Feeling autumnal

I've pretty much ridden myself into the ground - quite knowingly, Your Honour, guilty as charged - because the alternative was to look too hard at things I didn't really want to look at. And now my body's stuck two 'are these yours' fingers up at me, pumped up the lymph nodes behind my ears into hard little bullets of rattled immune-systemic spite and packed me off to bed.

Summer's last green calling card...

Just feeling deep-down tired and bruised and slightly broken. The bikes are sulking in the bike cave like unwalked dogs and the Peak has its autumn head on at last. Cold weather test kit keeps turning up with mocking inevitability. A North Face down jacket with nigh-on water-proof outer, several fleece-lined soft shell jackets and a selection of spiky things for feet. Oh, and gloves, ridiculously expensive winter gloves.

Tyres are shifting too. The Voodoo's shed its summer sandals - Dry XCR2 and Racing Ralph 2.1s - for fatter, knobblier winter boots from the tyre pile. Minion DHFs are 'in' and Ardents are 'out' and Mog, like all good cats, is shivering at the prospect of regular baths. And the Pace? The Pace has new, winter-hostile white saddle and grips to match its polar bear forks.

Coming soon to a trail near you...

It's all a bit grim. But I know it's temporary. The sun'll shine again. Grim autumnal Peak days will be mixed up with flashes of magic - nights when the trails freeze into grippy sandpaper friction fests, brooding skies with darkly magnificent cloudy eyebrows and then, one day, it'll snow and everything will be dusted with epic. And my legs'll work again.

But right now, I just want to sleep.