hot water. top tip!

my camelbak now nice and shiny. cheers for that.

i just like bikes, and whatever bike takes my mood when i get up (today it's the road bike in the morning, mtb in the evening when the dogwalkers have departed)

road biking in winter? lots of light – road bike lights are atrocious. and pick your route carefully, car drivers are even more bike blind at night!

what a coincidence. only yesterday i bought what can only be optimistically described as a cleaning kit on the grounds that what i'd casually assuming was dirt on the outside of the tube was in fact a perky colonistaion of mould.

those wee tube cleaning brushes work a treat. except they're maybe about 10 inches too short. i tried to disconnect the tube from the bladder. is it designed to do this or is it just a challenge too far for my girlishly weak hands?

the tablets camlebak recommend seem un-necessarily toxic (unless of course you're got a fungal proliferation of the type i have). anybody use anything different – naking soda/denture tabs etc? and should i be trying to disconnect that tube?

julian, you're surely not referring to the juan's post above?

two lane blacktop
thunderbolt and lightfoot

helmets and glasses

i'm such a pain in the backside about this. i won't go out without someone without a helmet and i get pretty miffed if there's no glasses happening. call me pernickety but i hate head injuries (particularly) in the young, stitching them up is a waste of time and boring after a while and serious injury is no joke.

as for eyes. first time you have to dig a twig out of someone's eyeball it's a wake up call, even if that wake up call takes the form of your colleagues phoning you to tell you that you have to come and see the **** mountain biker with the twig out his face.

but that's just me 😉

falling safely? maybe at low speed but for a high speed off i think this is a tad disingenuous.

i always wear a helmet, a new one this last couple of weeks as the last one breathed its last in a slate quarry where i punctured and headered a rock. it had cunningly hid itself so my master falling skills were outwitted. i have some excellent low speed brain injury xrays and ct scans at work. it's a motivator.

pads i only ever wear regularly on my mountain board. i don't like them on the bike, too bulky, too warm. that said i was melting it down a trail centre trail the other day and the thought occured to me that if i did have an off it would be hurting big time my mad falling skills being outweighed by the solidity of the surrounding trees and boulders.

tragically i think the main motivator for me padding up is age. no longer the elastic leaping up for me, more the realisation that yes indeed i am going to land like a fleshy sack of spuds. and being old it's going to take me that much longer than my more youthful brains in the toolbox testosterone fuelled colleagues to actualy heal.

people should wear what they want (except for helmets and glasses) esp if they can reveal to me how they can actually get up the hill without cooking in all their paddery, spine protectors and armoured pants. i get more bothered bythe notion of some sort of mtb fashion police than pad wearing.

i might be up for it if it's saturday as sunday is the first day of cx and i'm reasonably keen to do that

another day of solo january torture? how could i miss it!

same with me. no commercial use whatsoever, purely a recreational vehicle but commercial insurance nonetheless

all the advice above is sound.

the ligament in your pelvis is called your symphysis pubis and problems with it are grouped under symphysis pubis dysfunction. it's more common than people would think. it can cause long lasting and unpleasant problems so as above a discussion with a midwife would be well advised.

however, as with gps, there are good ones and others, well, not so good.

congrats!

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Geologist

is all i'm saying

i've got a felt f1x that i'm pretty into

my other half insisted i include /admit this

tub of vaseline in (her) bathroom cupbard marked 'bum only'

the omnipresent scent of degreaser

old bike helmets bolted to the shed to make handy hanging baskets

you don't give very clear picture of your symptoms other than there's a lot of them – numbness, pins and needles and pain really are three different things. plus trapped nerves (plural) – i'd be looking at something a bit more causative as the areas you describe cover a big range of nerve supply.

the advice above is good. get a second opinion. get referred on by your gp. if you have insurance now's the time to be thinking about using it but only if you're certain what specialist it is you need to see tho a neurologist would seem sensible.

that said, chronic pain issues are something the western model doesn't deal with very well so if, and it could very well turn out to be that way, 'conventional' medicine isn't working for you then some investigation of alternate therapies might be the way to go. and obviously if you're going down that route cut out the drugs/booze/fags, stay properly hydrated and eat well.

i liked the course. plenty quick and lots of room for overtaking. i probably shouldn't have done it with a cold and have paid for it since but wouldn't swap it. brilliant day, got to meet cullen and the boys who lapped me more than i really thought possible. and a handy reminder that all those back exercises the physio tells me to do really make life ona hardtaill much easier. all in a splendid time had.