It’s years since I took part in a duathlon so when a friend of a friend mentioned a new event – the Derwent Duathlon – held at the famous Derwent Reservoir, I thought I’d make my multisport comeback…

Travelling over the Snake Pass in the car to the start of the race I was half-expecting the race to be cancelled due to snow, in fact when I saw the forecast I left the ‘fast’ road bike at home and opted to bring the sensible (and heavier) bike with full mudguards, but as we descended down the road things cleared up and the sun came out.

Stood on the line, near the front, I looked around at the crowd of experienced triathletes and wondered how far from the front I’d be after the first 7 kilometre run. As things turned out, by the time I got 2k down the road I was quite a long way back….

As usual, after 15 minutes or so of running I started to warm up a bit, felt a bit more comfortable and started to pick up the pace and lengthen my stride. I wasn’t overtaking anyone but the earlier slide backwards through the field of runners didn’t get any worse and I arrived at the transition area in 30-something’th place.

No problem I thought, I’ve got a bike to ride now for the next 18 miles. I tore off in pursuit of the riders in front of me along the narrow road by the side of the reservoir. It was an out-and-back route that had to be ridden twice and the terrain was somewhere in between “nicely undulating” and “a bit hilly”. So not too difficult to bomb along like a nutter.

I arrived back into transition a bit later on in 10^th place, or thereabouts.

Now I had to bugger about with my shoes again, taking my helmet and gloves off, racking my bike….thinking about it, I might have lost a couple of places in transition. “Getting changed at high speed” isn’t something I’ve ever rehearsed.

The last leg was a 5k fell run.

To be perfectly honest I wasn’t expecting a full-on fell race to finish a duathlon. I thought it would be a relatively tame trail run in fact. Don’t know why. Anyway, I was wrong. Very wrong.

The final run headed out of transition, along the road for a little bit and then went BAM straight up the hill next to the dam. And I mean STRAIGHT UP.

I joined the line of tired people, pushing down on their thighs with their hands, towards the top of the fell where things levelled off a bit and I was able to stuff my lungs back down my throat.

Shortly afterwards the trail headed down. It was very rocky, loose and STEEP. Many other runners dropped back at this point so I took advantage of it and was only overtaken by one runner, his descending technique/insanity a bit better than mine.

I arrived at the finish line by the iconic Derwent Dam in 11^th place (3^rd in the 40-something category) and received a brilliant mug with a Lancaster Bomber on it.

What a great event! Hopefully the organisers will do it again next year.

*****self-pity alert*****self-pity alert*****

I’ve had a cold for the past week or so. Not a mild sniffle but not full-on flu either. Just an annoying and quite limiting “snot and cough” affair that has reduced me to a pathetic, slimy blob when I’m indoors and a wheezing, frail mess when I’m outdoors.

I don’t get colds very often at all. Maybe one a year at the most, so I don’t really know what to do when I get one aside from “Do nowt. Go to bed. Grumble a lot”.

The timing of this could have been a lot worse I suppose, but it could also have been better. In two week’s time I’m running a marathon. An off-road, hilly one and the first time I’ve ever tackled this kind of distance in one go on foot.

I should have been training this week and training hard – I had a few runs planned, one of them a 20 miler. It had been going well too. I’d been steadily increasing the distance and managing to balance it with some quality time on the bike as well. I’d even got used to running with a hydration pack.

I was also supposed to be riding a double century across Wales this weekend, but the prospect of 200 miles in a pacy and probably quite competitive group through a couple of Welsh mountain ranges is probably a poor strategy for recovering from an illness…

But I’ve done nothing for a whole week now apart from some damage-limitation in the form of some core strength and weights in the gym at work. Therefore it looks like I’m going to be winging my first marathon and having to deal with the “I’m just not ready for this” thoughts on the start line. Great.

Five weeks after the marathon though, I’m doing another long one. It looks like my entry into the 3 Peaks fell race has been accepted – I didn’t satisfy the entry criteria at all but I put some ‘other big stuff’ on the entry form and it looks like it did the trick – so the Rivington race in a couple of weeks will be good training for that I suppose.

What’s the worst that can happen, eh?

My mate Allen is a hard-working lad. So is his better half, Clare. Between them they manage to organise a brilliant series of road sportive events in the North West as well as running an equally-brilliant cycling-themed coffee shop.

(I think Clare’s got a full-time job as well so she’s probably the more hard-working of the two in fariness 😉 ).

The coffee shop serves nice coffee, cakes and massive sandwiches, has loads of space to park and lock your bike and shows pro cycling footage on a big telly. What’s not to like? Go there and get some of this down yer neck…

(Philippe Gilbert Slice photo courtesy of Twinklydave)

At the weekend I had a ride at Allen’s “Winter Sprinter” road sportive for the third consecutive year.

Say what you want about sportives, as long as they’re not completely populated by over-eager nutcases (who should really get themselves entered into a race to let off some steam) and as long as they’re not silly money to enter they’re a good way to ride a route that you otherwise wouldn’t normally do, get fed along the way and have a laugh. For someone that spends 95% of their riding time alone (and in the dark mostly), sportives make a very welcome and sanity-saving change.

They’re not a race and once you’ve accepted that they’re a bloody enjoyable day out.

After a brief ride to the start through the centre of Manchester I ate my large portion of porridge, said howdo’s to friends and off we went.

I’d decided, because I’ve been enjoying riding it so much lately, to do it on the Pompetamine. It’s only got the one gear and it’s also got flat bars and disc brakes so it’s a good job that sportives aren’t races but I was able to spin along nicely, enjoy the Cheshire lanes and had a good natter with a few riders that I’d only ever spoken to before via the magic that is Twitter 😉

It was going well….then 20 miles later my chain snapped. For some reason (my own forgetfulness), I only had 10-speed chain links with me and this chain is a 1/8” singlespeed-specific chunky bugger of a chain…so….I was pretty stuffed.

Off I marched in the direction of a main road that we’d crossed a mile or so ago. Rang Deb and grovelled for a rescue. Walked towards Knutsford and marvelled at the size of the mansions. A bloke in a very, very, very expensive car indeed offered to help. For some reason he didn’t have any 1/8” chain links with him in his half-a-million-quid motor.

Deb arrived, we went home.

It was good while it lasted though, honest!

At the end, everyone was treated to a huge portion of biryani and a slice of cake. I’d not earned mine so I hope someone had a double portion.

Get yourself entered into the next Polocini event – the appropriately named “B*stard” as there are a few more hills in that one than in our pleasant Cheshire excursion.

It’s not been a whole lot of fun, organising Hit the North 4 if I’m perfectly honest. Despite the near-certainty that the event would be a big success and would put smiles on the faces of everyone involved, myself included, preparing this one has been a chore at times and my usual level of enthusiasm just hasn’t been there for most of the time.

I think it’s down to the fact that the event is a few years old now and our perception is that we’re at the point where we can’t “get away” with quite as much as we used to and simply blame things that go wrong on our lack of experience. No shortcuts. It’s all familiar territory so therefore it’s a bit less exciting than it once was. This isn’t the Tour De France, but we tolerate our own mistakes less now and don’t want to look inept.

Fast forward to the event itself and its immediate aftermath and everything, on the surface at least, was tickety-boo. Everyone happy. All riders got a mint ball at the finish. All the marshals said “put my name down for the next one”. Our sponsors, especially those who took part or took the trouble to bring trade gazebos and kit to the event, were happy. The caterers did well and sold lots of corned beef hash. The one guy who spannered himself on the new section of trail – the new section where I expected carnage – picked himself up and didn’t need an ambulance and/or helicopter. The bagpiper and Nigel’s drum squad enjoyed themselves and contributed to the atmosphere in a big way. The kids’ racing and skills coaching was handled brilliantly by British Cycling and the youngsters taking part loved it and each received a medal. There’s plenty in the pot to give away to charity, assuming nobody hits us with a bill for something big. I’ve never seen as many photographers at a bike race before. The Mayor came, she saw, she conquered and her Jag got stuck for a bit but we pushed it out of the ditch. Loads of people commented that they’d return to Philips Park ‘just for a ride on the new stuff’ which was a big tick in the box. The sun shone. YES. THE SUN.

Great stuff. Best race on the calendar for a lot of people. I feel great now, the earlier thoughts of jacking it all in because I can’t be arsed any more have (almost) completely evaporated and have been replaced by thoughts of how we can make HTN cooler and more fun for us as well as those taking part.

I know Andrew feels the same way too (because we drank waaay too much beer on Saturday and had a slurred conversation about it).

The size of the event and the sheer volume of people taking part has told us though that if we’re carrying on, we need to look at a few aspects that are starting to creak a bit. The lack of toilets will get sorted out. Blokes can use the bushes but most ladies would rather use a proper facility. And we’d rather blokes didn’t poo in the bushes (not that any did, to my knowledge). We had one toilet on-site plus the ones at the Rugby club half a mile away but the on-site one ran out of bog roll very quickly. Quite rightly, people moaned about it.

Louise and her daughters and Debbie, her mum and Angela, who between them handled the lap counting burden, were stretched to the limit and perhaps as a result some errors crept in. Nobody’s fault but this time the errors were near the front of the race and this meant that one rider, who actually won his category, didn’t feature in the presentation.

300 riders being manually timed for 2 hours simply puts a small number of people under too much pressure both during and immediately after the race so we’re going electronic (with a manual back-up) from now on.

Luckily for us the rider in question was our very own Dave Powell and he was typically laid-back about it. What was also lucky was that the guy whose name I actually read out buggered off home before I picked up the microphone so I didn’t give Dave’s prizes away to someone else… but it was a bit of a cock-up all the same and we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again by making improvements and spending a bit more money on it.

The public address system, bought a couple of years ago from some charlatan on Ebay, is a pile of crap. So we’ll be sorting that out too so that I don’t sound like I’m auditioning for a Napalm Death tribute act.

Hit the North 5. It’s coming. It’ll be a bit shiny, but not too shiny 🙂

Loads of cool stuff, results and info about the race can be found on the HTN blog here and I’ll be updating it over the next couple of weeks with various links to reports that people have written and photos.

“…they might wear classic Reeboks or knackered Converse or tracky bottoms tucked in socks…” sings Alex Turner s as I’m riding across a quarter-mile stretch of downhill forest road, both hands on the bars, concentrating hard as the studded front tyre digs into the thick sheet of ice that separates my bike from the gravel road underneath. I’ve got a normal tyre on the back wheel which means I’ve got to stay seated when the icy trail heads upwards, which isn’t as easy as it sounds given I’d decided in my wisdom to race on a singlespeed.

We’re around halfway through the Strathpuffer 24 hour race and I’m apparently in second place. Also, for the first time in a race, I’m racing with an MP3 player with a fairly randomly-selected playlist of top stuff which doesn’t seem to be giving me much of an advantage in the race itself but I’m probably entertaining a few marshals as I speed past while singing all out of tune…..

In the previous few weeks I’d pretty much convinced myself that I stood little chance of worrying the solo podium, a lack of time and an uncharacteristically relaxed approach meant that I’d focused mainly on singlespeed-specific physical strength and my core rather than big miles and nine hour training rides. I’d learnt from last year’s Strathpuffer that trying to manhandle a one-geared bike around this course for 24 hours, while it’s not impossible (I’d finished 5^th last time after all), was going to involve some hard preparation in the gym so that I’d have some long-lasting power ‘up top’ as well as in the legs.

Only a handful of hours after the 10am start of the race and it went dark – as it does in the far north of Scotland in January. The course had started off slippery in places but mostly had a nice grippy layer of snow however a few hours later the weak sunshine and hundreds of tyres meant that most of the ice had gone. Those riders who had ice tyres were taking them off but I remembered the weather forecast for rain and sleet during the night and figured that this would probably cause the course to get icy again so left my (one and only) studded ice tyre on the front wheel for the duration. There was still some ice knocking around and I wanted to keep my few remaining teeth and sure enough, as soon as ‘proper’ night time arrived so did the drizzle and the sleet which caused large amounts of ice to form on long sections of the course. It didn’t matter to me though, my tungsten spikes were digging in while Ray Keith pummelled my inner ears with old-school jungle.

By now my upper body is really starting to feel the effects of well over 14 hours of hauling on the handlebars and brute-forcing the bike up and over the steep uphill parts of the course while my wrists and hands were starting to complain about the lack of a suspension fork up front. I’m mostly having to stand when climbing, as you do on a singlespeed, however a new problem now is that a long fireroad climb near the start of the lap is so icy that I have to remain seated and try to pedal smoothly (in a gear that’s too high for that sort of thing) to maintain at least some traction from the rear wheel. All I want now is gears. But I haven’t brought any.

Elsewhere in the race, Dave had had a big crash on some ice and retreated to his tent with some painkillers. A short time later, I moved into the lead. The abrasive ‘puffer mud is all over my gloves so every time I wipe my face it feels like my skin is being attacked by a belt sander. This race is tough in ways you can only discover for yourself.

Photo: Budge

I don’t know for certain but my head is telling me that there are lads on geared bikes who must be catching me up. I feel like I’m starting to crawl around the course, which was probably an illusion caused by my slow cadence and the reality was that I was extending the gap to second place…. I’m doing sums in my head, as you do in the final hours of an endurance race. How many laps to I need to do? Can I be caught? If I was caught, who would be the most likely rider to catch me and would I be able to respond to an attack? Paranoia sets in. Black Sabbath pops up in my headphones.   I force a Clif Turbo Shot gel down and immediately start to ride faster – the whopping dose of caffeine reigniting my senses and making me snarl a bit. Not long to go now. Stand up. Keep your back straight.

The other riders behind me were busy kicking chunks out of each other while I was doing just enough to stay in the lead with my rhythmic, low-cadence grunting and grinding up the hills and grimacing down again. The ice in some sections of the course was starting to resemble a glacier and some of those riders without ice tyres looked like they were really suffering now. Dave was breaking hearts as he emerged from his tent, remounted his bike and immediately rode a series of very fast laps and overtook a number of riders who had previously crept in front of him and moved himself back into 3^rd place.

I was ready to head out to do one final lap to the sound of “Get Ready” by the Temptations, but as I entered the timing tent I was told that I’d done enough. I wasn’t entirely convinced but Debbie, waiting at the finish with a warm coat and a hug, assured me it was all over and that I couldn’t be caught.

I’d won the Strathpuffer with a record number of laps on a stupid bike with one gear and no suspension. What an idiot. It was dead good though because I got to stand on the podium twice – once for the solo win and once for the singlespeed win. I felt like I was on Crackerjack 🙂

(no prizes for guessing which of these photos is the singlespeeders’ podium)

Dave maintained his position in 3^rd place and elsewhere in the race, Phil and Budge had put in a storming effort to claim 3^rd place in the pairs. Once again every Team JMC rider had reached the podium in every category they entered.

Finally, and I quite rightly say this every time, results like this are impossible to achieve without the devotion and tenacity of a solid and well-organised pit crew. Debbie, Angela and Wayne looked after all of us and our bikes throughout the entire race and catered for our every whim without hesitation. Actually getting to the race and having somewhere for pit crew to keep warm wouldn’t happen without the support and resources of Team JMC and being able to compete at this level is made possible by the amazing help I’m given by my sponsors Exposure Lights, Mount Zoom, Teko Socks, Squirt Lubes, Rolf Prima Wheels and Clif Bar. You guys all rule.