Thanks for the heads up marvincooper. I was hoping it’d be an easy ticket to doing the SDW. Prob just do it sometime by myself when the weather, commitments and motivation combine.

I’m still buzzing from the weekend. Around 6 hrs each day but that wasn’t what it was about. Great to do some real MOUNTAIN biking. I really enjoyed shouldering my bike and trudging up that smashed up tree ascent. How perverse is that?
Hard to say this without sounding sexist but how gnarr were the ladies? My experience is that the girls tend not to enjoy rocky descents as much as a lot of the guys but these girls (and I’m including the over 50’s lady in this) were proper hardcore. Taking a race bike down the gap descent was not for the faint hearted and they were clocking times in the 4-5hr bracket each day.

I used up 4 GXP BB’s in a year, they are utter crap. Bought a new SLX crankset with BB included for £100 and am well pleased that I can now forget about the bloody thing for a bit.

Similar here. They left me my Hope battery, pump, allen keys etc. Just took the gels.
Did leave me a banana though to race for 4 hours on. Bless em.

Definately there were photos being taken. Damned if I know where on the web to look for them! Maybe on Monday something will appear on the Hargroves cycles site.

Get well soon c klien87. Typical racers eh? Instead of shouting for an Ambulance, the cries of ‘medic’ filled the air.
Got 40th place in the 7 laps and was well pleased as I’ve never ridden that far. Very worn out today.
Great course wasn’t it.

It’ll be pretty muddy, best left till it’s dry. On a nice day it’s a lovely place to ride and the red route is not technical if ridden slowly (if ridden very fast it’s superb)

In reply to the OP’s question, last time this happened to me (at around midnight on a wednesday night in freezing fog!), I took a week off the bike and ate meals like mousaka and chips with extra toast for the first 4 evenings. Also had a beer every night. I probably could have got riding again after 2-3 days but needed a little time to mentally recover and remember the joy of riding again.

Watch; Cavendish The Human Missile on youtube. I guarantee you’ll find yourself going for it on the turbo during clips of him sprinting. It’s a good watch too.

2×10. You lose the big gears for if you ride on the road before, during or after your off road fun. You also lose your twiddly gears for when you’re absolutely cooked on an epic and just need to get home.
I’m convinced it’s marketing bullshit and we’ll be sold the new amazing 3×10 setup in a couple of years.
Please wake up and smell the coffee guys!

Hosed down? Heresey! These bikes were ‘showroom’.

No, that was just lame of me. Can’t believe I didn’t notice it.

Ha ha Gee, too right. I gave mine some proper tlc before my last race and apart from loosing half a pound of oily grime from the frame I noticed the BB had about 5mm of play in it. Had to do the race with sloppy cranks. Silly boy!

They WERE very beautiful. Secretly jelous of all those lovely lines. If I had one I’d polish it all the time. With work, training and making bloody half tasty pasta dishes all the time, I’m glad I’ve got a simple hardtail with a cheap, disposable drivetrain to not worry about.

I’m riding so much at the moment at stupid times of night and morning,I just wipe my chain with a rag and re-lube, check the gears are indexing and wait for a rainy road ride to give it a wash. :lol:

Gee, see my thread about incredibly clean bikes, do you think there’s a correlation? I was on Pitch today (had a fantastic time on an, ahem, grubby hardtail).

I ripped the bar ends off Ergons going up a steep hill on my SS. this meant the entire grip slid off and I had to ride the rest of the day with bare metal under my right hand. Considering my SS is also ridged and we went to a jump park en-route, I reckon I must be very manly indeed. 8O
If you are not quite as butch as me, I’d recommend any lock on grip with the lovely Specialized bar ends.
If you don’t like bar ends then you’re probably spending too much time looking at magazines and not enough time riding. :wink:

Feel your pain lazybike. I’ve done 7 sessions on the turbo since I last went out. I can’t take much more!

I hate riding on main roads with a passion. Minor roads are fun but surely are an ice risk at the moment.

Experienced fantastic service from them too, actually next day! Only place I look now. Plus it’s a really well laid out website with excellent close up pics of treads and comparitive charts of various model options.
Nice when someone really gets it right.

A lot of replies about shifters and indexing, but all things inc fitness being the same surely having to shift chainrings halfway through the gear progression is a hinderance?

Used one on the front for the first time today. Tubless ready, double defence 2.25.
Nice tyre, good alround mix of speed and grip. Ok in muddy and dry bits.
There are better tyres for specific situations but this seems like a nice compromise. Easy to air up, very strong, worked well with Ralph on the back even in the really slimey stuff.
Can get on with training now and stop spending hours pontificating about tyres.

They’ve sent 2 sets back to us this year saying nothing’s wrong. Can’t be arsed any more, just do the wiggle and then don’t touch it. Got used to it now.

Nervous to do that as is nicely sealed etc. Shouldn’t really have to with a £300 light, £80 battery surely?

All 3 of my night riding buddies have hope lights. ALL battery/charger units purchased since circa 2008 have had continual problems exactly as described with similar response from Hope.
I think they are being let down by their supplier and it is damaging their reputation (with us anyway).

Stupid thing is because I spent a fortune on some beautiful new Hope QR’s I stick with them despite their loosening trait even though I’ve got about 6 Shimano qr’s in the shed. Daft or what?

Damn their eyes! First venture into Maxxis land. Had a wobbly Intense and now this one. Thought I’d break from my trusty Mud- x. Pah!

I bought it online from next day tyres, would have loved to have bought it from LBS but not available. I really don’t want the hassle of having to package and pay to return it. Are you you seriously telling me that £43 Maxxis tyre is this poor?

Jedi: I’ve already tried this.

Thanks for the brainstorm guys. Have just bought some glasses with interchangable lenses for £30, so a fairly cheap experiment.

I’m in the same position as you nammynake, I really want to do a 24. I believe that goals need to inspire you and this one grabbed me from the first time I heard of it.
Now I’ve got to somehow change my riding style from 4hrs flat out to 24hrs of moderate effort.
Bonkers though this target seems, I figure that learning efficiency and endurance has to be the best beginning to an illustrious racing career (ahem, at 37.)
I’ve done one race – Maxx 40 in the autumn, and to begin with the challenge with my mates was to finish it within about 6.30hrs. Then I got into training and looked up the winning times for the past 3 years – circa 4hrs, and trained to that target i.e. maintaining 10mph average on varied and hilly terrain. In the end I came second with a time of 4.02hrs.
Goal for this one is to ride for 20hrs with 4 meal breaks, maintaining an average speed whilst riding of 8.5mph. This will probably change over the next few months but it’s a starting point. At the moment I’m simply trying to ride as much as possible (about 10-12hrs week) both on a turbo and out in the mud at Bedgebury as well as mates rides etc.
If you fancy swapping emails so we can do a bit of motavating during the dark months then lets do so (just tell me how to on this forum).

Thing is I’m enjoying training for future events. I like to go fast for several hours without stopping more than is absolutely essential. I hate faff but if I’m going to do some endurance events then I’m going to cop a clod in the eye at some point. The backs of my gloves were covered with mud, snot, sweat, more mud…
My jersey pockets were wet, so kitchen roll would have disintegrated, my entire body was covered in a carapace of solidified mud with dripping mud on top and this was with a rear mudguard and front neo.
It really was a smashing day. However still picking bits of grit out my eyes 4 hours later.

Got a Neogaurd which normally does the business, today was just a bit ‘special’. Getting the feeling on here that a pint of MTFU is in order and that’s just fine with me. I expected howls of “protect your eyes you fool” etc

I must own up to having a squeezy bottle helmet mounted squirty system daydream like on a car windscreen, however it fell foul of golden rule No.1: Less is more.

My gloves were sodden and filthy, not going to work.