the ice melted overnight. Praise be! Unfortunately this means:
The dog didn’t entertain me with a 360 this morning.
The whole area is deep with mud again.

The “Christmas Cracker” Sportive was cancelled today due to The Ice That Just Will Not Melt ™. It’s everywhere around here, so one can assume riding a road bike in the Lake District would be suicidal at the moment. Plan B was a road ride locally with Nick (who I was going to ride in the Lakes with), but I didn’t fancy that either this morning so made a phone call and took the singlespeed (my only working mountain bike) out for a few hours.

There’s ice all over the place off-road as well. It’s a bloody nightmare. I’ve already lost a good few teeth in my life so far and I’m in no mood for losing more, plus to add to the fun the star nut on my fork decided to pull clean out of the steerer tube after I stopped to tighten it. That’ll explain why that “crap” Chris King headset never stayed tight then. So I bimbled home after a couple of hours, headset rattling away. Lovely weather though.

The ice looks like it’s finally starting to thaw. I’ll go out for a run in the morning with the dog. If he lands on his arse I’ll grumble some more about it after I’ve finished laughing.

I was off work earlier in the week as I’d been sick a couple of times and felt generally quite ill. I soon felt better though, just a bit run-down perhaps. I was barfing my guts up all night and feeling pretty horrendous by Thursday night though, so maybe I was more than just run down. I went to work yesterday and left at 10:30 after I almost passed out. I got home, went straight to bed and got up 22 hours later feeling much better.

I won’t be doing the cyclocross race in Waterfoot this afternoon as I still feel pretty weak but I’m still planning to do the sportive in the Lakes tomorrow, where black ice will no doubt be a feature.

riding on frozen snow is INCREDIBLY NOISY. It’s so draggy too – I felt like I had two flat tyres. I only managed a couple of hours before going home – there was so much ice around the novelty was rapidly wearing off.

More snow tonight – should be fun!