Did anyone else look at this title and link it to the coke discovery on the beach? Made me smile

What a final lap! You have to love cx racing

I am organising one at the moment. I talked to the groom and worked out what he wanted from the weekend, we have decided on a rugby match (London Irish vs London Scots), beers and a curry. He wanted to keep the costs down, and I reckon most people are happy enough, there will be 24 of us, if it had been a weekend on poland etc I reckon half that number would have been able to attend! A far as I am concerned it gives all the men who will be attending the wedding the chance to have a common experience to chat about come the big day.

My mate is currently running 3rd in the pairs cat. Really happy for him, but in no way does it may me want to enter this particular race

I use M+ on my 13 mile commute, mix of country lanes and a small town. I am realy happy with them! I am worried about ever getting a puncture with them, as they were a very tight fit on my wheels!

Kennel outside, it is fully enclosed and in a sheltered part of the garden, it is stuffed full of rugs and we change the straw in it once a week! She runs outside at night when we tell her it is bedtime!

She is from working dog stock though, and the breeder advised that she would prefer being outside! Out neighbours also keep their working labs outside.

Nothing is fixed to the walls with our furniture! By the time I have constructed the s@@@@@@ thing it is a ball ache too far to start messing about with raw plugs and screws! Both children currently still breathing, although I am not in the same room as them

A few trips to BPW, probably on my HT, and some bikepacking with my new fatbike! Hopefully get fit enough to enjoy bimbling around pivot24/12 on my fatbike!

Oh and do lots of cycle commuting, I dropped off last term with back issues!

Lemsip! I am living the rock n roll life! All 4 of us have come down with colds so it is a suitable end to 2016 I feel!

Uk bike skills / Tony or Nathan will put you right!

Tony is known as Jedi for very good reason! Best £200 you can spend!

I have just bought my lad a bmx, he doesn’t need to go to a full on bmx track to have fun on it! The handling skills etc that he will build up by just dicking about on it (all day everyday since Christmas) will pay huge dividends at some point, if not screw it he has having a laugh on his bike!!!

I think it is amazing that he is out riding these trail centres but do think you should have thought ALOT more about the conditions before going out! It is ok to recognise after the fact and talk about buying a new bike but he still had a bloomin uncomfortable time, a couple of those and he may decide it is all a bit shyte!

So sad! I am a total SW nerd and a little part of my childhood has just passed on

Best is my Lego technics arocs Mercedes lorry! It is blooming massive and it is going to happily fill Boxing Day……….and some more! The instruction manual is nearly an inch thick!

Worst was a toy frog that croaks oh come all ye faithful! i am in a competition with my parents for most tacky Christmas present and they have won this year by some margin!

We have a set budget for presents/food etc and don’t go above it, so we don’t rack up debt! I am not fussed about the day but with two young children I love to see their excitement and getting to create our own family traditions!

So I went back to Jedi today!

This morning I was massively tense and nervous, so much so I could hardly ride! Tony did what I asked and it was an XC skills based session, he never once mentioned jumping! I just worked on the skills he suggested! I took my HT specifically so I wouldn’t have to do any drops or jumps!!!

This afternoon so much had changed, I was relaxed again and trusted my skills, so much so that I started jumping the lines Tony was sending me down! The man is a genius I tell you!!!!!!

Found the fun again

It is Jedi who I am off to see on Thursday! Looking at his blog post he worked on someones xc skills today, I may well ask that we focus in that direction!

cheers all!

For some reason the last half of my post didn’t happen!

It finished with:

Damn good idea Dover, I will try it next time I am out riding! It also gets me out on the fatbije which is fun! Are you going to be riding past my place after you are done with the rov 300? We could do a fatbike bimble

I am sure the coach will be over the moon when I rock up in my fatbike

Ahem not that I stupidly started a duplicate thread because I didn’t do a search! (Hoping it disappears off pg1 soon)

My aims are

1) Race a 12hr solo (twentyfour12)
2) Do some bikepacking including some wild camping
3) Ride the SDW which may include goal 2 as I am very slow!

B*****r can I plead a severe case of not doing my homework properly!

I like them! My local one (Guildford) has a better range of bikes and stock than any other bike shop I know and they price match! Just bought a charge cooker maxi from them which was reduced by about £200! Click and collect, it arrived the next day and the shop staff were all friendly and helpful!

I will happily buy from them in the future, nothing wrong with them just because they are big! We all seem to like crc and wiggle, at least Evans have a high street presence! I have also shopped at Halfords and found them fine as well, either I am just lucky!

Weirdly I get all the spannering done on my bikes by a local shop that only does bike servicing, they are based near where I live! Cyclesphere in Bordon, great blokes and decent prices!

The best skills day I ever had only taught me about 5 things! However those things were exactly what I needed in order to progress my riding! I think sometimes when people are coached it is easy to expect to get masses of information, when sometimes what you actually need is simplicity! Also it might be that on a group skills day it isn’t easy to give 1:1 instruction, hence the cheaper price!

For example when I went for my 1 day 1:1 course I was taught 4 mental questions to ask myself before I rode something, and one technique for getting air. The mental questions have become central to my riding and mean that I ride stuff better than before (still not very good compared to many I accept). He could have made himself sound amazing by telling me all sorts of stuff to focus on, and apply, and I would have left the day none the wiser!

However he did show me how to apply each of the methods, and rode the jumps and drops to demonstrate good and bad technique, I then realised that I can’t translate words into actions but I can copy things, and also that he can ride at a level I can only imagine!

What a scene! Properly unleashed doing dark side stuff! He was actually scary again!

The only bits I didn’t like were the CGId Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher. It may have been an artifact of seeing it in 3d but they both looked quite jarringly CGI!!

I did really enjoy the film and thought the tone was very different to the episodic films, but as it said above, did everyone have to die!!!!!

At work about to teach a full day, working on about 2.5hrs sleep….today could be interesting!

You can have my 26″ Soul………..when you pry it out of my cold dead hands 😀

As others have said CBT might be a way forward, however I would not advise a book, you can’t really get it from one! More towards group or solo with a therapist. My therapist steered me away from CBT as my mind would dissect it too much, and would destroy the group dynamic (her words not mine!).

I found it useful to realise that I am on the spectrum, not because it gives me an excuse, but rather it allows me a prism to view my behaviour through! I think that along with the therapy I developed a toolbox of strategies for interacting with people in a more positive way!

We never have full roast as none of us like it! The children want sushi as a starter, maybe a light pasta dish for main, then a raspberry ice cream concoction that my wife makes that we all love!

Breakfast is scrambled eggs in toasted brioche, my daughter and I share the smoked salmon as my wife and son don’t like it!

51 transporter combi!

I am an idiot! Not caddy, kombi! Basically like yours only older yak!

But given what everyone has said it is the welding/ miles I should be scared of!

I had just started Uni, and a guy down the corridor who played bass, woke up plugged in and just started riffing on ‘another one bites the dust’! A little bit sick, but what a baseline!

I wish I could have seen him live, as I think he was an amazing performer.

Do I have it all the wrong way round, but I seem to remember the day before he came out and admitted he had HIV, then died the next day? Please someone confirm this or deny it, it was my first term at uni and things were a little ‘hazy’!

It was a very long ago that I did any sort of number theory, but numbers do not need to relate to anything in the real world! If I recall you need to view numbers as sets, so zero is the set which contains no members, one is a set that contains the set zero (think bags within bags!) within this system 1+1=2 is proven, and any link to reality be damned

Cheers all!

I do think it was the rim/ghetto combination! Jedi certainly thought it might be the ghetto set up! I am going to go with the proper stans tape and although the conti’s are probably fine…….I have lost confidence so a change is required!

Will have a look for those tyres you mention yak!

The problem with fitness is how specific it is! I have done a couple of ironman races, and even then when i moved over to XC and CX I really struggled! ironman is about maintaining a certain pace for X hours! XC racing is much more about max efforts then quick recovery before repeating (until you are sick it would seem!).

I have tried XC racing and like others I found getting dropped within 200m of the start a tad demoralising, add to that rocking up for the fun race in baggies and flats, and seeing a racing whippet in full lycra on a very light carbon hardtail line up next to you, made me question if I had entered the right cat!

I go to XC races as they (southern xc/rampage) have a great social scene for childrens racing and the parents, but if it wasn’t for my children I doubt I would go, in addition it is knowing the other parents that makes things more interesting!

CX and enduro seem to have nailed the social aspects of racing (meander the transitions and nail it) or the racing aspects no matter your level, (CX race I have always been racing someone even if we were both BOP!)

It is always eye opening to figure out the speed top marathon runners can maintain and then try to replicate it for any sort of distance! Even sprinting (in my mind) I can’t match 4:40 pace for anything more than about 100m!

At the other end of the scale it is amazing what you can achieve if you are bloody obstinate! Did the great south run yesterday in 1:40! A terribly slow time I accept, and one where the pace matched my London marathon pace 6 months ago! The odd thing is I have done 0km of run training since London. The onyl difference is that I would not have wanted to run another m yesterday, but at London I plodded on for another 16 miles!

I have entered this as my first 12hr solo! I will be like yak, treating it as a bit of a holiday with a race in the middle!

My training plan is currently focused on: riding my bike! I might have to get that nailed down a bit more soon!

I was thinking of trying out a bit of singlespeeding over the winter to build up some strength, but a potential 29er SS sale seems to have fallen through…..and my eye has been taken by a 26″ HT! I am currently persuading myself that going 26″HT will hit the retro niche….and ermmmmm……well I want it! Not sure if I would do 12hrs on it, but I am tempted!

I will try to post here to keep you updated, no matter how badly you think your training is going, it will still be better than mine!

I do have a prejudice of morbid obesity, I know this and have to be self aware enough not to be a judgmental prick when seeing morbidly obese adults! However as a teacher when I see pupils who are morbidly obese I get really angry with the parents, as far as I am concerned it is a clear sign of neglect and someone should be taking the parents to task over it! I don’t blame the children, they genuinely don’t know better and think crisps and energy drink is a normal breakfast!

I used to be quite bad a buying stuff on credit (in my 20’s) but since buying a house and having a wife who is great with money i have come to enjoy the delayed gratification of having a bike fund and saving into it each month, to get to the point where I can splurge!

The only issue I now have is I am getting to the point of not wanting to spend the money at all on bikes, because it is a fair chunk of cash in one go, and I like the security blanket of the savings! Eg there is a really nice SS on the classifieds, that I reckon would fit, and I have the money in savings to buy it……….but I have never ridden a SS rigid before and am not sure I am not just impulse buying and I would come to regret it later! Even my wife has given me the ok…..I am just fully procrastinating!

I think I may well be sticking with my 26″ wheeled Five for a while!

None from my school days, they weren’t the happiest days of my life.

A couple from Uni, we still see each other quite a few times a year, although no one from my actual course!

Most of my friends now have come from my interests after Uni, we regularly have lunch / meet up with some triathlon friends despite not having done a tri for about 9 years!

Being quite shy does limit things though, I enjoy time with other people when I am out with them, but the thought of arranging it, and going, makes me incredibly nervous!

Sell all bikes, buy one, get out and ride, and stop worrying!

I have an 26″ orange five! It is the perfect bike for all the trails I ride, because it is the only bike i have! I never worry about over/under biked because there is no alternative!