I am 98{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} man…

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… and 2{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} Mendip. There is an intense moment of silence which follows the bangs and crashes of a big stack, and into that noise void dropped the thought that I’d completely screwed up less than a mile into my first lap. My plan had been simple; easy spin up the first climb, get a decent sighter of the downhills, and don’t race anyone – especially those with constipated expressions and lean bodies.*

Like all hastily conceived plans, it overlooked a integral component of a successful execution. And that component was my mechanical prowess when performing the complex task of correctly inflating the front tyre. This new boot took one look at gravity driven singletrack and decided to take its’ rubbery business elsewhere. Specifically a swift ‘see ya’ to the rim before flailing around the fork in a mildly comedic manner.

For anyone watching, anyway. I was struggling to find any time to see the funny side as the next few seconds were packed full of incident. If your car tyre ever punctures at high speed, the deceleration process is both rapid and uncontrolled. Now try that crossing rocky ground with half the number of wheels and at one tenth of the width. And that wheel is handling both steering and braking.

Except, of course, it isn’t doing anything of the sort. The front wheel immediately tucked under pitching me headlong over the bars, into a landing zone of spiky rocks and tough looking trees. This was the full crash experience – Surprise, terror, impact, pain, bounce, impale, roll and more pain. Then the silence. Then the ‘what the fuck happened there?’. Then the full systems check as body parts checked in with various degrees of damage. Finally time for a decent groan, after a cautious move to semi prone breaches the adrenaline/pain barrier.

Important to focus on the positive. My smashed up knee from 2006 took a blow right to the centre of the original damage and it’s articulating pretty well. My dislocated shoulder from last year suffered an identical impact as I’d instinctively thrown out a hand and – aside from some desultory bleeding – that’s fine as well. The bike – when I find it over the other side of the track – has some interesting new gouges but appears functionally undamaged. Lots of riders stopped to see if I was still alive, while commenting “woooah, that was a big one”. Which was nice.

The rest of the lap was not nice. I inaugurated myself into the “order of the purple hand” as the lefty changed colour, swelled up and bloody hurt. Refreshingly, all the injuries appeared to be on pedalling centres – ankles, knee and a banana sized rash on my hip. So to summarise; 1 mile completed, can’t use my left hand to brake or change gear, can barely hold the bar and my head feels a bit like it’s been slammed into hard rocks at 15MPH.

Time to MTFU** and get on with it. Which I did although not before two more punctures reduced me to a puncture repair kit and a bloody annoyed expression. The first set of marshalls clapping eyes on my less than pristine person offered me a ride in the broom wagon, but that didn’t seem the right thing to do. And it was with that attitude, I completed that lap and a few more afterwards.

But it was fantastic. Not the crashing but the great cause, the organisation, the course and the other riders out on it. The St. John’s ambulance guys did a fab job of patching me up again, even tho I had to show another grown man my willy as he tutted his way round a couple of deep scabs. I’ll write some more later – about the event not my new found interest in getting my knob out.

I’ve documented my hatred of event racing many times before. And that hasn’t left me, but this event is something I really want to do again. If only to make it past the first descent without barrel rolling down the track. Because then it would make it even better 🙂

Today, a goodly portion of my left side is purple. This is officially the summer colour of 2008, and I’m well ahead of the game what with the Voodoo already being that shade***

* It’s really not meant to be a race. A few people didn’t get that at first, but I’d like to think my pithy comments may have helped to shape their opinion. If you can’t beat ’em, insult the buggers as they fly past.

** Man The Fuck Up.

** It is not pink. A few people also made that mistake during the weekend for which they received a sharp glance and a sharper bit of glass in their tyres.

Angry badger at midnight…

Right idea, wrong liquid.

… Entire country lurches to right? This newly crafted folk couplet struck me as a furious badger attempted to extricate itself from betwixt bin and fence. But with the clock striking twelve and the seals of city hall being relunctantly passed to the floppy haired fop, I felt their must be a link between the extreme vexation of stripey mammal and handing the capital over to a man who appears to have been dressed by his mum.

Whatever. The badger finally freed itself in a squeel of pain and charged off up the garden to take revenge on the lawn, and/or insect/family pet innocently crossing it’s path. So with my inner hippy fully lentiled up, a fine morning brought forth “A week since it hailed… lovely dry trails” as we submerged ourself in the singletrack of Swinley forest.

Submerged being exactly the right word to spear my lentil* with ten minutes of post deluge slop creating the kind of mutinous environment that saw Sea Captain’s walking the plank. The dichotomy of hot sun and axle deep mud was rather disappointing in the same was as waking up with your knob missing could be termed slightly annoying. Rather than huffing off for some therapy cake, we struck out to the lesser known – and considerably driver – trails, and discovered a couple of little crackers.

It's bigger than it looks! I've used that line before Nig doing it properly with a hint of tweak

That cheered me up as did getting my fat ass off this little drop that I’ve been neshing for weeks. It must be all of about 2 feet, maybe 2 and a half if you’ve deployed the penis length adjustment factor. But the whole clipped in/riding off things fills my minds eye with splintered bones and splattered blood.

Still all’s well that ends without a visit to A&E. I shall however be visiting the model shop after a stunningly crash free flight of my RC plane ended when the propeller fell off. At which point, it exhibited all the aerodynamic prowess of a shot duck. It seems my legendary MTB mechanical skills have been passed seamlessly to other hobbies.

Super 😉

* Hurts just to think about it.

A Purbeck day.

Navigation. From where I am standing – which is normally in a featureless forest, pointlessly twizling a map and trying not to panic – it is merely a bunch of letters starting with N. To my friend, ‘Columbus‘ Nige it’s a mandate to explore new trails, submerge oneself into suspicious smelling bogs and occasionally claim a virgin track for the fat tyred collective.

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In five hours of riding, we found enough in the Isle of Purbeck to suggest a return trip may unearth further singletrack gems. In the spirit of balance, I should point out we also determined that recently harvest forestry is no place for untracked vehicles, and cheeky footpath entries sometimes hide arse pumelling field crossings.
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But the views were fantastic, the sky stayed dry and the riding lacked the technicality to make one fear for continued existence, each time the trail added degrees of verticality to degrees of anxiety. This didn’t stop me having a sky-ground-sky experience ending with man and bike in a spiky embrace. But that’s more a testament to my skill rather than any significant trail obstacles.
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Highlights included being blown UP an off camber slope, a mad urban singletrack sliced by blind ninety degree switchbacks, a tea shop with ten varieties of cake and a full day of riding bikes in a single layer of clothing. Laughing at the Trailbreak competitors as they zoomed off in ever decreasing circles had a certain comedic merit as well.

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I have a sneaky felling Nige was giving them directions 🙂

Today we went to the Grand Designs show and spent about£400 an hour. We now have a cooker that will fit perfectly in a house we don’t yet own. This is the kind of fiscal insanity which makes my obsessive bicycling buying seem almost well planned.

Should I stay or should I go now*

Swinley MTB (12 of 14), originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

That’s a picture of Jason, a hardy antipodean perennial showing his delight at finding warm mud in Swinley Forest. The joy of spring if you will**

That’s not what this is about though. Our buyers will be moving into this house in about four weeks. We have nowhere to move to. The option was to stay and lose the house sale or pack all our belongings in a cardboard box, and decamp to a bridge under the M4.

A compromise solution is a complex double move involving men with proper jobs sweatingly transferring most of our stuff into crates and a few much loved objects – including at least three MTB’s! – to a short term rental somewhere in Herefordshire. Assuming the legal issues ever get resolved before a) the kids leaving home or b) us running out of money to pay solicitors, we’re still keen to move to cabbage-land.

Failing that, we’ll be cash buyers with an ever decreasing time budget before the mortgage offer expires.

The bridge seems to offer a far simpler solution but apparently the kids have to go to school. And me to work. In Birmingham. Crikey.

Hopefully the local – and new to me – trails will be fast and dry when we finally rock up to our temporary home. Ian – I’m looking forward to a ride and a long chat about potential sites for the scorpion pit. I have about four sheets of closely written names who are deserving of a deadly spider experience.

* too easy to even ask the question. Ah I loved the Clash. But it was so long ago, I still had hair.

** Spring as in Springing in the air as in words linking to photo as in clever interplay between media. No, thought not.

Something for the weekend Sir?

In front of me, I have a map. Now I’ve always been fascinated by cartography in the same way that grot mags would capture my attention when I was a teenager*. The symmetry holds; I would peer at the pictures, get quite excited without really knowing why, and have absolutely no clue about what the hell would happen next.

Cracking it open shows vertical delights, hidden clefts, unconquerable summits and sun warmed valleys. I’m back to the map, what the hell are you lot thinking? The area 40ks north of Perpignan is known as Le Ganigou which sounds both medical and painful – it was nearly both. 12 routes radiate out from Vernet-les-baines – a rural town where ‘Allo ‘Allo must have been staged – increasing in severity from greens to clean, blues to cruise, reds to roost** and blacks to crack.

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As ever, we chose the hardest route intending to dispatch 6000 feet of climbing over 40ks wth nothing more than a pack of sandwiches and an Olympic class hangover. And, again in the long tradition of giving up, a mile later – all of which was pitched nearly to the vertical – we ran away scared.

Red route then lads eh? Best get ourselves warmed up first eh? We’ll crack that bastard tomorrow? Right?” Yeah, right. The next four hours were spent mostly getting lost, getting sun burned, getting backdraft hangovers***, getting laughed at by the French and pushing. The downhill sections swung between steep, loose and wide and steep, narrow and rocky. At no point did steep ever leave this holy trinity of going downhill fast. And a bit frightened.

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Uphill was – as I may have mentioned – pushing, sweating, grunting and lying supine on the saddle waiting for double digit heart rates and single digit vision. Still, the final singletrack back to Vernet was the dusty jewel in this twisted crown. An initial run in was a steep hairpin immediately switching to baby-head rocks which needed speed and balls to surf like a wheeled jetboat.

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Just when you were getting all cocky with rocky, the next challenge were alternating, blind and steep, root-strewn hairpins. Bleeding speed in the manner of “don’t make me lock up and bleed“, I faultlessly dispatched them in a new school manner of “spanners: bag of”. The reward for staying upright was a kilometre of insane trail which took hold of your adrenal gland and squeezed it unmercifully for the next three minutes.

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Dave has better lines that me, because he is a shitload younger, a sight braver and *curses* noticeably more skilled. He’s also currently dependentless****, so his dust became my track. Hardtails rule here, so fast to change lines, so easy to manual over portentous rocks, so laugh out load carvey in corners. Drop your elbows, swap stiff muscles for leggy suspension, don’t even flick the brakes and have summer riding hammered into your brain by every bump in the trail.

It doesn’t happen often enough but when it does, riding like this is better than almost anything else. There are no limits, there is no fear, nothing is difficult, fast is easy, everything is possible, timeshare skills come on line for 60 seconds and now you can manual, bunnyhop and – even for the briefest moment – hip jump in SPD’s.

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We rode it twice more over the next days and never made the black. But we’ll be back, no wiser, probably no more sober but with better excuses. I have so many long memories from this shortest of trips; nailing the steepest trails, drinking beer in out of season rural villages, Simon coming back from the dead on the first day, falling off, pointing and laughing at others doing the same, taking the piss, laughing till it hurt, long days, big nights, great friends.

Our friends Si and Sarah, who have swapped a somewhat hedonistic London lifestyle for rural bliss in a place perfectly sandwiched between the sea and the mountains, are very lucky people indeed.

More so, because we’ve left 😉

* For my younger readers, this was the like the Internet in paper form. Sticky paper, if I remember rightly.

** Forgive me the freeride lingocrap(tm) on the grounds of exceptional alliteration

*** The best way I can think of describing “the second chewing” of food and water.

**** Probably. We’ll leave it there should we Dave?

Pyr’a’knees

A brace of mid leg articulators are essential working body parts for a long weekend of dusty riding in the Southest of France. Useful also for getting around once walking becomes stumbling becomes resting, face down, on the sun warmed ground. Alcohol may have been involved, it generally is.

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You see there is an grooved narrative causality governing trips away with bicycles and good friends. Firstly a key component of my MTB will explode somewhere betwixt careful packing and despondent rebuilding. Following closely on is a twist in the story that ends up in a glass and then a full on monstering of the liver. And while the two may be only loosely related, I am powerless to resist the grip of the tale.

On the way to a hangover, which rates somewhere high in my top ten “never another drop, not ever, don’t even mention the word” thumping morning afters, we discovered from our recently domiciled host that “France is run by middle age women” and “there is no point trying to charm them, they get that 24/7 from the indigenous population” and “Driving while drunk in rural France is as simple as sticking your head out of the window and feeling the hedge“.

All you need to know in three simple sentences spread over an evening of ever increasing wine fueled stupidity. Which ended in us incautiously cracking open a further bottle back at Si and Sarah’s house before grabbing a bike each for a spot of “Derbying in the Dark“. Less Bruce Springsteen, more loose springs ream as a collection of expensive bicycles were thrown roughly to the floor, occasionally striking a drunken bystander.

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Once Si unleashed his BMX (if not his BMX skills), four men who should really know better spent much time giggling, searching for lost bikes in the darkness and attaining verticallity for the single purpose of securing another drink. Did it end well? Two guesses and you’ll not be needing the second one.

The next morning started slowly because the previous evening had finished not too much earlier. Head clutching shades stalked darkened corridors, moving slowly but easily identified by their cries and moans. Stairs were difficult, cutlery a mystery too far and the prospect of attempting to control a motor vehicle nothing more than legally sanctioned murder.

We did eventually go riding which went about as well as you could expect from a quartet of men sweating red wine and chewing back last night’s dinner. Still hell of a night, not such a fantastic morning.

I’ll get round to cataloging our mastery of both bikes and stomachs when I get a minute not earmarked for some serious study of the inside of my eyelids. But I’m fairly sure the world oil crisis may be over considering the volume of the stuff leaking from my (air!) fork over the weekend. I’m in touch with BP regarding some exploratory drilling of this apparently bottomless reserve.

Something is broken. Thankfully not me although Saturday morning, I’d have paid good money for a mercy killing 😉

Snow Joke

Our garden at 8am, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

Pitching up like an infrequent but frequently amusing old friend. Sticking around long enough for a whole bunch of silly fun, before buggering off leaving you with hankering for a little bit more and a whole lot of mess to clear up.

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That’s snow in April folks. Eight hours after braving sub zero temperatures to capture a snowy Buckinghamshire, the snow has gone but the cold remains.

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Sufficient time to build a snowman, engage in a massive snowball fight and perfect the little known winter sports derivative known as organic sledging. Take a hillside covered with rapidly melting snow, install a ski trousered child at the start gate, perform a bob sleigh welly lifting start and collect shrieking child from the bottom of the slope.

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A choice between this and a wintry odyssey through contingency houses was really no choice at all. Plus, all that riding has brought home the unpleasant realisation that I can no longer even burn the candle at one end.

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Still nothing wrong with an afternoon snooze, blanketed by Sunday paper mountain is there?

A perfect, er, 7

Swinley 08 (2 of 12), originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

Like a perfect 10, except for slack people. For the last week, my arse has been firmly rammed in the saddle* for at least an hour a day, regardless of the moaning of the wind. It could be heard for miles: “bloody hell, my legs hurt, this isn’t fair, can I stop now please.. and on… and on”

As for the wind – vegetables are the bellows of the Devil so I cannot be held responsible for unleashing something so nasally irresponsible. The bowels of hell if you will.

The balmy weather of Friday evening was a first swallow to summer prelude of the barmy weather now hailing at my window. So I mosied out resplendent in just a single layer of everything to spend two hours carrying my bike over muddy fields. A nice walk spoiled by a bicycle.

Forget those expensive WWII Normandy trips, just find a bridleway in the Chilterns and be transported back to Flanders. And while it may lack the authenticity of incoming shells and body parts, the local landowners are generally happy to oblige with shotguns and border repelling ‘Oi, get off my land

While all my favorite trails were closed for fun, the pub was both open and serving a rather lovely pint. Tomorrow we’re going for a tremendously dull day house hunting in the sleet and snow. Following that I shall replace riding with checking the forecasts for Perpignan and trying not to injure myself before flying there.

I tried that last time and it was rubbish.

* Keen to do another Max Mosely joke. Keen not to get sued.

Ready, Freddie*

Barcelona (36 of 83), originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

Barcelona is a fantastic city. So good, in fact, they don’t like to let you leave. Our Olympic standard lurking at the airport was finally terminated by the most surreal announcement I have ever heard. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to apologise for the delay to this flight from Barcelona to London Heathrow. This entirely due to the fact that it is snowing in Stockholm

I kid you not.

Now while anyone with a beard and a serious expression can convince me that the flapping of a butterfly wing in remotest Chile ripples the space-time continuum such that it begins hailing buffalo in Croydon, BA are clearly talking nonsense.

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They weren’t alone. In a three day period, I was assured an evenings entertainment with my peers would be jolly fun (it really wasn’t), the trip back to the airport would take between seven and ten days (it didn’t) and the conference we were attending would be *edited for reasons of job security* (As my German friends would say “This is a joke, Ja?

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It‘s been a while since I’ve thrown myself to the wolves of a technology conference. And it’ll be a while before I do so again. Hotel rooms too hot, dinners too long, willpower too short, people too dull, flying too shit, Alex too old and cynical.

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There were upsides. Grudgingly I learned a little, talked a lot and found many people who wanted to drag a difficult project from the abyss of possibly disciplinary action. I also managed to rush out -“ while others were snout down in the free bar -“ and take some pictures.

Like I said, it’s a great city. It would be great to come back swapping work for my wife, a big camera and a hotel room not superheated directly from the Earths core.

Yes I know I am an ungrateful bugger. No, I don’t really care.

* Remember the song? Okay that’s not an actual lyric (but a gold star to anyone who can tell me from which Queen track it was from) but close enough.

I’m back and I’m s’lad*

Rotorua (Blue Lake), originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

I can only assume that this weather is some kind of cosmic joke. A meteorological slap down to my electronic worship of ceaseless blue sky images plastered all over the flickr homepage. We reluctantly left Auckland under sunny skies clothed only in shorts and sun cream, arriving back at Heathrow similarly dressed, but much colder.

A brief prod of the soft news underbelly – poked by a refreshing fast and free Internet connection – revealed that England is still rubbish and sport but that hardly mattered since the entire island was about to be carted off to the North Pole by a bastard winter storm.

Such is the insanity of long haul that a mere 30 hours separates the lingering end of a long, hot summer and having your face ripped off by icy rain. My first response to all this sudden weather was to layer myself in ever more fleecy clothes, my second was to start peeling which just shows the human body is clearly fooled by aeroplanes.

In more ways than one. My jetlag is on the irritating side of properly funny with bipolar perambulations between madly wide awake at 4am and falling asleep at my desk just after lunch. To be honest, no one noticed much difference other than I Was harder to wake. The rest of the family seem to have conveniently ignored that it’s 4am in the morning most of the time, except for little Random who is suffering a few head/food interfaces.

Most of the last week – before returning to the Devil’s weather experiments – was spent idly watching the sun climb over a wave-capped pacific from the vantage point of around 100 yards. The limit of my ambition were frequent visits to the double height beer fridge and watching the kids being dragged under by the rip tides.

To say this was mildly relaxing is a little like wondering if setting your trousers on fire would be slightly distracting. The whole Beach/Bach house thing would not work well in – say – Cleethorpes, but it is failure proof in a land of deserted beaches, jaw dropping scenery, cooling sea breezes and an endless array of beer and cake.

But while the weather has been busy, my solicitor has not. At this rate of progress, we will move in just before the kids leave home or this jetlag has finally worn off. It is, however, providing an excuse to put back my fitness kick for another couple of days as CLIC-24 hurtles ever closer.

21 days with 2 riding bikes and 20 quaffing calories in many interesting and varied ways added only 3lbs** to the svelteness of Al. But I appear to have grown breasts, so it’s tea instead of beer and the drudgery of sorting a 1000 photos assuming I can stay awake that long.

Oh, and to any of you kind hearted sods that sent me one of a thousand emails, I accidentally deleted the whole lot ten minutes ago. You know where to find me, I’ll still be asleep at my desk.

* Salad you see. Refer to last paragraph for more. I’ve always found jokes are so much better appreciated if you need to explain them.

** I refuse to go metric. I was born before 1971 and therefore exempt.