Me! Me! Me!

Might have written this... slow, weak, rider coming through on your, erm, left, or er... or not.

Mayhem The Weird Way...

Did Mayhem at the weekend as a sort of last minute substitute for a mixed team - ultimately there were, erm, three of us, when there should have been five. That and a load of brooding storm clouds and incoming isobars meant that I badged up the single-speeded Rockyvento as a Maverick, slapped a Morvelo sticker on the fork and an Alpkit one on the chainstay and slapped a Ragley Ti one on the seat-tube for max confusion and packed a selection of mud tyres.

It was kind of odd being non competitive from the start - normally it takes me a couple of laps - but  had a really good weekend. For starters it never really rained properly. I saw loads of nice people I've not seen for far too long and met some new ones too. The Horror Cat got an outing with glowing red eyes and all. And surprisingly my singlespeed legs worked despite advanced mono-cog rustiness.

Ended up doing two double-lap stints then a triple on Sunday morning. I could have done a quadruple, but it felt like enough and I wanted to be able to get back into 24/12 training mode this week. So, seven laps at a briskish pace for me, lots of climbing, 70-odd miles of singlespeeding, sore hands from that final descent taken flat out every lap cos it was smoother that way, or maybe it was just over faster...

Lots of people thought the singlespeed thing was mad, but actually it worked pretty well there - lots of climbing, but most of it at an eminently singlespeedy gradient and the lack of weight, Rocky's around 22.5lb with no particular effort to keep things light and the lack of complexity help. There's a certain smug satisfaction from listening to folk desperately screwing up gear changes at the bottom of every climb while you just creak serenely on your way.

The Horror Cat did the steering, I turned the pedals, pulled on the brakes occasionally and came along for the ride.

Overall it was kind of reassuring that I could do that with very little singlespeed background this year and still feel pretty strong. Next stop, 24-hour solo at 24/12 but with gears.

Somewhere at the back of my head though, is an insidious little voice that keeps whispering about maybe soloing Mayhem next year on the singlespeed...

Floaty, fluffy, rest-day mode now.

Learning.

Blimey, I actually appear to have learned something from last year's 24/12-SITS debacle, like I will not recover properly from a 12-hour solo in the space of ten days, so if I want to do the ace-looking, two-day Lakes thing in two weeks time, then I'd better not ride around in poxy circles for 12 hours this weekend...

And besides, the weather forecast looks crap. And I'm about to intervalise myself senseless for 24/12. And I can't be arsed with driving for three hours. And I'm getting dead good at rationalisation. And possibly riding my legs off over the long Bank Holiday weekend wasn't ideal.

Ah well.

We're both resting...

Bad ideas...

Trying to do two 24-hour races in two weeks, one solo, one as a pair. A very bad move on both counts. Besides, I hate the way racing gets in the way of riding bikes - tapering, recovery, tapering and in this case, the bit where tapering and recovery become the same bloody thing. Arse.

So I'm sitting here with tired legs - running was a bad idea too - pondering why, when going slowly is logically a good idea, I don't really want to go slowly at all. It doesn't work. I don't work.

So instead, I'm sitting here contemplating another bad idea involving chocolate sponge things with Belgian chocolate melting middle things and cream and ice cream and a very good idea involving a mountain bike and a flight to Kathmandu. Or maybe Morocco.

And other recent good ideas included lying in the sunshine at Ladybower yesterday in the sun and watching unidentifiable great big propellor-driven aeroplanes flying overhead. Changing Mogg's bar tape for some rather fetching blue Techno Spugna french blue stuff - it says it's navy, but it ain't unless it's the French navy. And finding a way of converting spangly new road wheels into 2010 Revelations to replace the trashed Pikes on the 405.

Ah well. Swiss Alps. Yes please.

24/12, the condensed version...

I learned some stuff last year, notably that cycling is just a game. In real life, other things matter more and while riding bikes is great and kept me more or less together for the last 12 months, it is 'just' riding bikes. Life and death and people and love - friends and partners and family - all trump bikes when the chips are down.

Blimey - pre-race mode and almost organised....

But in a race, that shouldn't matter, that's the point of it, isn't it? Suspension of normal rules. So why after nine-and-a-half hours and nine-and-a-half laps of a 24-hour solo at 24/12 am I very rationally debating the pros and cons of jacking it all in? The thought process goes a bit like this:

Me: 'This is shite, the course is getting desperately wet and slippy and dangerous and some knobber has already knocked me off once and made a big dent in my shin.'

Me 2: 'Man up, it's about finishing and doing, not having 'fun'.'

Me: 'Yeah, yeah, I know that, but if you're not enjoying the riding what's the point? What's the point of riding at all?'

Me 2: 'Because you're going really well, feeling strong, eating and drinking well and if you bail now, you'll regret it later, you know you will.'

Me: 'But I'll also be trashed for SITS in two weeks time and let my mate down whereas if I stop now, I'll be more or less recovered by then and - shhhh... - it might be dry there. And I could ride faster, I hate riding slowly, hate it...'

Me 2: 'You knew that when you sent the entry off ffs, you idiot. Look, just keep turning the pedals and we'll talk again later.'

Me: 'But riding bikes is just a game. And right now, this isn't fun. Isn't enjoyment what this is all about?'

Me 2: 'Pathetic cop-out. But if you're happy with your decision then what the hell. Just don't whine about it later.'

Me: 'Deal. '

And I'm quite happy to have stopped. I'm not really a natural endurance rider - fast twitch sprint athlete me - and somewhere, I think, my internal rev limiter clocks in at around 12 hours, I loved the 12-hour solo I did a year ago. Maybe it's just mental and maybe in drier conditions I'd have seen things differently, but then 24-hour racing is as much about dealing with the conditions as it is about riding fast, dry, sinuous singletrack. So there you go.

So I went to bed and did some pitting for my friend Julie and was chuffed to bits for her when she not only completed her first ever 24-hour solo but came a solid third as well - thanks Rory for reminding me that helping a mate do well counts every bit as much as your own stuff.

And the best bits of it all were catching up with friends I've not seen for a while - hello Rob for one - and Pitch who had a cracking, gutsy ride and everyone else and some sterling chats out on the course, for some reason mostly with women soloists - why is it that lasses seem happy to chat while blokes, even slow ones, seem fixated on burying themselves deep in some personal pain cave.

Anyway, powder mostly dry for pairs at SITS, ten hours of fun, slippy riding under the belt, limited nausea, one ace sausage and bacon sarnie and too much driving. Now about that big pile of kit in the front room...

A very happy unMayhem...

It's taken me a week not to write anything about Mayhem. Somewhat amusingly, I managed to assemble a team consisting entirely of people called 'Dave', well, apart from me, obviously, I'm not called Dave.

 Friday... note traditional clouds...

But the things I'll remember aren't really the racing - we did okay by the way, ninth in vets sub-class, or 'oldies' I think it's called, yep, officially an old bastard and 27th in Sport Men out of around 110 and 250 teams respectedly - but actually it was mostly just a really nice weekend.

 Warm, sunny, hot, dry, and loads of mates to bump into a chat with. And I had a teepee, a nordic one made by a company called Tentipi and it was properly ace. A really nice vibe. Super practical and, get this, because it has an adjustable vent at the top, you can have a firebox inside the teepee...

... so, at three in the morning, when normally you're huddled in a sleeping bag or draped shivering in a belay jacket between laps, we were grouped around a crackling fire feeling, erm, hot. Which was brilliant. And next day, when the sun was doing its own scorched earth thing and normal tents were performing a passable imitation of a sauna, inside the teepee, it was, as Kevin McCloud, or however he's spells it, might say 'cool and light and airy'. Really nice. Goes well with the the prayer flags too. And the Horror Cat.

As a team we did okay, as an individual, hmmm, well. I guess the thing that's been driving me in biking terms has been soloing 24/12, the 24-hour version, so a lot of what I've been doing has been long, hilly and steady. Not a lot of intense threshold stuff. I did some sprinty intervals in the four weeks before, so I had a proper singletrack overtaking spurt, but...

So the first two laps were briskish but in a sub-threshold way, and then I sort of lost interest, or not so much lost interest, but didn't have the motivation to hurt myself. And didn't really fuel properly either. Which was ironic given that someone spent a big chunk of last year trying to convince me that I was overly aggressive - yeah, right - and there I was without the competitive urge needed to punch my way out of a wet paper bag. Fierce, me...

But there you go. I'll leave the fast racing to the fast people and most of my mates went pretty well, the odd podium and some quick laps and one unfortunate crash. And the most important thing was that apart from one dark cloud of a conversation that I kind of wish I hadn't had now, it was a weekend of sunshine and lightness.

Got to stop that bloody Maverick from creaking though...  If someone finds my creative urge, could they post it to me please. I feel like I've been run over by a steam roller. Which in a way I suppose I have.