Sunday ride

sunday ride.

today was to be a Sundayriders steady Sunday ride. But...

The Mighty Dinsdale - had to work.

Greg - contracted the man flu.

Paul - a garbled phone message about some complaint that only hurt if he touched it!.......a broken finger perhaps?

so it was just me and Juanita.

Weather: stunning blue skies and frost at 2'C

Terrain: hard and fast, soft where the sun had reached.

Distance: a steady 38 km in 2.32

Interesting things of the day:
1.lots of horse riders orienteering in fancy dress(juanita's favourite was batman on horse back)
2. a friendly llama who liked torq energy bars.

Mechanical of the day: ramon finally found the answer to the strange knocking sound coming from the fork/headset. It was the brake caliper, the bolts were loose and partly out!!

ramon: "a steady wind down to start training over xmas in Ibiza".

juanita: "a hard ride to get ready for training over xmas in Ibiza".

We go to Ibiza next Saturday for two weeks riding in the sun.

The Cardiff Santa 5km

lco, the Sunday Riders and Skidmarks pitbabe, ran her first race at the weekend. The santa run is a 5km road race around Cardiff dressed as Santa Claus!

Along with lco and juanita, a further 800 people turned up dressed accordingly.

The marathon de sable next, maybe?

Marin winter series round two

Sunday was the second round of the winter series at Thetford. Once again it was a sell out and 500 had signed up to race. However, the weather forecast although dry all week showed a torrential downpour at 9.00 am., an hour and half before the start. This led to a rush of....'anyone want my place? I've got a sore throat, I have to work.....etc' posts on the website :-)

I had rested well since the last round and felt stronger, pretty good in fact. So I decided to change that! The night before the race was Paul's birthday so Jane made cake,but Paul couldn't make it. So I ate cake, loads of it. So much that my stomach was like a balloon when I went to bed. It was still like that, and very sore, when I got up at six the next morning. I couldn't face breakfast and hoped to eat some torq bars on the way.

It was chucking it down when we arived at Thetford, I went for a quick warm up and got absolutely soaked fom the standing water and was shaking from the cold, so we sat in the car to keep warm. At the start the queues were already five deep. I queued on the left, because the tight left turn a 100m after the start had a huge puddle also on the left, but just out of sight. I figured that most would swing right on seeing the puddle and I would go straight through it.

The klaxon sounded and everyone sprinted into the first corner. I got ready for the veer to the right at the puddle, so I could take the left line through it. Instead the front runners stopped dead, so I flicked right and through the centre clipping a couple of bars in the process!

This track was 500m of big ring very wet fire road descending at 40kph into a wall of spray from the standing water into a 90deg off camber left. This caused a few problems and people were overshooting it. Then into the first singletrack, which though wet was very fast. a few fast bermy turns and back onto the fire road to the first bombhole: this was very deep but, quite straight in and out. I've raced this part of the course before and the next bit is great fun, the locals call it the beast! It's a singletrack descent through the woods made up of a series of rollercoaster whoops and berms. The most fun way to ride this is roadie style lined out tucked in, inches from each others wheel :-))) This spits you out across a fire road and straight up a singletrack climb. I can hear people behind me whooping as they came down the beast.
This section is always quite tough because coupled with the ascent is a claggyness in the surface. Here the heavier riders tend to suffer and it's easy to pass riders, particularly later in the race as people tire.

The rest of the lap followed in true Thetford style ie hard fire road sections(for some reason always into the wind!) and fast jiggly, rooty singletrack.

I had decided to eat at the end of the second lap, I tried to eat half a torq bar, even though I could barely swallow it. I had a couple of bottles of energy drink by the course at the start/finish area, so I grabbed them as I went through.

By the end of the third lap my legs were getting a bit wobbly, and I still couldn't eat.

The sixth lap is where I met my maker and everything went a bit Lewis Caroll. Suddenly gravity increased tenfold, my bike seemed three sizes too big and the world narrowed to a small fuzzy circle in front of me. The little man with the big hammer had arrived and.....bonk, he hit me hard!!! I had to walk a couple of the short sharp climbs and freewheel down the other side :-)

At about halfway through this lap Alan Parkinson's friend from the London Pheonix caught me; he was blowing fairly hard. I guess he must have seen me and put in an effort. We rode together while he got his breath back and I introduced myself as Alan's other friend. He then slowly pulled away. Paul came through sometime later and slowly but inexorably moved ahead. Meanwhile I died a little bit more:-)

Towards the end of the lap, I realised that I might beat the four hour cut-off and be 'allowed' to do another lap. Another lap was out of the question! Now I was faced with a quandary; do I deliberately ease even more, miss the cut and have the decision not to do another lap made for me or do I press on and deliberately 'pull out'. I passed through the start/finish and the guy shouted 'go on you'll get another lap' . I pressed the stop button on my gps and it read 03:59:58. Their official time was 03:59:25.

It was frustrating as I been going so well and no one in the latter part of the race passed me with any pace. Still, I'm pleased that my strength has returned and I managed to get tenth in the vets without eating :-)

Paul managed another lap and took 9th place vets.