Life In The Saddle

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3 Friends - Tim, Ben and Francis 3 Bikes - A Peugeot, Specialized and ? 3 Countries - Britain, France and Spain 3 Weeks - In September Over 1300 Miles of roads... Yesterday we booked our ferries to Spain in preparation for our touring trip to France and Spain in September. Very Exciting! I talked about the route in an earlier Blogpost ( link ). Not a lot had changed in it except that we are now planning on going to Santander in Spain first and then making our way back up to Le Havre, via the Picos de Europa, the Pyreness and the Alps. We have planned the route to take us 3 weeks - including two full rest days. This means that we can cut back the daily mileage to a "moderate" sixty miles when we are in the mountains and more like 100 miles when we are on the flat plains of central France. My kit is all coming together for the trip: Black Classic Ortlieb Panniers: a Tortec Expedition Rear Rack, and a lot of upgrades to the Peugeot winter

When you're racing a Mountain Bike event it is probably fair to say that "Everybody Hurts Sometimes" as the REM track goes; however after Sunday's Southern XC race at Perham Down in Wiltshire, I reckon I probably hurt more than most, as a consequence of two pretty major crashes and a very hard, but largely unsuccessful effort in an attempt to get back into the main pack. When you arrive at a venue and there is an air ambulance sat in the car park it normally means the course is a hard one; in fact there were two broken collarbones before I had even started my race, as the junior and open categories demonstrated some carnage around the course. On the pre-race warm up lap Sean Williams, Jamie Brett and I rode the course and confirmed that it was indeed challenging but great: a mix of short sharp climbs, dusty descents, chalky drops and weaving single track. Once again my single track inability was showing even on the practice lap as I seemed to fall a bit behind Sean an

Every bit of training I have been doing this year seems to have been leading up to this event - the XC race in the Natwest Island Games. I knew the Criterium race wasn't going to suit me overly well; but I gave it a decent shot, always hoping for a better result in the Cross-Country event - here's how things unfolded... The Course If the Criterium Course was hard, then the Cross Country course was brutal. The women had to do three laps and the men five, of a course that challenged even the Commonwealth Games athletes at the front of the field. Starting again on the top of Fore Down, we raced a fast section through the grass area on the top before quickly hitting a section of single track, where inevitably the riders became spread out as we rode single-file through the technical lines in the top part of the course. It was then time to drop...we descended VERY quickly down the side of the down, on an off-camber grass track, building up enough speed that you had to be very careful