Today is obscure musical homage day. If anyone can correctly identify the band with a hit single almost entirely similar to the title of this post, a keepsake from my box marked pile of crap, remember to burn shall be summarily dispatched. To help you out there were the best best thing to come out of Swindon since the Honda Civic.

Admittedly a close third was the M4, but the fab three still enjoyed modest success while still living at home with their mums. We did finally manage to break my friend Nige last weekend in Swinley after he’d boffed a hundred and sixty off road miles in ten unbroken days. The previous four had accounted for about half of those and since in the winding forest singletrack every mile counts double, it was no surprise this was the final resting place for his legs.

Bit of a relief frankly; he’s finally free of the robotic host which sent him up hill and over dale while the rest of us had called it quits for beers. In lieu of post ride beers “ which lamentably do not form any part of the café menu at Swinley “ we instead gorged ourselves on high priced ice creams and conceit. It’s clearly fat people wearing Oakleys season already and stretched t-shirts fail to hide pregnant bellies while expensive sporty shades wobble atop jowelled cheeks.

I mean “ at nearly 40 “ there’s barely a man alive who doesn’t have the beginnings of middle English handles some label as love but are really beer and chips but surely being able to see your feet is not simply a lifestyle choice?

And with 200 miles bagged since April 1^st, a certain sleekness of torso and tiredness of legs have manifested in some belt tightening for the man behind the hedgehog. That sounds almost as rude as I was hoping for. But since my dietary approach to exercise can be summarised as Time for a milkshake and chocy flapjack before the train is delayed?, a barely remembered hollowed out feeling did a Nigel on me trying to get home the other night.

The body is an amazing thing “ even one as abused as this example “ but the mind is even cleverer. While a fusillade of non maskable interrupts briskly instructed muscles to stop pedalling and begin hunting for food, what I’m charitably calling higher intelligence ordered them instead to adopt a rotational approach to foraging. Two miles and a small hill was all that separated an empty stomach and fading legs from an oasis of chocolate and energy recovery drink (clever branded under the Speckled Hen moniker).

But what a two miles that was, nothing really hurt but even less worked. Cars bullied me for the first time in ages because raising a heartbeat, my game or a smile was lost behind a desperate sweaty grimace hiding a broken man.

Even unclipping in sight of food was now beyond me, I shuffled the bike into the barn and inhaled two Nutrigrains while still attached to the bike. On reflection, I probably should have removed the packaging.

In the last three weeks, every bike I own “ (and that’s alot although this is in no way the same as too many) “ has been given a proper outing. Even the 38lb behemoth was dragged up to some illegal jump spot and given a proper thrashing until darkness claimed us some five miles from home. That ride back, chasing a mate with only a blinking LED for navigation, through bar wide forest bumping over invisible obstacles hidden under a blacked-out trail was about as much fun as you can have standing up.

And having spent most of the day juggling big drills, sledgehammers and the FreeRide Frisbee in a doomed attempt to extend the kids play fort, I feel I am speaking with some authority.

.. and it is only a matter of time before my inauguration as supreme ruler of the planet, every citizen of earth shall be forced to wrap up their working week by riding a mountain bike quickly and then drinking beer a little faster. Trust me on this, world domination through the structured agenda may appear slightly less raffish than the movie bred mad media barons with their cackling laughs, but it is going to happen.

So if you are a traffic warden, a Chiltern Railways employee or the person who invented the automated call director, the world is soon to become a far harder and more painful place. With more scorpions arranged in a pit ensemble. May I just be allowed a small cackle at this point and some deranged exclamation marks? !!! Thanks, that feels good.

But not as good as riding two gears faster than two weeks ago on a local loop much loved for its secret singletrack, yet less appreciated for its nine months descent into gloopy hell. It’s generally unridable much before May as clay subsoil and winter rain turn fast summer curves into wheel locking ciphers. Even dried by a rain shy March, it tempted us fourteen days back but still rolled out the muddy, leg sucking carpet for around half its length. We nodded as wise trail sages and cautioned a few weeks delay before trying again.

But we slipped back tonight under cover of a sustained dry period of dry weather and found hard baked trails broken with enough cracks to make a fast bowler smile. Seventeen miles and a little over ninety minutes later, we too wore the dusty grins of men not quite sure how we got so lucky. Friday the 13th it may well have been but the only bad luck we suffered was the death rattle of an empty beer barrel at rides end and that was simply circumvented with a simple “pint of anything else then and throw in a few whelks for our trouble”

The trails are back pummeling dry as identified by me and another change of bike, after last weekend when my approach to happy gravity could only be called riding because I couldn’t remember how to spell portaging. Today back on familiar trails with my nutty hardtail and a style best described as “non braking bar death grip“, we shimmied between gasping trees and ducked under springy branches. I worried less about falling off and more about staying positive except for two incidents which triggered a Kryton like “Panic Circuits Engaged“.

Didn’t crash tho which as world dictator incarnate seems about right. I mean what kind of leader of the free world falls off his mountain bike? Well apart from George Bush but since he has been almost fatally injured attempting to digest a terrorist pretzel, I think we can agree he is a special case. As in special needs.

The last trail was a insanely fast dusty descent, tyres whumming on a six inch ribbon of joy banked in by an imposing hillside. I had almost forgotten how much I love riding mountain bikes faster than I should but slower than I can, then stretching the post ride glow with a couple of cold beers. If I could bottle that feeling and spread it out over a week, almost everyone I meet would have a somewhat nicer experience. And that’s important if you’re going to have four billion employees – you need to be a people person.

Right I have some European boundary planning to attend to. If you’re interested in being the “Duke Of Good Cheese and Smelly Frenchman“, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.

Hello and welcome back. As you’d expect after a fantastic weekend weatherwise, the hedgehog is going to reverberate to the sound of photo inspired ego bumping. Here are three to be going along with.

The first shows Jason in Brechfa forest deep in the middle of Wales. A fun trail if loose enough in its top surface to engender a similar looseness in the bowel regions.

The second is at Afan (near Port Talbot) showing firstly the wind farm and secondly a stationary bike that pretty much matched my average over the weekend. More of my mincing later.

Finally, one of Andy playing silly buggers when he’s old enough to know better. I was going to have a go only to find the sun was incorrectly aligned with Venus. Bugger 😉

If you’ve really nothing to do, lots more will be posted in here including two shots of me entitled “my life as a dwarf” and “What are you doing with that can of Stella?“.

Worth waiting for I’m sure you’ll agree. But wait you will as work I must 😉

… more pink bikes. I can see my kids riding these in a few years time. The first is a good effort especially the tassels which, I’m sure you’ll agree, add a certain class.

This however is properly done, any pinker and it’d be offered as an official barbie accessory.

Stolen from this thread on SingletrackWorld.

For a couple of seconds last week, I was possibly taking myself too seriously. Normal service is resumed. When I get a minute, I’ve a fascinating theory to share with you regarding the best way to wee into a compost bin.

… the lot of us for believing barely past winters icy clutch, dry trails would abound, and the forests of the North Downs would reverberate the to the whoop, holler and occasional cry of pain from a happy mountain biker.

Here’s a spoof photo. You see, I can tell you that is from last Sunday but I know you won’t believe me.

I don’t have any decent ones to show you as that would tax my photoshop skills. Other lies include we traversed the ridgy Surrey Hills this way and that, diving off onto bar wide, secret singletrack and riding old favourites such as “barry knows best” and “telegraph road“. We were occasionally lost, mostly warm, adequately replete after a major raid on the Peaslake stores, and appropriatly refreshed after Marty supplied some post ride beer from the depths of Daisy the camper van.

In terms of lies, damn lies and statistics, the route was around twenty miles, ridden in a relaxed four hours with much stopping for a brief chat or a rather longer lie down, having breathlessly bested some of the tougher climbs. Marty brought his girlfriend along for only her second MTB ride, provided her with a heavy bike that was two sizes to big and swiftly introduced the concepts of terrifying bombholes about 20 seconds into the ride.

Amazingly she didn’t kill him afterwards but only because she was too tired. Fantastic effort tho and put some of us rather more experienced riders to shame. If I may, for one moment, remove my prism of cynicism, it is great to see someone else starting in the sport and seemingly getting the tiniest bit hooked.

It was all too good to last of course. The “sore throat of annoyance” upped the viral ante last night and now I have some kind of unspecified but quite miserable lurgey. And a sore throat 😉

Perfect preparation for four days riding this weekend. Still it’s good to get the excuses banked early.

… and possibly any other limb

YouTube MTB crashing and pain

You have to give the man credit for keeping on trying and crashing again. Either that or he’s bonkers.

I think he’s still alive at the end 🙂

That is what Spring has done although it is as swallows to summer, with warm, breezy days sandwiched between icy blasts and freezing rain. But warming rays have thawed out this less than hardy perennial and hacking over drying trails has replaced hibernation. Hacking coughs have also been a early season feature but I’m not one to make a big thing of it.

This is Steve Watlington Wakins recently harvested from retirement and showing old school style perfectly matching his retro bike and really rather advanced years.

Not quite as old and annoyingly fitter is Nigel who casts off winter sensibility for a bit of buggering about in Swinley Forest.

For me, it’s a case of scratching the crust off old memories of how to ride and what happens afterwards. Having crashed almost as many times as I’ve ridden this year, my downhill style has been likened to nervous lemming that has been damningly blighted with self awareness. You’re not getting me close to that cliff, no way, it looks bloody DANGEROUS.

Uphill, thankfully, nothing much has changed except I’m a little slower, a little more rubbish and a little readier with excuses pertaining to lost fitness, gained weight and some random mumbling around tyre pressures.

After the ride though, it’s the same glorious dichotomy of pain and pleasure. But I think of it as fitness pain and it is simply dulled with a quick beer or a strong brew. And either is very welcome as long as there is cake to follow. With the pain comes proper tiredness – not the kind of boring bone ache from , say, gardening – but smarting pain with an aggressive personality.

So try and run up the stairs and in it steps between your hind brain and leg muscles calling everyone out for an industrial dispute. I find it best to have a little rest until the Synapse Union and Dendrite Management have come to an accommodation. Yesterday, this took quite a few minutes and children rushed past many times, as I lay supine but marooned half way to the landing.

And the ˜Give me something to eat RIGHT NOW or I’m starting on this child’ hunger pangs are back as well. The kind of stomach wrenching non maskable interrupt that has you running “ okay limping quickly “ to the fridge and considering devouring an acre of raw broccoli.

It’s all good.

The dirty dozen of twelve riders seeking sunshine and singletrack are heading off to South Wales over the long Easter weekend. If I can shed about a stone, regain at least partial fitness and not succumb to any further undiagnosable illnesses, all will be well.

I never did get round to cataloging the last two days of riding in Morocco. Not that I was doing much riding anyway. So here’s a pictorial story with a few words. I’d stick to the pictures if I were you. Day 3 started with a few kilometers descent on a surface best described as dusty ball bearings. Each corner was a mountain switchback which led to some fairly interesting “ohhhhshit” moments. I buggered my shoulder early on and was soon far behind and whinging.

I’ve no idea what Martyn is doing with that bike in the shot above but he’s clearly enjoying himself. I ended up back in the broom wagon which was a little scarier that riding. You really need a vehicle here that has a short wheelbase and a tight turning circle. It’s disconcerting looking over the edge to a thousand feet of vertical bugger all but after a while you sort of get used to it. If you close your eyes and take strong drugs.

I met the fellas for lunch and deciding riding was going to be more fun/less fatal than the landy, we set off on about 10k of dusty, loose fireroad that ended up being way more fun than it should have been. At this point I gave up again and so did a few of the others being faced with a huge climb. The road – and I’m using the word advisedly here – to our third night stop at a burbur lodge was fairly terrifying and I was glad of various but extensive medicinal products to dull the pain later that evening.

The last day was going to push the difficulty a bit and it started with a rocky, off camber singletrack strewn with huge boulders. Pretty technical all the way down to the village but WAY WAY safer than taking the landy back down that track of the night before. Some super steps near the trail end put paid to my riding for the weekend tho. A little too much vigour and a little too little shoulder recovery rended the arm pretty useless.

After another landy uplift, three from five (Nig had succumbed to some kind of major intestinal failure) set off on a huge traverse across the valley where vehicles cannot go. And sometimes bikes too as Jason tells of an incident when he flung himself off the trail and over a handy cliff. Somehow he only fell about ten feet and damaged himself not at all. If that had been me, they’d have been scraping me off the valley floor with a spatula.

Apparently it was a fantastic ride and one both Nigel and I are looking forward to doing next year when we go back. And we have to go back because it is a wonderful place to ride your bike and equally fantastic in terms of the people, culture and stunning scenery.

There is always a double knot of anxiety and anticipation when packing riding rucksacks and fettling pointlessly, when facing the prospect of riding somewhere a little edgy. This is a useful simile because Morocco is essentially an ancient, extinct volcano circumcised by donkey tracks and watered by mountain snow melt. Global warning here doesn’t mean the loss of a few ski-ing slopes – no with bugger all annual rainfall, the entire south of the country is a couple of warm winters away from sliding back into the desert.

So a Landrover supported trip into the mountains shuttles us high into the foothills on increasingly crumbling roads clinging to ever steepening slopes. And where the Landy cannot go, the semi-nomadic villages and their animals can, creating vast swathes of lonely singletrack hugging the side of the mountains in a series of never ending rocky switchbacks. It is is – by degrees – achingly beautiful, stunningly unspoilt and bloody terrifying.

The villages are cut into the hillside, camouflaged by the sandstone – itself cleaved from anywhere close enough to hand carry it. They appear at first crude and unfinished but that’s just through the prism of the Western eye. Each building blends perfectly with its’ surroundings, ensues form for function and its’ inhabitants lack nothing in terms of fierce pride in their culture easily mixed with genuine hospitality.

Loading the Landy is always a faff and we’re about an hour late striking out beyond the lunacy of the city. But it’s only ninety minutes into the mountains and soon we’re climbing reasonable gradients at unreasonable altitudes, low lying lungs painfully adjusting to the thinner air.

One of the joys of riding a bike off road is you get to learn the extremes of personality unshielded by any veneer of social convention. I know how well each of my friends climb steep slopes, how able and brave they are going the other way, where they are fast and smooth or slow and nervous. How they react when it’s all wet, cold and shit and their bike is ‘just fucking useless‘ and the unashamed joy of when they’re on it and nothing else can ever get close. This is stuff you understand before anyone volunteers a vocation or springs a surprising family in a bleak car park.

Today we were all a bit average. Desperately happy to be out riding our bikes, but a bit clumsy and lacking in any sort of flow. I like to think of this as my ground state. The first downhill confirmed what I really already knew in that my trusty bike was a barely ridable pogo stick and my shoulder was just a smidgen from being totally fucked.

The sight of my friends snaking away in ever increasing distances was one that became irritatingly familiar over the next three days. A combination of being properly averse to falling on the shoulder and said limb not being of any real use other than for resting lightly on the bar. And aching.

Fiddling around with shock pressures and quaffing ibuprofen kept me going most of the day though and what a great day it was. Officially the warm up, it still threw up nasty little climbs, endless off camber singletrack and fast blasts down dusty fireroads. The landy was always somewhere close, carrying all our stuff, lunch and our rather splendid Berber driver going by the name of Najiv.

30 years old, brilliantly competent in the drivers seat, making local salads and shooing away the occasional seller of tat. His English was better than my long forgotten French (Morocco has been independent of the French since around 1954 but along with infinate Arab dialects, it’s still the common language) and through a bit of both he explained he was away from his wife and kids for six months at a time to earn a living.

Jason had the first proper stack, dumping his front wheel in a rocky gorge and pirouetting over the bars at a velocity marked “that’s going to fucking hurt“. But he emerged unscathed leaving me cursing silently on the unfairness of life. Clearly I am just Mr. Mong and I’d better get used to it. My shoulder really had had enough by this time but my ego hadn’t so I grimaced on for the remainder of the day until two late punctures provided the excuse I was looking for to quit.

Somehow a packet of 20 Malboro had been planted on my temple like form so it seemed a shame not to smoke a couple in the warn sunshine leaning on the handy landrover. I’m a cheap date when it comes to finding some inner peace and mountains, bikes and a general lack of responsibility does it every time.

We shuttled 20 clicks up to a Mountain lodge run by a sour faced French dame whose father had clearly been Vichy. She didn’t like us much and dispatched us to a remote bunkhouse warmed only by steaming ride kit and sufficient methane to ratchet up global warming. But there was more beer, more bollocks and a partial lunar eclipse perfectly framed by a total lack of light pollution.

And since we were on the top of the mountain, tomorrow was all downhill apparently.