I was thinking of an anthem as well but I already have the x1 26er which is better specced that the current x29 1.

Bump, no one own one?

Sad story really especially for the children.

Im getting a warranty replacement from halfords, will inspect it before taking it from the shop this time.

Im going to take mine back in tomorrow as there is a small crack between the top and seat tube, see what they say. Bit of a hassle really as it is a 2 hr round trip to my nearest store.

Micarms – did halfords replace the bike/frame??

Also reduce the caffeine/booze until you reduce the anxiety.

Mayby you see this symptom as a threat to you, which makes you worry (seen the docs) and this is enough to keep you on alert, checking on it to see if it has gone. For me the way it goes away is to accept it, allow it be there, stop seeing it as a threat and go on with your life. It fades away.

Have you been under some stress lately? That probably brought it on.

For me cbt was useful if you had a specific, defined problem. Sometimes you may have been under too much stress, you have experienced a symptom of excess stress and now this symptom is stressing (worrying) you.

Do you have anxieties/worries in general? If anxious about something it is then difficult to sleep because the fight/flight is activated and you have a lot of adrenaline.

Another one is being anxious about not sleeping itself, not sleeping, more anxiety etc.

When I had anxiety disorder my mind and body used to way overreact to what you’d now call normal stressors.

Anxiety for me was a fear of these feelings (bodily and mentally) and I would do everything I could to not experience them. Avoidance, meditation, CBT, docs, deep breathing, researching, chat forums support. But this fearful behaviour only fuelled the fear and only by stopping the behaviour and letting the anxiety run its course did I recover.

Although my GP was very nice to me she didn’t help me rid of the anxiety. I luckily came across a couple of books that exsufferers had written.

You can either avoid, but that fear will remain, or go there (facing) and just accept you’ll feel anxious while you desensetize over repeated exposure. Show your anxiety control centre that this situation is nothing to be scared of by quitting worrying about it.

Do you mean start to their career, or start of the season? Think arsenal went a whole season unbeaten in the prem.

Mayby try a different approach? Instead of thinking your way out of it (analysis), just do it (exposure), and accept the nervous feelings. Does it matter if you go flat out or or not perform to your very best ? See if this reduces the fight or flight feelings (nervousness) you seem to be getting.

Remember about weight as well if you intend to carry it. Lighter the weight, tighter / smaller the bag.

What do you use as a stove? I sometimes use a single person trangia 28 which is around 300g, but also use a ti kettle/karrimor ti stove/lightweight windshield

Edit: something else important missed is my travel tap water bottle and a platypuss bottle.

The list wasn’t mean’t to be exhaustive, more to give an idea of the heavier items, but i do take things like phone, map, compass (whistle built into compass) small first aid kit etc. Probably still missed a few things off the list. Wild Camp mostly in snowdonia mountains where i live. Planning on going to the glyderau on sunday night.

Im into this, not ultralight but light enough.

Rucksack: osprey talon 44 (1kg)
Tent: laser competition (1kg)
Sleeping bag: alpkit pd400 (0.75kg)
Sleeping mat: exped 7 ul (0.5kg)
Stove: trangia 28 (0.3kg)
Pillow: exped (0.1kg)
Cup / plate / spork (0.15kg)
Seat: thermarest z lite (0.1kg)

Which is around 4kg, then there are the spare clothes, food, firestarter, headtorch which probably makes it around 5.5 mayby 6 kg for a single overnighter. If the forecast is bad ill take the akto and more clothes.

It’s underlying fear, the more you worry about it the more you’ll experience it. When adrenaline is squirted into your body your mind races with questioning thoughts and your body is primed for fleeing or fighting. The last thing you’ll be able to do is sleep.

Accept you have it for a while, it’s only temporary if you stop worrying about it.

I’d look for a secondhand akto on ebay. Pretty much bombproof, can take a lot of wind, excellent porch and good innerspace for one. I found the headroom at the centre of the tent better than my previous superlite voyager. I found the laser comp a bit claustraphobic, but you may find its ok for you.

Nothing better than a wild camp away from it all.

It had severe anxiety a few years ago, resulted in a few ER trips, thought I was having a heart attack and I practically lived at my GP surgery. Guess I felt ‘safe’ there.

What I learned is that you have to consciously feed the anxiety for it to remain. Face it, accept the strange questioning thoughts and physical symptoms and over time it calmed down and went away. For around 2 years I got really into the anxiety, researched everything. It was when I stopped this that things got better and the anxiety went away. It is your self defense mechanism and will always protect you from your anxieties/fears; it is amaizing what constant excess adrenaline can do to you on a pshycological (sp?) and physically. When the fight or flight response is activated, you feel very nervous, have questioning thoughts and physical symptoms ( racing heart, sweating, etc). You are primed to fight or flee. But this is happening inappropriately because of your previous worrying/analysis.

It isn’t easy, but it will get better. When you get better you will also realise the damaging effect that worrying nedlessly can have on you, whether it be work, relationships, etc.

Constant high adrenaline in your body causes both bodily and mental symptoms. It’s your self defence mechanism priming you for fighting or fleeing. When there is nothing in your environment to fight or flee, we become fearful of the actual symptoms themselves. You can’t sleep as you’re on alert, beating heart (is it a heart attack?), tight band around the head to name but a few symptoms. Then there is the questioning thoughts, ‘what if this…, what if that?’. Constant.

These symptoms are not the cause, but the effect of your previous worrying. Worrying = analysis. Anxiety sufferers tend to fix onto a few symptoms and are scared of these.

The way out of it is to prove to your anxious mind that these fears have now gone. To do this completely stop analysing what is wrong with you or whether the docs missed something. So the next time you get an anxious thought or symptom, divert your mind onto something else. Don’t attempt to resolve or answer the question. Don’t keep researching why, what, etc. Basically consciously don’t feed it at all. While recovering I still got the anxious thoughts and bodily symptoms, but accepted them instead of reacting to them.

It took me about a month or two of practising this new behaviour for them to go away. And I was in a pretty bad way.

I suffered from an anxiety disorder for a few years, resulted in many trips to AE and to the docs. This is what I did to recover.

Fear and anxiety have to be fed to remain. It isn’t what happens to you thats the problem, but your reaction to what happens.

Take away your reaction and over time the fear state, which keeps bringing up the questioning thoughts and possibly physical sensations will slowly dissipate and eventually go away.

What I did was go about my normal day as best as I could, accepting the strange thoughts and bodily symptoms. Don’t seek reasurrances from doctors, hypnotherapists…., dont analyse your condition (dr google?), don’t talk about it, use distraction to take your conscious mind off it. In other words do anything except anxiety.

Important to remember that while recovering you’ll still get these thoughts/symptoms, thats normal, just do your best not to react. It is quite difficult to do to start with, but does get easier. Its like the saying what you resist persists.

It took me around 2 months to recover, but each week it got easier.

well, apart from the cold I caught off my friends kids I’ve been fine.
The treatment course is based around the maladaptive stress response and the way they explain it makes total sense – basically you are walking around in a constant stressed state – although you may not realise it due to feeling fine most of the time. Think of it like a frog put in boiling water will jump out, but if you put a frog in cold water and boil it up it won’t move – same with this – you gradually build up your levels so it feels normal but actually you are hyperstressed at a subconcious level.
The key areas they say are that
1. You are in a constant stressed state and this has become the norm – hence why you don’t recover after having a restful nights sleep.
2. Thought processes don’t help as they keep you in that stressed state which produces all the chemicals / hormones which cause the physilogical symptoms
3. The way to overcome it is calming the mind down and retraining the subconcious to react differently to bring that constant state of stress down over time to something normal.
Think of it like riding your bike at Max HR all the time rather than an average of 130-140bpm. Over time you’d burn out if your were always at MaxHR, but at 130-140bpm (which most people would ride at) you would be able to last for longer. So you have to adapt a different way to ride / think
Does that make any sense???
The best bit of the time spent with them was meeting other suffereres with different symptoms but all having the same condition. The differences made you realise that it was down to this stress response as you could see everyone’s anxiety about doing the wrong things, eating the wrongs things, over doing it etc. That was the biggest eye opener.

Keep on with the advice in there as thats the way to recover.

The high stress state you refer to is also referred to as a sensetized state. And that is all that is wrong. This state needs to be fed to remain, so take away the fuel (analysing) and it dies down over time.

What a lot of sufferers do if fight these feelings, analyse the symptoms to death.

I suffered for a few years with these symptoms, plus some others. It was only when I deleted my computer ‘anxiety’ bookmarks, closed the anxiety books, stopped going to the doctors, generally stopped looking for something wrong with me, that I started to recover.

A stressful event initially triggered these feelings, instead of aknowledging this initial event, ‘we’ become scared of these feelings and then analyse them which maintains this heightened sensetized state, and it is this state that produces all the phsycological and physical symptoms experienced.

The symptoms are the effect of your previous worrying, or residual stress. Brain fog is a classic anxiety symptom, its called depersonalisation or derealisation – can’t remember which, but it’s not important. The classic mistake is to think that these symptoms are the cause of how we feel, but in reality they are symptoms of your worrying and analysing.

I remember someone telling me once that the way you think affects you both physically and psychologically. Anxious sufferers then become scared, or afraid of the symptoms and analyse for their deeper meaning. But there is no deeper meaning except the constant analysis keeps you feeling the same way physically and psychologically.

Give up analysing and do non anxious things. Mayby antidepressants might give a kick start but you can recover without them as well.

remove all stresses
Just picking up on this point. I’ve tried to remove all stresses, whether it be at work, home or even in my own mind (ie hangover leaves me thinking I’m relapsing so I now sadly avoid beer) but I think you need to go further than this as you can’t get rid of all stress.
I believe rather than trying to remove all stresses or avoiding them, I need to focus more on how I consciously and more importantly subsconciously react to stressors.
For about a year before I hit the tipping point I was constantly monitoring how I felt, whether I was ill or not (I seemed to come down with something after every ride) – now I’m thinking that I’ve trained myself to get anxious subconsciously when I don’t feel right. Something I am working to overcome but is damn hard.
The mind controls the chemicals which make the body function, whether this be the stress chemicals (cortisol / adrenaline) or hormones etc. I looked at the effects of too much adrenaline on the body and realised it read like a list of my earlier symptoms.

Thats what happens during an anxiety disorder. By behaving ‘scared’ you teach your subconscious to react scared when presented with the symptoms you are scared of. The way to retrain your subconscious is to face the symptoms, let them happen, but don’t react in a scared way. Ie rush to the doctors, seek reasurrance, read books about it, google it. When you feel the urge to do this do something else(diversion). Anything non anxiety. You are then slowly retraining your subconscious, a part called the amygdala, that this is NOT dangerous, the amygdala eventually gets the message (a few weeks) and the danger alert/symptoms are switched off. However your response has to be consistently the same all the time, so during recovery you will get and feel a lot of strange symptoms, and you are going to behave normally as they are not there. You wont have to do this forever as after a few weeks of this new behaviour your symptoms/anxiety goes away and your subconscious adopts this new behaviour. So you will stop the automatic testing you subconsciously do to see if these symptoms are still there. The decision how to react is always yours. Hope this helps someone.

1x exposure strada
1x exposure diablo

Both grat imo as about 50% of my riding is on road and the diablo complements the strada for anything off road.

It isnt coincedence flow, thats the way to recover. All you have to do now is stick to it for a month or two. Remember you will still feel your symptoms during the recovery period, its all natural. Some people start questioning the method when they dont see immediate results and fall back to their old ways of analysis/worry.

Dont let it get to you. I had the breathlessness as well and had all the tests but nothing was found. I even had a chest xray.

The underlying cause was anxiety. Too much worrying/analysis/searching for what was wrong. I had tons of books, hundreds of internet links. (For a long time it was my life).

Google panicend forum, some brilliant information on there, not just about panicattacks (which is driven by a fear of them) but also anxiety symptoms. But to cure yourself youll have to stop reading about what might be wrong.

I am a M in general and have a M gilet, slim fit but I like it that way.

Flow, how often do you read or research your condition? Remember that this fuells the condition. Mayby try and accept the doctors diagnosis, accept youll have these strange symptoms for a while, but 100% stop reading, analysing, seeking reasurrance about your condition (visiting doctors). See how you feel in a month? To help get by find a few hobbies to take your mind off how you feel. This is how i got better.

Just seen this. I had similar symptoms a few years ago, felt really tired but I also had bodily pains including chest pains and head pains. I had a lot of tests done but they all came back ok, such as a chest xray, ecg, bloods and so on. However because of the symptoms I was experiencing I thought there must be something major wrong with me. It was a scary time to say the least.

However to me it was this belief that something major is wrong with me that kept me analysing my situation, whereas the underlying cause was anxiety. To be fair to my doctor she said prety immediately it is anxiety, especially after the first hospital tests were done, but I didn’t believe her if I’m honest. Unknown to me but all the analysing I did was just fuelling the anxiety and it just keeps on coming.

The way I got out of it was to stop anything to do with trying to resolve the situation, basically stop analysing how I was feeling. It will take time to go, but it will.

I disagree hh. I’ve worked for a private and public consultant. I was paid around £8k a year more privately, got a car allowance and a small bonus around christmas. Currently work in a local authority consultancy, same type of work as we have to bid to win it, same hours as we are constrained by client budget, less pay, no car allowance, no bonus, I get 5 more days holiday and pension is slightly better at the moment. Once the construction industry picks up Ill probably return to private employment.

I have dealt with many private companies that I don’t know how they survive, totally bad public relations. It totally depends on the company or person you deal with in my experience.

Can they just sack people without any redundancy?

Llandegla is a good bet. Marin is also ok, mayby one or two sections you may have to push. Penmachno can be quite steep and exposed in places and coed y brenin is relatively rocky and technical. You coul do cyflyn coch at cyb though, that is quite smooth but only around 10k. Tarw is a black grade and has quite a few tough sections for a beginner. Nothing wrong in pushing, we all started somewhere.

Reading your post it could be anxiety as you seem to be worrying over many things. We all know the more you worry over something the worst it gets, especially if its difficult to resolve. How often do you catch yourself worrying and do you feel generally nervous ?

I havent raced much recently but have had some issues with tubeless not sealing a puncture and having to walk back so now (mostly) always carry a tube/pump.