The best sounds in the world...

There are two really good noises in the world, yes, only two. One is the distinctive thunk that an ice tool makes when the placement is spot on, solid, right, in good ice. And the other is the strange hollow, crunching hum of mountain bike tyres running fast and loose over dry, hard, singletrack.

Given that Kinder Downfall thawed at least a month ago and even when it was in, looked worryingly think and brittle, no prizes for guessing that this evening's dying of the light soundtrack was the second.

But actually, what made it a really lovely ride was the company, a climby mate who doesn't ride mountain bikes much, but with a mildly broken foot ain't going anywhere fast without wheels.

It's lovely riding your local trails and seeing them, just a little through someone else's eyes. And when they're drying and fast and framed in golden late afternoon light and punctuated with incendiary grins at the bottom of every descent and hyperventilation at the top of every climb, it's just ace.

And at the end, when Danny said thanks for the ride and the loan of the bike and I said no, really, thank you for dragging me out, it was special, I really meant it. Bikes are great, but after all, they're just bikes. It's people that really matter.

Between the illness and the fitness...

Somewhere between being ill and being better are the weird shadow-lands of 'not suredness' and that's kind of where I am at the moment. Essentially I'm okay, I have the faint remnants of a cough and that slightly comatose, post illness feeling of not being quite as sharp as I ought to be.

Handy bike and rider stand courtesy of the Ordnance Survey. Thanks guys, right at the top of the climb too, which shows real thoughtfulness.

And on the bike, while I have enough base to trundle along quite happily at a sort of seven out of ten level, when I try to go that little bit harder, push over the top of a climb, boost over some technical steps or whatever, I kind of hit a rev limiter. Which is annoying and slightly disheartening.

And the funny thing is that the ithlete app is drawing an amusing, saw-blade, post-illness portrait of instability. Drops and rises in HRV are more exaggerated and a brisk night ride is enough to send me further down that it ought to.

It's funny wondering if a three-hour road ride is going to be 'too much' and wondering if I'll be able to hack the pace on a local group ride, when I'd normally simply just turn up and ride. And at the back of my mind, there's always the worry that if I do too much, too soon, I'll break myself again, go post-viral and spiral into a rubbishy trough of uselessness.

There are worse times of year to be 'not quite well' - summer for example or when the trails are cracking with deep frozen ice beneath your wheels.

So instead I'm looking at the bright side. Planning on riding places I've never ridden, but really want to - Torridon, Mid-Wales, maybe the Alps or Pyrenees on the road bike, and wondering hard about taking a bike out to Nepal in the autumn. Poring over maps spotting local and not so local trails and remembering why I ride a bike in the first place, which isn't about racing or winning or beating people, but all about just being out there, moving through beautiful places and the sensation of a body functioning efficiently and working hard.

And yeah, going fast too - fast for me that is, I have no illusions about my relative speed. All of which makes pottering through the get shadowlands of Not-Quite-Wellshire a bit depressing. But hey, it'll come.

Bright And Shiny...

Slush And Mud And Puddles And Random Tandems...

Pottered along on a STW Peaks forum ride on Saturday. A few old friends, a few new ones, a few people who I've possibly met before and a few I'd not.

 
Anyway, a special day of wet snow and a old mate of a route - along from Whaley, up the Goyt Valley to Derbyshire Bridge, over the Old Road to Buxton then threading back along a mix of tracks and back lanes.

It's just a really nice, scenic, sociable, rolling-along sort of route. When it's not under a few inches of fresh, wet snow that is. And it was. Which made it entertainingly slithery. And pleasantly dawdly. And scenic too in a gorillas in the snowy mist sort of way.

And it had a special sting in the tail in the shape of an especially deep perma-puddle full of icy water. An ideal place to lurk with a waterproof camera and an encouraging grin... Treading water.

I Have Sat On Satan's Prong...

Back on the devil bike on a properly vile Sunday in the Peak. I don't know, you leave your trails unattended for two weeks and someone unleashes a bloody tsumami on them, ripped to bits. But still nice to get out and let the soul and the mind roam around freely.

Oddly, after about two hours of riding through mostly sludge with a big grin on my face, my brain cell wandered off to a far distant past when I was a motorcycle journalist and the time we dubbed a particular project bike 'Satan's Prong'. I can't even remember what the bike was, but the sub-head has stayed with me ever since: 'I have sat on Satan's Prong and it was devilishly good'.

We sat around giggling at our own silliness like hyper-active teenagers. At first it was just a silly line. Then it metamorphosed into a sub-head, then somehow into a cover line. And yes, it was daft and childish and we got a bit carried away with our own cleverness - not that it was particularly clever - but mostly we just got a kick out of sneaking it onto the cover because, as a magazine, we were quietly at war with our publisher, who appeared to hate us with a cold and steely passion.

Why? Why was I thinking about it? Riding a barking mad mountain bike. Just as ridiculous and juvenile and funny. And it's the Devil Bike. And it's just good to be riding again. Hello world, hello clouds, hello sky.

Dreaming.

Summer alpine dreaming. A project with dangerous feet...

Ovine dreaming.

And backyard dreaming.

Two dreams in one.

Summer glove and tasteless helmet dreaming.

Spanish dreaming - Oi - who Photoshopped those mountains in?

Dust - 'remember tha't dreaming.

Being Human.

I haven't been properly ill since, oh, November 2008, which is a while, so I guess I had it coming. It being a nasty cold. Not flu. Not plague. Nothing serious. Just a really vicious cold that pinned me to the sofa and stopped me riding my bike for two weeks.

And for once, I should have seen it coming. I say that because I've been using an iphone app called ithlete - it uses a dongle thing that plugs into the ear-phone socket of your phone and a standard Polar HRM belt to measure something called 'HRV - heart-rate variability. Basically you stand there and breathe in and out in time to the animated lungs on the screen for a minute, first thing every morning and it tells you how well recovered your nervous system is based on the difference between your intake and exhalation beats, or the gap between them, or something like that.

It's a bit like taking your resting heart rate in the morning, but a lot more sophisticated. You get a graph with averages over time along with a colour indication of whether you're totally recovered - green - and can kick yourself senseless. Or not quite recovered - orange - and should take things easy that day. Or, surprise, surprise, red, the devil colour, which means chill out, take a rest day, kick back or suffer the consequences...

Given that I can resist anything except the temptation to ride my bike and am quite capable of hammering myself into a deep hole, it makes a lot of sense.

But of course, it won't stop you getting ill. But it will spot the bloody thing coming. Which, if you look at the chart, is pretty much what happened. Two gentle dips followed by a nose dive into the depths of HRV horror that equated to being knocked out cold on the sofa like a dead whale on a beach.

I think it went somewhere down in the 40s, which given that normal is high 70s or more, says it all really. And then you can see it climbing again, until it hit 72 and like a muppet, I went night riding. 'It'll be steady.' Yeah right, ha bloody ha... Too much too soon. The line goes down again and it's taken another five days to get back to where it was. Lesson learned...

Anyway, still learning how the thing works. Obvious stuff - it's intensity that blasts you. You can do six or seven hours steady and as long as you drink, east and sleep properly, it has minimal impact on HRV, but blast out a hill interval session or beast yourself on the turbo and chances are, you'll know all about it next morning.

It seems accurate too. On days when it says I'm good, I'm good, even when I feel bad. And when it says I'm a bit off it, I am, even if I seem to feel okay before heading out. Obviously it's not going to improve fitness in itself, but it's a great way of working out how recovered you are, possibly when you're good to go hard again after illness or lay off and, just as importantly, it gives you objective evidence that you should back off, even if you don't really want to.

I'm not quite sure I like that last bit. I'm not sure I want to be told whether I can go riding or not by my phone and me, being me, I'm sure at some point we'll agree to differ and I'll go off on some epic day regardless and hang the consequences, but for now, it seems like a very good idea.

But for now I'm just about well enough to start feeling twitchy, grumpy and restless, which has got to be good, right? Er...