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

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.

96km, 3hr18m

Arranged to meet Dave, Sim and Mats at Penmachno this morning. As I’m meant to be training for CLIC24 I decided to get there early and do a pre-ride ride. A navigational error meant I got there 30 mins later than planned but still took the risk of heading off for my pre-ride hoping I’d get back in time to meet the others. This was a bit of a risk as I had absolutely no idea how long it would take to get round Loop 1 having never ridden it before! We’d arranged to meet at 11 which gave me just under 1h15mins to get round. Luckily the Remedy 8 I’d borrowed from work climbed pretty well and flew on the descents and after a pretty relentless 75mins of riding I arrived back at the carpark just as Dave’s van pulled up. Great (lucky) timing.
After a chat and some food we set off up the first climb. Reaching the point where you have the choice of Loop 1 or Loop 2 we stopped to chat to a couple of guys that were there. They explained that Loop 2 was about a 10km add-on to Loop 1 which it then rejoins. Sounded good to us so that’s where we went. The trails on Loop 2 were built by a different team to those on Loop 2 and had a different feel but were great all the same.
By the time we got to the last series of descents I was feeling a bit tired and a small error led to me clipping the bank sending me flying down the trail and the bike off the edge (it luckily stopped before it tumbled hundreds of feet to the bottom of the valley!) Took a big hit to my left thigh and arm but nothings broken so no need to worry. Took it very slightly easier on the last couple of descents but still went fast enough for lots of fun. A big thumbs up to everyone involved in building the trails there, they rocked :) The fantastic spring weather with sun, blue skies and singing birds made it even better.
Rubbish journey home with the A55 being shut leading to massive tailbacks. We eventually made it to the services at Chester for food and drink before heading off home. A fine day.

50km|3hr30 pedalling time|1670m climbing