Nice one!

Agreed. I thought it was basically a 2t difference between wheel sizes

Fwiw I use 34t front (11-42 10speed rear) with 27.5 and have no issues. I may go up to 36t soon.

BBC Wales had reports on Manon Carpenter after the last two UCI DH events too.

Bike ones our club usually has someone who photos for free and puts them on Facebook afterwards.

I think this is a big contributor to the perceived expense of £6 – I’ve got a fair few images that were uploaded for free by various photogs at different events. Most people buy a photo and don’t print it out, just whack it on Facebook, so a super high quality image isn’t really necessary and the free ones probably serve the purpose.

Hob-Nobs pic is great, if it was me I’d happily pay £15+ for the high-res file as its interesting enough to print out.

Never watched a race long enough to see a podium on telly/net, as soon as the winners over the finish line i switch off, so never noticed them.

The thing I thought quite amusing and out-of-place was the shimano girls in bikinis holding umbrellas over athletes to mark the launch of XTR Di2 at whatever UCI world cup race it was.

Wheelies shops are Tredz and Wheelies in Swansea centre

I’m not sure they are, if I’ve remembered/understood correctly, Tredz/WheeliesDirect have one or some of the same directors but are different companies.

I heard that Wheelies in Uplands used to be the same company as Wheelies Direct but now they are different companies. This was according to a kid in the shop when i asked about getting a bike from wheelies direct into the store to look at.

got a pair of berghaus vibram soled jobbies for £30 in a designer outlet. Seem comfortable although no arch support really

I haven’t bought a cycling image but I’d certainly pay for something like that enduro one, with or without pterodactlys. I think there are two issues with cycling ones, firstly a lot of the xc ones don’t exactly look spectacular so once you’ve seen one photo of you slogging along some flat singletrack you’ve seen them all, I’d be much more keen to buy if the photo was on an a-line making it look difficult! Secondly so many get uploaded onto facebook to look at for free which reduces the percieved value.

Womens mtb on now on tinterweb if anyone is remotely interested…

I actually like the look of that Chinese frame in the link

Dropping me at the train station to go to a party aged 17: “if you’re going to get pissed stay away from drugs, if you’re going to get high don’t drink”

That the only advice I remember anyway…

Regularly. My default go-to healing method when I hurt myself and can’t ride is to put fancy bits on the credit card. Although I kid myself I need them, or that the few g’s saved will actually make a difference. Having had a nagging injury for a while the c-card is feeling it. Most recent being a thompson seatpost and a mt zoom clamp (I did save over 50g for £20 on with the clamp though)

wasn’t riding at the time but in the vein of tomd’s answer, a while ago I saw a guy on a roadie in a skinsuit with a full on pain face on weaving in and out of stationary traffic and bits of coned off roadworks at a fair lick and making a pretty decent job of it, until he misjudged the gap between two cones, one cone somehow got fed into into his drive-train and rider, bike and cone all went flying in different directions. Hope the bloke and his bike were ok but i couldn’t help but laugh.

I’d like to watch the mtb, but its on BT sport, which desipite being free, seems like you have to pay for a set-top box even if you want to watch it on the app, in order to ‘activate’ it. Not sure if its worth £14. Anyone got the set-top box and find it remotely useful?

Cheers, I wondered that. I’m going to start off getting some of those specialized shims to align my foot angle and see if that helps before getting a cleat assessment.

This being the European Games that BC isn’t sending any athletes to?

Mtb on Sat I think

Guardian sports photo of the day makes the mtb look interesting:
Xc climb photo

Unlucky with the crash, but well done on the result anyway.

I am also in racing doldrums land. If my maths and understanding of the points system is correct I’m actually doing ok in my regional series standings – more by dint of few people doing them all than any actual skill. There’s one more race to go in a few weeks, which I had in my head would suit me, and I’ve some painful niggling in my leg the last month which means I can’t really ride, and if I do I can’t put the power down. Physio in the morning – fingers crossed he can work some magic

Fair weather cyclists are great, they pander to your ego by providing slow moving targets to pass :-)

Especially when you overtake roadies while on the road on an mtb.

i seem to be almost constantly injured to some extent at the moment. Currently nursing strained groin and hamstring. tried to ride through it for a couple of weeks but its not happening. feeling my fitness leaching away and with my last race of the year early July I’m a bit narked. still seeming some of your injuries makes me pretty thankful!

I once had to go to the docs with a painful swollen ball, got a random appt. turned out to be a female doc, but a late middle aged woman of little attraction so not a massive amount of embarrassment there. However when it came to the examination she said “shall I get the nurse ( who was young and pretty) to be a chaperone?” Hmm let me think… Be humiliated by one female doc or be humiliated by a female doc with an attractive nurse watching??

A book would be brilliant.

Would also be amazing to get some more of the orange mint sauce jerseys made!

. And who in their right mind would want to upset half a ton of dum animal often piloted by someone with less intelligence than the horse

This. I amazes me the speed that strava says people go down one narrow and well used bridle way with blind corners near me. Meet anything going the other way at 50kmh and someone will end up in the hospital.

On the plus side, horses and cyclists can both gang up on chavs razzing their 105’s round quiet country lanes!

I spend a decent amount of time lying down, feet on a pillow to elevate them slightly.

I’m currently reading through https://mintsaucembuk.wordpress.com

This is great – just what i need to read while i eat my sarnies :-)

I ate in y sospan whne I was up there before, they had a midweek to course deal for £15 and it was a tasty decent portion.

footflaps, mikewsmith,

That was tongue in cheek – clearly we invited them becuase we wanted them there. I was just highlighting the variation in gift amounts – though we were a bit surprised as they were close relations, and my wife (before we were together) had spent hundreds at their weddings / been a bridesmaid etc.

When I got married a couple of years ago we had a john lewis gift list of the standard, cooking stuff, plates, towels etc. put a whole range of stuff at varying prices on. Couldn’t believe how generous many people were.

4 people were absolute stinges though, 2 couples with the best paid jobs of all the guests(one earning a couple of hundred k a year in the city) clubbed together spending about £30 per couple, despite the fact they brought 4 kids with them too. I told the caterers to p!ss in their soup.

We typically spend between 50-100 quid depending on how good friends they are and on what they are after. I’m more inclined to spend more on an actual gift than a cash donation – no logic, just you often see really cool things on gift lists.

The climbs are already brutally steep, but could contain way more interesting features too

Plenty of tech climbs in some of the other courses by the looks of he the footage e.g the ‘expert’ climb at Novo Mesto. I’m looking forward to watching the Lenzerheide one as I’m guessing that will be full of natural tech.

I really hope xc does get more popular again. It’s the most accessible form of mtb racing so I don’t understand why more people aren’t frothing on it. I was so surprised when I got back into riding bikes last year at how small the fields were compared to when I last raced in the mid nineties.

There is a road by me that’s a dual carriageway with no cycle lanes, it constantly busy, often with stop start traffic due to traffic lights. 100 yards away, across a grassy area, with lots of linked access points where roads meet the dual cariageway, is a wide, well surfaced, cycle path and footpath (white line separated). You still get cyclists just using the road, weaving in and out of traffic. I can’t really understand why people aren’t using the cycle path. During commuter time the cycle path has minimal traffic and you can easily average 30+kmh along it safely without breathing in exhaust fumes. Admittedly in school hols/weekends in the middle of the day its busy with families but otherwise I’d have thought is faster than the road.

lap after lap after lap of watching 29ers being riden by lycra clad shaven legged weight wennies isn’t my idea of fun.

If I’m planning on watching it live I tend to go for a ride first and beast myself, have some food, watch the start and the first lap, then alf watch and doze, browse interweb/papers for the middle and watch the last 2-3 laps avidly. much better than watching football/ the grand prix / snooker etc etc …

They might be wearing lycra and riding 29ers but i reckon there are a fair few sections on WC courses that the average baggy wearing, FS riding UK trail rider would baulk at!

edit. agree with mrblobby the PB photos were really good.

I saw a bit of FB chat after the BC round at Newnham about trying to bring a world cup xco race to the uk. Probably just chatter but I’d be well up for watcing one live! Shame the Margam worldcup course isnt being used.

Maybe pivot les though know very little about these

I lust after these bikes (well the 27.5 more so). Seen a few in the flesh and they look gorgeous. All the reports I’ve read are very complimentary too.

I find the weight thing a bit bizarre in an xc fork, if it was lighter than a SID I’m sure they would be much more popular, even with the reports of flex issues. I wonder if they will try to reduce weight or if they’ve got that design as light as they can? For the average xc rider (non-sponsored), a lighter cheaper fork is a no-brainer surely.

I think head to head racing is way more interesting than DH where, unless somthing crazy happens, when you’ve watched a couple of runs its much of a muchness.

For the general public / mtbers with short attention spans its a shame they’ve ditched XCE, while I didn’t think the courses were always quite right (need to be a touch longer at times and more technical) I think from a viewing perspective it was probably the best.

I can’t believe how little coverage xc gets both online and in the mags. Grant ferguson is doing really well in the u23, 4th last week, which you’ll have thought would be worth a mention on some of the british websites but I didn’t see anything.
Though the xc (mtb in general) content is pretty poor on the BC cycling website too.

Will have a look at that pb coverage later

October works out perfectly for me so long as I can nurse my current groupset through to the then as I’ll have finished paying off the bike so will have no guilt spending more money on the bike!

So for those of us not certain enough to pre-order, when is the cassette,mech and shifter likely to be avail? I guess once stock starts coming it comes fairly regular?

I just bought a Met Veleno as my old helmet was too hot. Very happy with it so far – nice and cool and not too heavy.

Which bit of the Bordon ranges was it? Longmoor?

If you do go for the south downs area make sure to pop into the Harrow (near Petersfield ). Worlds greatest pub, and nice riding round the hangers nearby if it’s been dry.

I do intervals on my mountain bike as I gave up gym membership, just use a strava segement of the appropriate length and steepness and repeat over and over again. Better on road for uniformity but fun on off-road climbs too. Plus you end up with a KOM if you are training hard enough :-)

Agreed though that check with doc and break back in slowly. I had pneumonia a few years ago and even though I was officially ‘better’ after a month or so it was triple that before I felt fully 100%