Jools – I turn mine quite often. It didn’t get anything resembling a dip until the bf moved in (!) but if I see one starting to form then I turn it and it goes away. It’s also got a summer side which isn’t as warm as the winter side. We rather like the toastie winter side as our cavernous half-renovated house can be a bit chilly!

Sounds great – we’ll be there.

I’ll be going for the gurn record, if that’s ok. Can I have a brass band?

I had a similar realisation. I’d thought that my back was in terminal decline until I realised that it was fine when I slept on friends’ floors. Scrapped my awful sprung mattress and bought a Waterlattex. All fixed. :D

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually something completely different but it’s easier and cleaner to be pissed off about the ‘pain in the arse’ comment.

No, sexy is the Singletrack Tandem Users Development Squad.

Would love to if I get my weekends back. They’ve been stolen by my business for the moment.

I read the Tyler Hamilton book. One of the things he said was that you could probably still win short races clean but it was the multi-day events which were debilitating and in which doping gave them the advantage. Or in that warped world, evened up the odds.

being much prettier now and not wanting to mush up my new face that cost me over 10 new xtr group sets

Tbh if OP hadn’t said she’d paid for it it wouldn’t have rung such alarm bells. I work in fashion and see people do eye-bogglingly self-destructive things for appearances’ sake and it upsets me. So forgive me if this wasn’t the case.

Anyway, healing – wherever – takes a lot of your physical resources. Although it’s not your arms or legs that are healing you should still build up to stuff you would have done gradually. And you will become more cavalier with yourself in general (like when it is all fine the next time you hit your head on a desk emptying the bin and you realise that you’re stronger than you think).

Oh and surgeons are usually terribly proud of their handiwork and will tell you not to spoil it by doing anything rash (you will anyway, we all do that terrible, injurious thing called age).

After reading (and refreshing) a couple of times it dawned on me that the OP has paid a lot of money to have her facial structure altered and now fear of stacking it onto the expensive new titanium bits is affecting her approach to riding.

Please tell me I’ve got it all wrong? It’s made me very sad.

Darn, I drove home from Buxton this evening. If I’d have known I could have stayed a bit later.

Although two hungry cats and Audrey the bottle-fed lamb might be unimpressed by my excuse for their late teas.

Yes, Strava is bad. There.

I’m in! Just got the email. :D

Oddly it doesn’t start ‘Dear mentally afflicted person, your self-flagellation starts here’. Or even ‘I stand before thee, Pen y Ghent the mighty, slayer of bicycles, dealer in despair, trespass on me at your peril’. Nah, just please do not delete this email until you have completed the event.

Time to do some training.

Despite all our efforts the only thing we killed was Binners’ chain. We can have another go if you like though :D

I went on a weeks road bike riding in Spain. I loved being able to do 80 – 120 km per day – ‘wow, we went that far on the map’ kind of thing. But by the end of the week I was missing being on my mountain bike – not how you ride but what you see. I decided it was about scale – on trails you see all sorts of smaller things; the texture of the trail, trailside oddities, little things that stick in your mind. And you also get great views. On the road, it’s all the bigger picture.

I don’t mind road riding and will do if I need to go further afield but I decided that I prefer the granularity of mountain biking.

I’m in!

Feed Zone cookbook is good – recipes for rice bars with egg and bacon in them which come out like savoury flapjacks. I seem to have lent mine out otherwise I’d write it out.

Train stop is Walsden if you’ve not been before. The climb is slightly more forgiving than the one out of Tod and there’s a train that stops there at 19.54 which is perfect timing.

But then again, you might like the Honeyhole special as a warm up 8O

Pints.

Mainly.

The bike ride is merely a pretext. :-)

Just back from a mega-setting up day. Still not achieved everything. Thanks for all the advice.

Anyone sending shop staff greatly appreciated – the best ones talk to people about what they would like, tell the story well (after all, shearing our own sheep and knitting amazing things from wedding dresses to tiny booties is definitely worth talking up) and wear clothes well (but not intimidatingly). Also must not mind that I am employing them to escape that commute (and possibly go riding in the daytime with Bunnyhop :wink: ).

I’ll be in touch once it settles down to just regular long days rather than monster shop fitting ones – looks like there’ll be a nice bit of riding to keep me smiling. :D

Thanks! Marple is on the way home…. I will see whether I can get there next week. I think I’ll be populating the shop with knits this Thursday evening.

I’ve been looking at trains too. It won’t be too bad. I hope. :?

I will only be able to go out during the day once I’ve found a shop angel Bunnyhop :( But maybe one will appear – the Hebden shop one floated in on a cloud and is fantastic.

Thanks! I am thinking about the part drive part ride option too – there seems to be a lot of route choice. I’ve noticed how close it is to Hayfield and will have a look.

It’s knitwear Bregante – all made in our Todmorden workshop. We’ve got a shop in Hebden Bridge (Makepiece if you do go there) and this is expansion (eek!).

I have some Pearl Izumi 3/4s – I think they’re the Sugar ones – which have a really great fitted waist that doesn’t dig in (I do notice that some shorts compress the diaphragm and this isn’t good for monster climbs where every atom of oxygen counts). Haven’t noticed the padding and have ridden all day in them which probably means that it’s good.

First time last year. Enjoyed it so much that I have put my entry in again.

Oh no! We started pretty much at the same time. I get all ‘great, there’s another girl’ for a couple of nanoseconds before lapsing back into ‘must beat her’. Crashing is rubbish and having bike nicked is poor payback for chivalry. :(

Sorry he’s not in the Midlands, but Ed Oxley is great and I’m a much better rider after one of his courses. I think Jedi is more your way and loads of people recommend him.

Not dead and not last.

But I’d be quite happy never to see a shiny root again, even the innocent ones had started to freak me out by stage 5.

I think it’s about more people cycling so that you understand how terrifying close overtaking is. I have to say that I quite often tell drivers if they’ve passed too close and I catch up with them at lights. I’m pretty polite and say I was terrified, tell them that the road surface is rubbish and you can’t always hold a precise line so there’s always a possibility that a near miss can end very badly etc and look female :-). So far, all drivers have been very apologetic.

After a bad week one lorry driver was particularly patient as I toiled up a local hill – held back and overtook me with lots of room once he had better visibility. He stopped half a mile later at the butty stop – so did I to say thank you. He said no worries, he was a cyclist too… which probably goes to show that more people cycling will increase consideration for cyclists.

You are a star! I’d started to build it up as impossible in my mind. But it looks doable. Well, at least try-able.

Apart from the tape. I have a strange and unhealthy attraction to tape. So if anyone finds a limply struggling figure trussed in tape and incapable of escaping (think mountain biking fly caught in the web between the trees), please release me. Or at least don’t laugh.

I’ve had that rash after a tick bite but it wasn’t immediate. Took me a while to connect the two events – wasn’t completely circular but it kind of moved. Said bite was in Germany in a Lymes area. I went and asked for the relevant antibiotics and they were forthcoming (with my mother haranguing me from Germany so I wouldn’t take no for an answer).

The antibiotics make you light sensitive – I managed to spend the best two weeks of that summer wearing full length sleeves and sitting in the shade :(

If you can find a cyclist friendly physio get yourself booked in. The best money I have spent. Things that I was worried were really in sticky decline have been fixed.

Not tonight :cry:

Just a couple of inches of rain forecast overnight… there’ll be only the tiniest suspicion of moistness.
:D

Lambs imprisoned. On our way.

What no sheep and cows sharing a field thread? Disappointed…
:D

Nice pics and nice vid.

It was a cracking day!

Current incumbent is being paid to ride huge mountains in Italy. Sounds like a terrible job.

Stubbing is good – also Old Gate on Market St (main road just before the bridge) is newly renovated and has an excellent selection of beers (both British and Belgian) and a seating area at the front where bikes will be ok.

On our way!

We’re off to do the Dyfi enduro. That’ll leave Calderdale empty – it’s all yours.

Where is it? It is strikingly similar to ours which is in Calderdale.

Ours is so vast that I have been trying to sell it for years. Although when the bf moved in it became a bit more cluttered with mountain bikes and therefore slightly less of an embarrassment. If it is structurally sound and big you can do a bit at a time (from experience). But it will cost double what you expect. No. Treble.

If the roof needs doing avoid. Stone slates are mandatory for listed buildings and eye wateringly expensive.

Planning may not be too bad as our council has started to realise that lived in buildings get maintained better. Listed building demands add to cost of building work.

Is that the same for blue tits? I have seen two dead on my route to work this morning.