Dolomite Training open bike ride

Paul and Steve at Dolomite Training gave me the perfect excuse to get a pre-X-mas bike ride: They organised an open bike ride for all their friends/colleagues/clients. They had the biggest rucksacks as they carried cameras and mince pies. I only took my GPS, to generate a googlearth track of our ride:

Our starting point was the Woodbine cafe in Hope, where we finished with a mug of tea and an Eccles cake. A very good morning Here are pictures of me (!) they posted on FB - not sure if the link will work...

Michael's goodbye ride

Michael, from the LSMC a long time ago, organised a goodbye weekend in the Peak district on February 12/13 2012, before moving to sunny Australia. I was allowed to join for one activity, with a choice of saturday climb, evening pub at the 3 stags or Sunday mountain bike ride around Ladybower. With snow and ice on the ground, bike was the best option. This was in February 2012, I've been very slow to update the blog. Here are some videos of the ride preparation with lots of climbers turned bikers from Loughborough Student Mountaineering Club circa 2001. Fast forward to 2:28 if you want to skip the preparation. Click here to access the video on youtube. We passed a farmer training his working sheepdog, here's a quick video from over the fence: And here is a video that Michael took of the last downhill ride that day, with his chest cam. In case the embed doesn't work, click here to see it on vimeo
Preview of my last Peak Ride - Bit of Snow from Michael Smith on Vimeo.

Good bye Tom

Tom is going back to Australia. Some South African mountain biking friends of his organised a weekend in Afan (south Wales), so i fixed my bike and joined them.

On saturday, I really struggled to keep up for the whole 40km we did. But we had good, dry weather instead of the fog/drenching we were promised, and i really enjoyed the day. Here is an image of our ride, recorded by the GPS. Click here to open the file in google Earth, or to download it.



I only had my mobile to take pictures with, the quality is not too good.

At the start:


First breakdown - and only - breakdown:


First long climg, and last time i had the chance to take pictures of the others from the front (!)


First break:


Another break, I'll loose my smile soon:


Near the end we caught up with other friends who did a different ride. Here's Julie:


On sunday, I emptied all the spare layers from my bag to take the bigger camera:





After these 3 pictures i realised i'd left the gps in the car park, so i raced back down and then tried to catch up with the rest of the group, which i did after a couple of hours non stop except for this picture:




A big thanks to Claire and Spike who organised this. I hope to join you for more adventures on wheel next year!

And good luck to Tom on his return to Aus.

Quand on voit ca, on comprend mieux...

... pourquoi ca casse:



Et moi qui croyais que je ne faisais pas beaucoup de velo! Qu'est ce que je vais trouver quand je vais nettoyer les moyeux des roues? du sable?

J'ai casse mes velos!

Les anglais disent "fait en fromage" (made of cheese) quand ils pensent qu'un bout de velo n'est pas solide. A voir ce qui reste de mon derailleur, on comprend!

gps tracks

Linux computer + garmin etrex gps = lots of head scratching, and success at last. Here is a map of last sunday's bike ride:


Now i have to tackle the backlog of such maps, and to find a way to upload routes on the gps. But for now i am happy :))

I would like to thank fub for his explanations.

cheap sci-fi set

I had to cycle through a cement factory on Sunday. It felt as if i was visiting the set for a cheap science fiction television series:



Here's another one, a bit more 70's "James Bond":

Close call !...

I changed the fork on my bike on saturday and set off for a test ride on sunday, paying lots of attention for anything dodgy coming from the front of the bike. So when the rear derailleur snapped in two, i was quite surprised:

Then i realised that for once i was lucky! This happened as i was cycling slowly uphill, not racing downhill on rough ground. And i was only 5 minutes driving away from home, so i was rescued in a matter of minutes.

On a less happy note: I am waiting to hear from the job, rush to change the rear mech before wednesday, receive the rear shocks for the mystery machine, succeed in removing the rear brake drum on the mystery machine, hear the outcome from last week's walk, find the time to finish up the kitchen and gaz fire surround (both major must do before end of year goal), finalise my x-mas trip to France (pending on item 1 above), and i'm not even touching on the pile of admin papers to do...

Wish me luck! Advice on getting enough quality sleep when stressed most welcome...

American kids are better !

I was talking to one of the counselor from the camp where i do climbing instructing. Kelly's from Australia, she doesn't like what passes as Summer here and she finds that the kids here are not as good as what she expected. Well, she's a fitness instructor the rest of the year so it's no surprise if she's disappointed by the lack of energy and motivation that English kids have these days. She said that next year, she'll go to the US because, in her words, "American kids are better". They choose to go to camp.

I managed to sneak a picture to show you what i do at the moment. I had to frame it so that we don't see children face/feature. The guys you can recognise on this are 2 counsellors, 23 years old Graham and 24(?) years old Noamh. Pronounce Nieve, it's proper Irish, the kind that would not bow to the Queen...

Counsellors also come from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, the Netherlands... Not many English, and if like Graham they want to work abroad, soon camp YHA will be able to teach kids foreign languages as well as other outdoor activities.

Now some more news to fill you in on the last couple of weeks. The mystery machine is still not running properly. I took it to the garage that converted it to LPG, it's one hour driving away but if they can't tune the engine then no-one can. Meanwhile, i've bought a 10 year old Skoda Felicia for a song. The challenge is to sell it when i get the Mystery Machine back without loosing any money. Now that i don't waste time sorting out the car, I have picked up the diy where i left it 6 weeks ago.

Meanwhile, my trusty mountain bike has learnt a trick or two from the car and started to rebel. I have changed the back wheel, the chain looks a bit tired and the fork must be replaced before the biking season starts. Because i bike when i cannot climb, that means the rainy season here.

I had to do a bit of work on the bike because colleagues from the sports shop had organised a ride from the store in Sheffield to the one in Stockport 10 days ago. Off course, things didn't quite go to plan as we were supposed to use the Mystery Machine to get there. As the previous garage was unable to tune it, we defaulted to a colleague's 205. Last minute panic to arrange a roof rack meant that we missed the start, here's a picture of us on an empty car park, 20 minutes too late.

And one from the ride:

To finish off with the stream of July Problems, the old computer that i planned to use to run a database for work couldn't be coerced out of hibernation. Perfect excuse to get a quieter, smaller, faster one from ebay. We're talking £100 for a P3 with 160Gb HD and 512Mb RAM. It's running on Ubuntu, with MySQL and other software from the Linux community. Yes, i can be a geek sometimes...

As you see, i didn't have much time these past few weeks. First thing to go, as usual, was sport. So when Mathieu from the ski mountaineering expedition 3 months ago pulled out from our project in the Swiss Alps in 2 weeks time, i wasn't too disapointed. No mountaineering then... Oh well I need a holiday!

Que font les grimpeurs anglais quand il fait un temps a faire sourire les grenouilles?

This is for my French friends and relatives. Anyway, English readers don't need the captions to understand what i'm on about...

La vue de ma fenetre ce matin:

view from my window

Au choix: On reste au chaud, on va au mur d'escalade, ou fait autre chose que de l'escalade. Aujourd'hui, c'etait du VTT dans la foret.

at the start

De gauche a droite: Matt, Remi, Ben, Rodger, Dan. On n'est meme pas reste propres 5 minutes...

J'ai essaye le petit saut:

small jump

Et ca m'a decourage d'essayer le grand. Bravo a Dan et Matt, et aussi Ben pour une belle gamelle!

big jump

C'etait une bonne apres-midi, tout compte fait!