Crossing Tod

As the saying goes, "there's a first time for everything" and Monday was a day of three firsts for me:

1. Riding in a cyclocross race
2. Riding a bike with disc brakes
3. Riding a bike with a bamboo frame

For two autumns/winters I'd been trying to actually get to a race and continually failing for one reason or another. But this year I finally made it to Tod Cross, which happens to be right next to my wife's parents' house. After several days of continuous rain in Calderdale I was beginning to wonder what on earth I'd let myself in for, a feeling which was compounded by watching the veterans race (see excellent reports from Dave Haygarth and Alan Dorrington).


However, there was no chickening out to be had as I'd been very kindly lent a lovely bamboo framed mountain bike for the day by Rachel Hammond. A quick recce lap of the course around Centre Vale Park left me in no doubt that I'd be somewhere towards the back of the field after an autumn pretty much out of cycling with the arrival of our baby in September. Rachel has very kindly published a few words that I wrote about her bike, so I'll spare the details here.

The race for me was a massive learning curve. My first lesson was that the tyres the bike was shod with had something close to zero grip which was a bit of an issue in the gloopy mud sections on the lower half of the course. Tyre choice, which I've read so much about, really is a big deal in CX.

The second lesson was that disc brakes are pretty amazing, especially compared with cantilevers where the grinding noise of pads on rims could be heard all afternoon long.

And the final thing I learned - I'm going to be back for much more fun in the mud. Roll on Hit The Northm hopefully with a few more cycling miles in my legs...

Splatterfest picture thanks to Eleanor Leadbetter.

There's a black and pink moon on the rise

The performance roadwear specialists of the cycling world, Rapha, have launched their second challenge of the last six or seven months to riders. The initial test was to ride 500km in a December week between Christmas and New Year's Eve 2010 to keep the winter blues and kilos away. Now, in honour of the categorised hills and mountains of the 2011 Tour de France, Rapha Rising asks us mere mortals to climb like the grimpeurs of the WorldTour peloton and ascend 21,125 metres during La Grande Boucle. Progress is to be posted on the internet and linked to from Rapha's facebook page, and there're some tasty prizes from their product range for the best documented attempt.

My main problem is living on the flatlands of Cheshire - maybe I'll manage 2,000 metres of vertical riding in July.

Rapha Rising

Bury Clarion Hill Climb - 21st June 2011

On Tuesday evening, I took part in the Bury Clarion hill climb, along with three other North Cheshire Clarion Riders. My full report can be found at

http://northcheshireclarion.blogspot.com/2011/06/bury-clarion-hill-climb-2011.html

Edinburgh Marathon 2011

 "Make sure you don't hit the wall. That's never pretty"

If you watched the BBC coverage of the London Marathon back in April, you may well have seen Mara Yamauchi interviewing fist-time marathoner Jo Pavey. It was a compelling interview as Yamauchi sought to provide Pavey with some knowledge from her considerable experience over 26.2 miles. The thing that stuck in my head was to Mara's advice to Jo to control her pace through the first half of the race so that she didn't hit the wall/bonk/crack as "that's never pretty".

So it was that on Sunday morning, at about 09:45 as I stood in the rain on London Road in Edinburgh that Mara Yamauchi's words came back to me. I was there in the third wave of five on what was being hailed over the PA as the "fast" start with a marathon to run, and feeling a bit out of place. The last time I'd run this course was 2009, my first marathon, and the wall had been right there for me to crash into at 21 miles which really wasn't an experience I wanted to repeat. In 2010 I'd completed the Brathay Windermere Marathon course without the same problem - but there was still the nagging doubt in my mind at the Edinburgh start that these roads had beaten me before.

The running conditions were perfect for the start: a little drizzle, a cool temperature and little wind. The forecast was for the wind to increase during the day - and we'd know all about that later. However, problem in the race organisation had already started to come to light. There had been no formal printed final details for the runners, it was simply a case of downloading a PDF and printing it out - then hoping that everything was going to be ok. The two starts didn't appear in my race details and it took a little bit more finding - and certainly more walking before a race - than I would have liked. But I made the start in plenty of time and the pens and line were well organised.

I set off and the second problem with the race day was highlighted after about eight or nine minutes when I hadn't seen a mile marker. Another eight minutes went by and still no sign of a mile marker. I knew I wasn't running that slowly, despite the crowds around me. Then there was a water station ahead sign: three miles in and still no sign of any information to the runners relaying the distance covered. I realised why at the four mile point, when I saw the sign but instead of the standard black on fluorescent yellow race marker they were white on dark blue and placed very high up on lamposts. Once I knew what I was looking for, I only missed seeing one more in the race: the 26 mile marker.

After that the race itself progressed well. I had a plan and I stuck to it: steady to 20 miles and then increase the pace. The profile of the Edinburgh Marathon route is largely flat, with a slight loss of height from start to finish so there were no hills to worry about. With the exception of one water station at 16 miles the route was well marshaled and the hydration/nutrition well delivered.

As the course turned back on itself at the 20 mile point, I was really pleased that I'd kept something back for the last quarter of the run. It immediately became apparent that as we'd been running away from the city a westerly wind had been getting stronger and that the final 10km were going to be into the teeth of it. I don't mind running into the wind too much as we get a lot of it on the Cheshire Plain and while it didn't necessarily help my time it certainly helped my position as I started going past many runners in these final miles. The support on the streets of Port Seton and Prestonpans was brilliant and must have kept loads of runners going to the end.

Tick off the 21-mile marker. Tick off 22-miles. And 23. You're still running: you're going to make it.

And then we come to the finish. Seemingly there was no 26-mile marker, or at least it was so well hidden that I didn't see it. There was a great crowd at the entry to Musselbrugh but then as the finish line approached it thinned out, a very strange feeling as you're digging in for a "sprint" finish and there's no-one there to cheer you home. Crossing the line, my watch showed 3:18:08 (later confirmed to be my chip time) which meant I'd set a new personal best by a minute or so, and a gun time of 3 hours 20 which considering the wind in the finale was really pleasing.

It seems that the race organisers had taken the strange decision to ban spectators from the last couple of hundred metres and relay the finish to a big screen. Only the technology failed them so they were showing an old T In The Park instead of the race. Fortunately, my wife and the friend we were staying with had managed to somehow get closer to the finish line than they were supposed to be, so saw mwe finish and we were easily reunited. Following the #EdinburghMarathon hashtag on Twitter and looking at the comments left on the official Facebook page it seems like we were incredibly lucky.

All in all, a great race and a performance I am more than pleased with really spoiled this year by some logistics failures. I'd need to be convinced that these had been addressed before heading back to this particular event.

Race day photos by Mary Mowat.

Inspiration - I

I find that inspiration and motivation are funny concepts. What inspires me to get through the door and into a run or onto my bike changes on a fairly regular basis, especially when I'm not close to a big race or event. Motivation comes in waves: sometimes it's easy, sometimes I need a kick up the backside to get me out there. This is the first in an irregular series cataloguing what's making me run and ride at the moment.

Back in February, I spent a lazy Saturday afternoon watching the Aviva Indoor Grand Prix from Birmingham. Watching the track events, in particular Jenny Meadows brilliant run in the 800 metres (a distance I used to run reasonably well), inspired me to try and recapture some top end speed. I'm lucky enough to live about a mile from a two-lane outdoor track which is freely available and little used, so I've been trying to add a speed work session once a week. I feel that it's paying off on my longer runs now and am hoping to keep them up over the summer.

Jim Speakman put me on to XXC, the extreme cross country cycling magazine. And from the XXC blog I heard about Dirt Road Washtenaw, a website and book subtitled "Discovery out your back door". OK, so Washtenaw is in Michigan and I live in Cheshire, hardly next door, but the idea stands. Discovery out your back (or in my case front) door. There are places you can get to which can inspire you, and armed with my new-ish Inov Roclite 295s I've been running offroad much more regularly to discover those places.

Finally (for this post at least) I've been reading Joe Simpson's "Storms of Silence". I've not read any of Simpson's other books but was aware of him and his story largely through having seen the film version of "Touching The Void". This book though is magnificent, and I'll be working my through Simpson's back catalogue when I've finished this one, reminding me that there's a great wide world there outside the M62 corridor where I spend most of my days. The details of the Chinese occupation of Tibet presented here aren't for the faint-hearted reader but serve to show that we're lucky to live the lives we do in the West and that we're most fortunate to be able to play the games that we choose.