blimy I could ride with people every night almost, does indeed sound like a good area to be in.

cheers, all very good info.
will sort myself out and contact some people for info.

I was under the impression that night riding at langdegla was against areas planning permission, something to do with parking. If the cafes open then obviously not.

sickens me to see bids on an obvious dodgy sale, bidders obviously know what they are buying and why they are cheap.

C&I in the Power Industry, and still on 9-5 hours
Present job is ace and enjoy the challange, great for cycling with full kitchen/showers/clothes drier and some ace off road commutes.

Best bit is knowing the place inside out and being put on a good flexi-time scheme to keep me sweet, 24 hours/3 days a week minimum and go out and ride when the sun shines…wahoo.

do you just rate your riding on how far it is from a trail centre?

stumpyjon
Northamptonshire is a big area,us in North/East Northants really enjoy our riding. We have some some great place's to play, and a large amount of varied trails to play on, and a thriving local race scene.

Oh well Racing Ralphs then.

you guys are talking like you want to go win! I'll be happy to survive.

So place your bets, the winner will be?

My money will be on Sam Morris from Bike Village for overall talent, Dan Darwood is a downhiller, but has he got the Stamina 😉

who do you think Rob.

Now I'm getting excited!
Just packing the XC race bike now, 1.9 conti's should give me enough gap on the uphill, I can mince down the hills on any tyre 😉

Will be interesting to see the range of weapons brought to the party.

so going to die!

What an experience, brutally hard and a great introduction for me to some ace trails at Kielder and Newcastleton. (Too much fireroad..!.. any less and we'd still be out there)

It's obvious an unbelievable amount of work went into this event, and for a first attempt on this scale it all worked well. The amount of local interest showed how much they were behind it too. Finishing prize of a beer and a burger added to the satisfaction of just finishing.

Not sure how many finally finished but I got in at 10.5 hours and heard that only about 40 had completed by then.

GPS stats of flag to flag ride time 10hr07 for 102.6 miles 11429 ft ascent.
Must have done 40 miles with brakes metal on metal, amazingly still slowed me enough for the final descent chase.

And for those that didn't hang around you got a thermal finishers mug and the winners/podium trophies were superb polished oak blocks.

The deep puddle after the food stop was indeed mental, hitting some of the others at speed and having the wave wash over my head was great fun.

Great event and superb course, railing those descents made all that climbing worth the pain. Managed to avoid the stings, and quite liked the challange of the improvised detour.

On the XC racer site it mentions several photographers who were there.

The party was well attended, great location on the seafront, the bartab didnt last long, it was getting abused heavily by non racer friends from what I saw, great idea though.
And cool off shore fireworks show specially for us racers too 😉
Head and legs both equally sore today.

I just find these posts highly amusing as they seem to play on people's stereotypical views of things and then give them a soapbox to shout from…unless you know 100% they are stolen, keep out of it as it could get nasty for you if you are shown to be wrong.

I'd rather highlight 4 potential stolen bikes so owners can identify them as stolen, which would be evidence enough. If nobody does identify them and the seller can answer all questions, justifying why he has put up such crap descriptions for over £8000 worth of products then fair enough.

Having had a bike stolen, I know scouring the forsales ads is about the only very small chance you have of ever seeing it again.

somebody must recognise the Ibis at least. Is there any evidence that reporting it to ebay actually does anything, apart from maybe removing the listings?

that was a really good fun course, did the 2 hr so not in your photos, but there was an official photographer, so should see some more.

Can't believe there is a bmx track that good in effectively someones back yard. mental.

100 miles off road is going to be bloody tough, a fast off road race pace for us average haveagos is about 12mph. And thats for an hour or two.

I'm thinking of all those rides in Wales and Peaks where all of a sudden doing 10mph is a challange. 10 hours is going to be a good time.

Ian Leitch will probably do it in about 6 hrs though 😉

Anyone got any info about camping?

my favourite from him was the 'ron jeremy' lookalike abuse (he really did look like ron jeremy though!!)

aw come on…..I'm not that fat or were you just checking out my "packet" 😉
my revenge was abusing him for being a Ben Elton look-a-like

Great fun event, if it it feels like my bones have turned to jelly!
Grant, we were ninth in the pairs and you had no chance of top ten ya slacker 😉

How much fun was that cottage descent, worth every uphill second for that.

Saw an ITV advert for their tour coverage last night…..Lance returns…can he do it…..bla bla bla

Surely their advert should have been based on Mark Cavendish for the UK audience and can he win as many stages as last year….

every item in the press that mentions lance needs a footnote:
OTHER CYCLISTS ARE AVAILABLE

RESULTS[/url]
The results are in and look good to me, nice one.

Lots of fast people out there, and I can now say I have raced Tracey Moseley and been well beaten 😉

timing should be done like the avalanche enduros. Much simpler to keep track of. Clock starts at your allocated start time (one less variable to get wrong) and stops when you cross the line. Sorted.

We really enjoyed the event because of the lack of need to be at a certain place for a certain time though. We had a great laugh riding all the other trails together as mates, even stopping for dinner half way through. Racing the bits we wanted in the order we chose.

I guess for the Avalanche there is queuing at the beginning of each section, which would be hell if the weather was crap. We never queued anywhere. Also your start time might be an hour out from your mates.

The concept of recording a start time and an end time is not to difficult, but needs to applied with a very strict procedure. It would not have been too hard surely to have a properly formatted sheet to log times on, (instead of small bits of cardboard i saw in use!) which are collected say every few hours from the timekeepers and delivered back to the central area at windy corner for a person to input on a rolling basis.

Electronic timing will always fail, you have to have a backup of people writing down times as well. This wasn’t happening on the climb section for sure.

I’d love to do this as a series, it was ace, but why pay expecting to not get a result.

Oh also the prizegiving was an ace laugh. Everyone who thought they were fast hanging around because each section had prizes down to 5th place. so thats about 40 prize winners.

lots of winners names shouted out….silence……………only 2 people were actually there in person. big anti-climax.

4 of us numplumz did the enduro and got interested when we saw from a preliminarty print out of one of the sections that we were all in the top ten! None of us are in the final results.

Don’t really expect any reliable results, when you saw the scribbled bits of paper the marshalls and timekeepers were using to input data into a spreadsheet late into the night, while the band were banging out tunes and people were almost serving food over their heads, its not a suprise.

Shame as it was a top event idea, but effectively we paid for results! we can ride the trails anytime.

fun bike…..shame the prat riding it isn’t so stylish!

Monster all day fun ride in the hills, but if pushed I’d say the Blur LT2 rides better, but that could just be the Pace….sorry DT suspension. They still don’t do damping to match Fox.

Just ridden in the rocky Sierra Nevada on a QR15 for the first time, I can Honestly say I have never felt so relaxed about riding super rocky trails, I’m damn sure the fact the forks tracked accurately played its part.

Better operation than having to unbolt my DT 20mm forks just to get the wheel out too.

they will inflate and seal real easy, but you might find the sidewalls will be pourous for days, the problem with such a lightweight tyre.

Course its worthwhile; there are no bosses in, holidays saved for better times and the cycle commute in is fun when it dosent really matter if you are late.

Oh, and you’d all be pissed if if there was no electric coming out of the sockets wouldn’t you. 😉