eventually feeling my quads screaming tired under my (rather optimistic) ¾ tights as I pushed home - with a smile on the outside and a ‘yessssssss’ on the inside. That feeling he understands well from years of running 10ks and marathons and fighting for the front and not always getting it but when you do… what a feeling.
This morning, stood in sweaty lycra and a helmet fresh from the ride, I drivvled on for minutes about this hill climb and that descent or that corner and the various heart rates at each stage. No scowls, he just looked and smiled and said “keep it up”. As the pressure of work, jobs, responsibility and studies creep into my subconscious like little New Year worry-gremlins, I’ll keep hold of that. I know that cycling keeps me sane and the hours at spinning classes and the soul-destroying winter riding will pay off.

Fi

Lots of fixie miles this week. Making the most of a nice quiet new chain and ring on some excessively long commutes. A good bit of playing out on favourite trails too - wide bars higher than the saddle, boingy forks, effective mud tyres and a handful of gears equals superb fun. just what the doctor ordered after a little too much grey tedium.

Jenn

SPAM

SPAM. Sounds as much fun as it isn't - should have known better, really, but some lessons you never learn. Within 100m of the start there I am pedalling in my tiddliest gear up a flat but somehow steep and dragging waterlogged field, brain all confused because whilst I know this is '06, my legs are telling me it's '96, that I've slipped into a ten-year timewarp and been zapped straight back to my first few years of mountain biking, when I rode all the time in these conditions because I simply didn't know any better. Funny how as we become more accomplished riders we start to let equipment dictate the pace. Winter filth is for road bikes, or the crosser at a push. Dusty summer's evenings (remember them?) call for singlespeeds and a cool beer on the beach at the end. Commuting is fixed wheel territory - all that grime wreaks havoc with precious, costly Campag - and The North requires a new bike to be built up for pretty much every trip as the gears get rescued from the shed for another irregular airing. Sad, really, that sometimes I look at all the bikes in the corner and spend so long trying to work out which one I want to ride that by the time I've made my mind up the sun's long gone and the day's over. That innocence, of being able to ride a bike, just one, all the time and for everything...

Jenn

Felled by grotty cold caused by the Northern Chill. So, the weather's finally turning Winter, and I'm grovelling about in the bottom two sprockets, back on inhalers I thought I'd seen the back of many months ago, and suffering that deep, deep tiredness that tells me it's sofa time. Still, it's traditional to be a little bit poorly over Christmas, and I'm buying someone the full Aardman box set, so it's only right that I should get to watch them all first before wrapping them up and handing them over, no...?

Jenn

Note to self. When setting alarm clocks make sure the time is set correctly first.
Scenario: drift carelessly off to sleep on Friday night before a big adventure race on Saturday. Dream first fretfully about the following morning’s early start, anticipating a rude awakening in the early hours. As those early hours approach and no alarm sounds, your body relaxes more and more and your dream becomes calm and relaxed and eventually your brain blanks into deep, uncaring sleep.
Until a corner of a part of an eye catches sight of the clock. 7.35am. You should have been at your teammate’s at 6am and well on your way to Sussex by now.
Heart rate doubles, bed covers thrown back, curtains wrenched to check for daylight. Check. There shouldn’t be daylight. It should be 5.30am. Panicked dressing and sprinting out of the house, waking the dog, all the cats, breaking ornaments, slamming the door and driving through bollarded, pedestrianised one way streets to the other side of town. Heavy breathing. Adrenaline surging.
So we reached race HQ at 10am just as the first teams were heading off. The start was staggered and we had negotiated a later start time (although we were only postponed by 4 minutes until 10.09). So we threw the bikes together, necked a gel and headed out for our run. Late but not that late.
It was an 8 hour adventure race. We were to run first (our choice) and then mountain bike. It had been raining for days and the ground was sodden. We ran and ran and ran through woods and moorland and over beautiful agricultural land. We ran for 5 hours and cleared the course. Neither Gary nor I had run that far in months and our legs were screaming by the time we reached the transition. I was so grateful to sit on that saddle and my thighs and calves welcomed the pedalling action as though it was a steaming hot Radox bath.
But soon I realised that although Gary had been struggling on the run, his cycling legs were fresh. He shot off effortlessly and for the next 3 hours I pedalling and pushed trying to keep up. I gave up all hope of trying to contribute to the navigation and let Gary get on with it. I’d done my bit on the run.
With 20 minutes to go we decided to be greedy and go for one last checkpoint. The bridleway started well with firm concrete under our caked wheels. But turning a corner we soon sank axle-deep into thick boggy mud. After a brief chuckle from us both, we aborted the mission and backtracked. Unfortunately despite our best efforts we arrived at the finish 3 minutes late (annoyingly we had also started 3 minutes late) and so were docked 6 points which was enough to nudge us into second position. Errrr….
But what a race. It was fabulous fun and I was feeling very chipper in my pink Minx jersey. No prizes for us but the knowledge that the moral victory was ours and a few lessons – in alarm clock programming – learnt along the way.

Fi

This weekend saw a return to Proper Mountain Biking. Driving up the M1 on Friday night was just the begining of the nostalgia trip - hurriedly packed bikes and kit rattling away in the boot, alternating coffee and Red Bull at every other service station to keep myself awake, Pete Tong cranked up to LOUD as the endless headlights flashed by for mile after mile... There was a time when I used to think nothing at all of hopping in the car on Friday night and driving hundreds of miles just to ride for two days somewhere different, only to drive all the way home again on Sunday night ready to start the week primed with tired smiles, a severe calorie deficit and a few new scabs to the knees. The tally this weekend? A hankering for suspension&gears (and indeed rocks) which could prove to be expensive; plenty of smiles and laughter to see me through the winter; and one smashed helmet - leading to a realisation that riding full-tilt round potato fields is a great way to get faster at the expense of proper, didn't-see-that-one-coming trail skills. I've done a lot of petrol miles to and from endless races and events this year, but precious few in search of 'just riding'. Next year, this will change. More driving to ride. More driving to friends. More... driving to fun.

Jenn

You know how you have friends who fulfill certain needs in your life? And how often a certain somebody is the only person who will do when you're feeling a certain way? Went for a road ride this evening with just such a friend. She races, too, and we spent the majority of the gorgeous, full-moon-lit, tailwind-assisted thirty miles chatting about next season's racing and working ourselves up into a state of gibbering excitement. It's great to be able to share that feeling; sometimes it can feel pretty isolated down here in the arse-end of Britain, where few people make the effort to spend a substantial amount of weekend traveling round the great, sucking gravitational mass of the M25 to race and so have no idea what it might be like to know that you're going out on a Tuesday in December, whether or not it's blowing a gale, pouring with rain or icy, just because this is where the head start begins. When they're sitting at home with a beer and the record collection, we're putting in miles which already count towards next summer. Grinding up over the Dyke in the dark for the hundredth time we know that every pedal stroke is one up on those who stayed in because it was a little bit damp, and the odd thing is that it just adds to the fun.

Jenn

Well, there went November. Highlights? Mostly 'cross related. Big bunch of friends down for a South/North Downs unsuitable bikes extravaganza (with additional Bonfire night pyrotechnic shenanigans). And my first proper 'cross race - 3Ps doesn't count, somehow - unlikely to be anything Fisher Price will be marketing in the near future, but so gloriously, curse-inducingly painful that I might just have to find the time to do another one before the winter's over. Currently suffering a disturbingly high broken bike tallly - running on one sticky DT Swiss frreehub (Unit), two knackered Mavic XC717s (Unit again) and two nearly knackered, precious, blue-grey Open Pros (Omega); one rattly Octalink bottom bracket (Jake), one actually now rather stupidly worn chainring that keeps dropping its chain (Kogswell), and one slow puncture that holds air for just long enough to not make it worth finding the time to fix (Unit, *again*). Are they possessed? Or just protesting belligerently about the distinct lack of TLC that muddy corner of the house has received over the past few weeks? Who knows. Still, at least the running shoes have yet to join the dirty protest...

Jenn

On Friday as the wind was swirling the leaves around outside on the road and the sky was crisp and blue, I sat and stared at my books and wished and wished I was outside playing in the woods with my bicycle. So when the (fierce and scarey) postlady arrived bearing packages from Minx I jumped around with excitement and immediately changed into my new kit. The lovely, soft, gorgeous and snuggly Pearl Izumi tights and divine pink Pearl Izumi jersey gave me the excuse i needed to slam shut my books and leap onto my bike to tear off around the woods. I blame Minx entirely for leading me astray. Being nearly 30 you would have though that acquiring a few new bits of cycling kit would be met with mature and calculated observance and intelligent comment. No way. They wer SO comfortable and SO pretty, I got back from my ride, immediately washed them, wore them on Saturday to show off to my roadie mates, immediately washed them and wore them again on the wet and muddy Quantocks with 'the lads' on Sunday too. That is where the honeymoon ended. The beautiful Somerset coombs are now covered in a thick, crunchy layer of yellow and orange beech leaves which cover treacherous mud and slippery roots. As I happily trekked up and down after my superfit ‘lads’, I was still thinking 'hmmm I look GOOD' as I caught sight of the lovely pink and sleek black of my new outfit. But as the tears streamed from my eyes on a particularly fast descent I mis-timed a turn, the backwheel slipped and I tumbled off, sliding over the pretty leaves on my left side. I soon discovered that pretty as they may be, autumn leaves don't form a very soft cushion and my lovely, gorgeous, perfect tights had become ripped and bloody. Aghast as I was, I slapped a melonin patch on my rather ugly, ripped knee and shot downwards towards the bottom of the coombe and enjoyed the rest of the morning. (Of course I can't now move my knee and it is oozing disgusting horrible yellow stuff but let's not go there).

Fi

...and that's it, season over! Dusk Til Dawn was the usual customary end-of-year ball - I'm sure something will happen one day to make it less than perfect (raining frogs? plague of locusts?) but it just goes from strength to strength and is probably my favourite event of the year. Over 500 lovely friendly riders, a fantastic course (and I mean *really* fantastic - the Thetford singletrack is just perfect, all polished berms and swooping, sinuous trails through the trees), spangly 'mood lighting', one of the best thought-out solo pits I've seen (no tedious schlepping of kit across a field - just park up and work from the car), gallant work from Timelaps in the face of twelve hours of trying to read number boards behind blinding HIDs, just enough trade support to keep those not riding amused, fed, and spannered throughout, and above all the loveliest small-town atmosphere that no other event seems to manage to replicate. The Thetford MTB Racing crew work so hard and achieve such great things; a huge, huge thank you to them for all their tired, tireless efforts and the plentiful original thinking that makes Dusk Til Dawn so special.

The ladies solo field was the biggest of any ultra-endurance event this year (did you know that any evemt over 4 hours long is classed as ultra-endurance? No, neither did I - I've done commutes that are longer than that!), and it was great to see all 14 grrrls complete at least the required 2 laps to finish. For various reasons I'd really wanted to win this one; I don't usually get all fired up and aggressive about a result, because I'm mostly racing against myself but I decided to change tack from my usual softly-softly approach and ride very hard indeed hard from the off. Suffice to say, it worked - after red-lining for 3 laps, I settled into a slightly more sustainable pace but still found myself attacking all the singletrack sections with gleeful fury and going far, far, far faster than I ever have done in an enduro before. The threatened rain never materialised and we rode the whole night long under starry skies (with the occasional stray one shooting overhead); it got very cold indeed (but then it wouldn't be Thetford if it didn't); first a battery and then a light failed (the latter through numpty user error); the iPod threw a gurgly fit at being asked to cope with twelve hours stuffed down my shorts and the whumps made eating near-impossible but heavens, was it fun. At one point I dropped into a particularly swoopy bit and suddenly lost all sense of direction; like being thrown into a tumbledrier, there was no up, no down, no left or right, just the faith that if I followed the swirling ribbon of dirt it would take me where I wanted to be going. And it did - twelve hours, 138 miles and nowhere-near-enough-food later I spun over the line to a beer, some terribly unflattering photos and a finish as not only first solo woman, but also third in the solo men. That'll keep me quiet for a while, then. Rock on...

Jenn

Out on the road bike this evening for a last prime-the-legs ride before Dusk Til Dawn. Feeling slightly sad now that this is the last chance to go properly fast for a few weeks - recovery from long, hard races takes weeks, rather than days, and I know now that I shouldn't expect to be contesting any roadsign sprints for at least a month. Which is a shame, 'cause I really do love riding the road bike...

Jenn

And so the night-time commutes begin. Lupine, 2 x rear lights (lesson learnt), reflective stuff all over everything, mudguards and twice as much food as I'd usually take (it's dark, therefore it's cold, therefore more cake, right?), and out over the Downs for a long-way-home to remember. Clouds of kamikaze moths, curious bats doing fly-bys, badgers, deer, glorious sunsets, spooky trees and flickering probably-nothing-but-could-be-anything shadows playing mind games.... First of many. Hurry up autumn, you're overdue.

Jenn

Jenn

A salutary lesson in preparation and a slight bite on the arse for being cocky. Went for 'short' night ride on North Downs with a friend last night; and realised that whilst I know my properly local trails well enough to be able to get around them with my eyes mostly shut, the same doesn't work when you try and transpose routes that you only ride on the wheels of locals on sunny Sunday afternoons onto wet, dark, windy Tuesday nights the day after a raging storm's passed through and switched all the trails around (and don't even mention the light failures, lack of food, and hour-long wait for the train). Black dog, anyone...?

Jenn

Three peaks

Isn't it funny how sometimes the things you're most worried about end up being the most fun? 3 Peaks Cyclocross this weekend, and boy had I worked myself up into a complete frenzy of nervous terror beforehand... All went terribly well, though - the climbing wasn't as bad as I'd expected (thanks to pipe lagging and Newtimber steps), the descending rocked, big time (thanks to the wonders of unintentional speed and gyroscopic forces), and the road bits, well, they were tedious, but Yorkshire views and a little bit of eye-bleeding effort more than made up for that. End result: a totally unexpected third place (hence grubby kit in podium pictures - whoops!), a sub 4hr30 time when I'd been hopeful of 5hr, and a great big tired smile all the way home. The only downside? I'll have to wait another whole year before doing it again, because there's nothing quite like it at all. Roll on 2007!

Jenn