After a frustrating week of suffering from a weird kind of cold ‘thing’, (not a full-on snotty cold but a listless, tired-out, just-want-to-go-to-bed cold),I knew I was feeling better as soon as I’d just knocked out six fast laps of the new ‘red’ trails and some other stuff in the local woods. Instead of feeling ill and that I couldn’t breathe I was able to push hard and was properly shifting again.

My week-long grumpy mood rapidly evaporated and I was wearing my head-to-toe suit of wet winter mud with pride.

I felt great for a few hours anyway….

Later that same day Debbie and I went to a party at a friend’s house and had rather a lot to drink. This was a Bad Move.

I was doing the Cumbrian Cracker cyclosportive the day after and my red wine and lager excess followed by a good, solid three hours’ sleep meant that I spent the entire ride feeling like I wanted to be sick when I should have been feeling on top of the world because my cold had gone.

Oh well. Better crack on then. Meeting up with Dave after the sign-on, we got ready for the off and I recounted to him just how many glasses of wine and cans of lager I’d drank the night before. It probably wasn’t loads and loads but it felt like one or two too many.

The first climb up Red Bank soon had me feeling sick, however for the most part the route isn’t terribly difficult. It seems that all the flattish roads in the Lake District have been assembled into one 60 mile loop and I was often thanking my lucky stars that none of the ‘proper’ Lakeland passes were on today’s menu. Once we arrived at the one and only feed station in Cartmel I devoured some real food and had a cuppa. Felt a bit better.

In spite of the amber weather warning, the predicted rain didn’t seem to materialise and apart from two or three (very) deep puddles, the roads were all pretty much clear of debris. What started out as something that I could quite easily have given a miss ended up being a brilliant morning of great views, good company and doorstep-sized slabs of cake.

photo: Sportsunday

About three and a half hours later, we arrived back in Grasmere, had a bowl of soup and I went home, bang on schedule.

Dave however did the decent thing and rode the route again 😉

Photo: Sportsunday

I don’t do many cyclocross races and bloody hell, it doesn’t half show. It’s down to a combination of things, but mainly really busy Saturdays doing family stuff means that it’s not too often that I’m able to wipe out most of the day on a one hour race in a local park, but sometimes they’re on a Sunday…and quite often I can ‘do’ Sundays….

Photo: Martin Holden Photography

The North West League race last weekend at Leverhulme Park in Bolton was a bit muddy. Ok, it was incredibly muddy. This mud, mixed with the deep layer of recently-fallen leaves resulted in a tough old slog around the course and for those of us without a second bike ready and waiting in the pit area, it meant regular stops at the side of the tapes to remove large wads of compost from the ‘cosy’ parts of the bike. With each lap, my bike maintenance stops (where I would alternate between pulling mud from the bike with my hands and prodding it away with a twig) became more and more regular. The highlight of the penultimate lap was trying to get my chain back on an encrusted chainring while watching THE ENTIRE CYCLOCROSS POPULATION OF THE NORTH OF ENGLAND ride past.

That was ok really. I said hello to Phil and a few other friends as they all rode past and I contemplated completing the race on foot.

I didn’t, obviously. After what seemed like an eternity of chain faff, I got going again and muttered and grumbled my way to the finish. 70-something-th place. Plenty of room for improvement/two bike strategies/singlespeeding.

It wasn’t all bad. Here’s some Good Stuff:

• Tubular cyclocross tyres. I’d never ridden tubs in a race before, let alone a slippery, muddy race. Gawd I love em. Glued to my pair of Planet X carbon disc brake-ready wheels, I was able to ride every off-camber slippery slope and was left grinning from ear to ear every time I defied what I thought (in my clinchers and innertubes sensibilities) were the Accepted Rules Of Riding Bikes Up Steep Things-Physics. I’d glued them on properly as well, given they didn’t come unstuck, roll off and send me into a bush. Alan told me how to do it – watch this and learn.

• A race 10 minutes from my house. Ten minutes from my house!

• A bike that doesn’t try to kill me even when I spend an hour riding like a muppet. Ok, I crashed a couple of times but in the main the On-One Dirty Disco was as confidence-inspiring, stable and just all-round ACE in this race as it was in the 3 Peaks. I’ve no worries at all about doing REALLY big stuff on this bike. Watch this space…

Here we go again. My solo entry into the Strathpuffer 24 was successful last night after the customary “stay up late and hit refresh on the computer keyboard repeatedly then bang your payment details in dead fast” session and effectively signals the start of the 2013 endurance racing campaign.

No more easy rides for a while. 12 weeks of hard training, balancing training hours with Real Life, mental preparation, worrying about the cost of it all, how far away it is (it’s REALLY far away), to-ing and fro-ing over equipment choice and weather watching.

Ok, it’s not all like that. I actually enjoy the training and preparation aspects of endurance racing as much as the racing itself – as well as the quite large amount of riding bikes involved I love noticing the inevitable increases in fitness and the dropping of excess weight. I love the smaller races in between now and the big day that to ‘normal sane folk’ would be pretty big on their own, entered merely to break things up, keep things sharp and to gauge progress.  Perhaps most of all, I love the planning of occasional big rides with friends – often friends who are in the same situation and will be racing in the same races throughout the coming year.

The last time I raced at the Strathpuffer things didn’t go entirely to plan but I did alright. I’ll probably be racing on a singlespeed again this time around due to having convinced myself that it’s the ideal race to approach on a one-geared bike (despite it almost killing me last time). Hopefully this time I’ll also be a bit stronger a little bit wiser….

Ill. Snot. Sore throat. No exercise. Grumpy.

That was last week. Probably a result of the week before, when I did very little as I’d just won a 24 hour race.

This always happens. A period of training and a peak in form followed by a mad race followed by a big, crashing impact with the earth.

Bah.

On Saturday I decided not to race in the Rapha Supercross, which was pretty disappointing because it looked like it was ace (and I’d already paid). An hour of flat-out effort would probably have done more harm than good though and put me out of action for even longer. I can do ‘sensible’ sometimes, y’see.

I was going to ride the Polocini Rivington 100 sportive the day after though, come what may. The weather for once was blooming lovely, Allen’s events are always top-drawer and Team JMC were sponsoring a feed station (I had all the cake in the van) as well as having several riders taking part so I was determined to drag myself out of the house for this one.

An early start to drop the feed station gubbins off in the van halfway around the route blew the cobwebs away and luckily I made it back to Horwich just in time to get changed, sign in and eat some porridge before the start…

I was planning to ride quite slowly – I didn’t want to make my cold worse and I’d not ridden a bike for two weeks but the pace in the first few miles told me that this was going to be a tough day out…

Leading out the ride, the Team JMC train rumbled through the town centre, took the road to Rivington and hit the hilly stuff. The weather meanwhile had gone from “a bit grey and foggy” to “wow look at how blue the sky is!”.

photo: Cyclesportphotos

The whole time, I coughed, blew my nose, wheezed and generally sounded like a 40-a-day smoker, then I started to lose my voice. I worried that this big bike ride lark might not have been a good idea….

When we eventually arrived at the Team JMC feed station in Dunsop Bridge, I attempted to cure my sore throat by eating one of the chocolate orange and chilli cookies that Budge’s daughter Charlotte had donated.

I realised my big mistake when my already-sore throat started to burn like it’s never burned before…. I’m doing daft stuff so you don’t have to, dear readers.

Five hilly, sunshiney hours later we arrived back where we started and were each handed a complimentary tray of biryani (yes – CURRY at the finish).

The best bit is that despite my sore throat, coughing, runny nose and near-total loss of my voice, a few hours later my cold seemed to just disappear. That might be the medicinal properties of curry….

Everyone probably thought that Dave and me weren’t really trying, or even that we couldn’t be bothered. Admittedly, two 24 hour soloists spending the entire race riding around the course, side by side, sometimes chatting, sometimes not, while extending their lead over the rest of the chasing pack was a bit unusual but we were getting away with it mainly because we weren’t actually going slowly at all, despite our outwardly relaxed appearance.

The mental struggles one goes through in a 24 hour solo didn’t really have chance to materialise and take hold for any length of time either. No downward spiral of despair, no dark and dismal moods at 3am, no overpowering thoughts of metaphorical mountains to climb.

Just two mates out for a (very) long bike ride. A very long, fast, bike ride. At times, we indulged in a fair amount of ‘Gentlemen’s Racing’….

“After you.”.

“No, after you.”.

“My dear boy, I must insist. After YOU”.

We had a few cups of tea and ‘proper’ warm food in between some of our 25 laps, lovingly prepared by Debbie and Angela who themselves were spending an uncomfortable 24 hours in a freezing cold pit gazebo.

While tapping out laps, we nattered about plans for crazily-long rides we’ll be doing in the near future. We moaned about our combined collection of snotty noses and 3 Peaks Cyclocross-induced bumps, scrapes, sore knees and general fatigue. We rode some bits fast, we rode some bits not so fast.

We enjoyed the tricky sections of the course and (eventually) hated the near-vertical climb with the cobbledy bit at the bottom.

All the time there was the unanswered question about what we’d do at the end. We were both racing in different age categories but there was still the all-important overall win that needed to be taken by someone.

To be quite honest, me and Dave weren’t really that bothered – the category system would mean we’d be on two separate podiums anyway but the race organisers, our friends and partners and probably a large portion of everyone else there were asking, “what’s going to happen to decide the overall win?”. Would there be a mad sprint in the last 100 metres? Would there be a mechanical or a puncture that would decide it? Would one of them attack the other on the last climb?

All of those things would have been fun, but the outcome was much less exciting. With only two hours of the race to go, we both had a five lap lead over our nearest challengers. We called it a day right there and then, recorded exactly the same time (and therefore were equal first place overall) and each claimed the top prize of entries to the World 24 Hour Solo Championships in Canberra next year.

We’ll probably never race “in formation” ever again and I fully expect friendly hostilities to be resumed at the start of the next race we’re both involved in but as a one-off it was good fun and hopefully others will consider it a cool story.

Meanwhile, Team JMC team mates Andy and Budge had been battling away in a proper close race in the pairs and eventually won the vets pairs category. In other words, every category a Team JMC rider entered, they won.

As for the World’s in Australia – it’s a long, long way away from Manchester. Will either of us actually be able to go? Who knows. It would be nice but there’s much to weigh up.

Whatever happens, Relentless 24 was once again a brilliant event in a spectacular setting. The course was superb, the organisation was as slick as ever and the prizes were once again very generous 😉

If you only do one 24 hour race a year, you really should give this one a go.