This lot can stay archived now. I have moved HERE, please update your links/feeds. Ta :)
I’ve been thinking about doing a time trial for years but have always come up with an excuse for not doing one. Well tonight I just said fuck it and turned up for the Seamons CC evening 10*.
Despite pretty much everyone else being on full on TT bikes I don’t think I disgraced myself and I even beat my boss. To be fair, he is nearly 65 and hasn’t raced for many years :)
The results have just been posted, looks like I was 25th out of 39 starters and pretty sure nobody on a standard road bike finished ahead of me. Yay! Something else ticked off the list. I might have another go later in the year.
It seems that time trialling is growing - little Mikey Mulroy of Velocake fame took part in the Penzance Wheelers club 10 last week recording a respectable time of 29m26s
*It’s actually an 8.75 mile time trial
Went back for another ride, this time taking in a big mountain. Hard work, boggy in places, pushing/carrying required, weather closing in, mentally strong winds, frozen feet & hands, excellent company. Real proper mountain biking. I should do more really.
No words required
After working 7 days straight I was in need of a long ride so arranged to meet up with Samuri who is rather fond of long rides. Left the house at 0815 and got to Leigh just before 0900 where Jon joined me. The plan was to head down to the Trans Pennine Trail and follow it all of the way to Southport before making our way home. I was on my trusty cross bike, Jon was on Benji’s old Kona Humu singlespeed - not a bike I’d have chosen for this ride but it didn’t hold him back at all.
The ride was a nice mixture of road, sustrans routes, trans pennine trail, singletrack and farm tracks. Nothing particularly exciting but a perfect route for getting plenty of hours in the saddle which I need as CLIC24 is next month! We kept up a pretty good pace for the whole ride with only a couple of real stops including having an ice cream when we got to Southport :)
When we got close to my house on the way back I had a quick look at my GPS and realised that I was fairly close to 100 miles so added an extra loop to make sure I reached that landmark. Despite knobbly tyres and quite a lot of offroad in the route I’m pretty sure it was my fastest ever century. Looks like the commuting miles are paying dividends. Quite tired now, hopefully lots of food should help sort that out :)
163km|7hr05m riding time
Rich asked me earlier how I was getting on with my new shoes, my reply being that the weather hasn’t been nice enough to venture out in them. This seemed like a rubbish excuse so having finished various trips to the post office/pet shop/supermarket on the pompino I changed into my new shoes and headed out to get an ice cream :)
First impressions are good. Very comfortable, the ratchet is really nice to use and they have a lovely stiff sole. Obviously a quick ice cream ride isn’t a very thorough test of them so I will report back after I’ve done a few long rides in them.