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January got off to a good start, with 202 miles on the clock it was further than I’d ridden in all but one month of 2007, courtesy of a metric century ride and a slightly longer commuting route.

February saw another decent mileage for the month, with the longer commute continuing and an aborted attempt at the Hamsterley Hill Rush.

March was a commuting-only month.

In April I rode a bit of a local Sustrans route, but being away for Easter knocked the distance down a bit.

In May I found some local bluebell-lined singletrack.

June saw me getting in a 50 mile road ride and a group ride at Hamsterley, plus some extra trips about town on the bike, netting me my first ever 300 mile month. By the end of June, I’d ridden about 37% further than the same time in 2007, but that was the high-point of the year, and it tailed off a bit from there.

July was by first proper MTB race at Hit the North, though I didn’t do nearly as well as I’d have liked (I was crap, rather than just bad).

In September I used car to get to the and from a ride for the only time in the year, riding High Street in the Lakes with HTB. I missed out on my ‘usual’ road century and the Great Milk Stout Ride this ear, because they were reorganised and so fell on the same day, which also clashed with a friends’ kid’s christening.

After riding in the Lakes, I seem to have given up riding bikes for anything other than getting about, which is a bit depressing. I also seem to have given up blogging for the last part of the year, so I don’t even really now why. Illness over Christmas has also stopped me from hitting the 2000 mile mark for the year, getting a total of 1953.5 miles for the year, which is only 15% more than 2007 (5.3 miles per day average, compared to 4.6 for 2007).

Most depressingly, I only did eight proper rides in 2008! That’s officially crap, especially when doing more proper rides was a target for the year after only doing 14 rides in each of the previous two years. 36 rides in three years!?!

Update after some more number-crunching: My eight proper rides totalled 376 miles, which is about half of what I did in both 2006 and 2007. That averages to 47 miles per ride, which is about the same as each of the last two years. I did just over 1500 miles for ‘utility’ purposes, which is 50% more than each of the last two years.

Happy New Year and all that.

With just four days of 2008 remaining, I’ve given up on reaching 2000 miles for the year. On Friday I started feeling flu-like, which developed into a chesty cough. It was only a fortnight since my last chesty cough, which knocked my asthma and made be get my first brown inhaler and a course of steroids, and this second cough knocked my breathing again.

So, I went back to the docs on Monday and got another lot of steroids, pus a course of antibiotics. I spent the period up to and over Christmas wheezing, eating very little and not sleeping.

I got to finish Christmas Day by going mental - a lovely side-effect of the steroids. Proper, curled up in a ball, making repetitive movements and being genuinely convinced that I would die. Not pleasant and not something that I ever want to repeat, but luckily only lasted a couple of hours, while the kids were in bed and while I wasn’t in on my own!

Update: Another course of antibiotics started yesterday and I get to go for a chest X-ray next week if it doesn’t clear up. And the steroids haven’t given me moobs sorry, just temporary mentalness.

I’m not dead, I’m just busy.

Last Sunday I went for only my second ever ride in the Lake District. A group of four of us travelled over to Pooley Bridge, rode down the lakeside bridleway to near Glenridding, then two of us carried on to Hartsop, from where we carried the bikes 2000′ upwards over the space of about two miles, then rode along the top of High Street back to the cars.

Three days later my shoulders are still sore from the carry up to High Street. I’d though the SS would be a handicap in the Lakes, but the climbs were mostly ridable in middle ring or carries, so it wasn’t a problem, with just a few points where I was pushing while others carried on riding, and there was no real difference in speed.

Distance: 25 miles (map - our route was slightly different and started just off the top of the market route)
Climbing: 4800 feet
Surface: Off-road
Time: 7.5 hours
Weather: warm and dry!
Bike: Inbred Singlespeed (32:17, with 2.1″ tyres)

Rode up to Hamsterley to join a group ride with some HTB members who’d been camping there the night before.

A massive group of four of use set out at 10:30 on Saturday morning - myself, Andy, Dave and Karen. We rode at a ’sociable’ pace it the first bit of the black, then down G***** O** (not sure how public this trail is) before Dave and Karen went to the skills loop and Andy and I followed the Black to the ford and then along to the Grove, where I had a cup of tea and Andy went back to bed to sleep off Friday night’s excesses.

I did 50 miles with 2664 feet of climbing on the road, plus 720′ of climbing over about 5 miles on the group ride.

Distance: 55 miles
Climbing: 4444 feet
Surface: On- and off-road
Time: 2 + 2 + 2 hours, plus breaks
Weather: warm and dry!
Bike: Solitude Singlespeed (34:18, with 2.2″ tyres)

When the sh*t goes down and the screws are turned, we all wage the war against the ingress of doubt. Like cold, salty ocean water, doubt will find its way inside a breach and then… it’s only a matter of time before the ship goes down.

Following an effort so hard that it leaves the eyes bloodshot and your feet fried, a rider tries to sort out the race’s details. How can one’s fitness vary so greatly on back-to-back days? All things being equal, one can point to doubt.

At times, denying doubt is harder than any of the physical efforts doled out. When the group is strung out into a razor sharp point and riders begin popping, doubt becomes tough to ignore. At that moment, the difference between a good day and a bad day is determined by the mind’s willingness to ignore the persistant whisper of that f*#ker doubt.

I’ve been meaning to blog tha above (Doubt, by BKW) since reading it yesterday. It fits in really well with a BBC interview with Chris Hoy, which I read today:

In the velodrome, we battered the other teams into submission. You could see their morale was completely dented by the first few days.

I was almost surprised at how badly some of them performed. Some of them didn’t even reach the levels they had at the World Championships in March.

That couldn’t be a physical thing, because you’d aim to peak for the Olympics. I think it was mental.

The lower your morale, the more you feel the pain. And when they saw how our team was riding, everyone else just started to crack.

The emotional side of it is almost tougher than the physical part.

If you ever look at a map and decide that the bridleway between Melsonby and Richmond looks like it would be a great way to ride to Swaledale, don’t ride it. Pushing your bike through nettles and brambles then over boggy grassy fields seriously takes the edge off a ride, as well as producing the great low average speed of 7mph you can see below.

Luckily, there’s a road alternative which means that I can do the rest of the ride again. That’s a good thing, because it’s a great ride. The descent off Fremington Edge is great and riding to Tan Hill is suitably epic.

Having no water between Hurst and Barnard Castle also dragged the speed down and made the climb up the valley from Langthwaite seem a very long one. For future reference, the shop in Bowes is only open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and the public toilets in Langthwaite are currently closed for renovation.

For the two bottles of water between home and Hurst and the two between Barnard Castle and home, I used nuun tablets for the first time, bought from Nick at Nixon Interactive. It’s hard to say whether they made a difference, but the ride home from Barnard Castle was a lot easier than when I’ve done it before and I feel fine today, which is pretty good considering I had no water for the middle third of the ride.

The big tyres were pretty draggy on the road, not helped by the skinny tube in the rear tyre making it a bit flat. I’m pretty sure that I could have ridden the off-road stuff on the 45c Panaracer Cinders I have in the garage, if a little slower than I did on the bigger ones, but the road bits would have been a lot less draggy. I think some Small Block 8s would be a better tyre for me than the Nevegals, at least on this bike.

I’d planned on riding the bridleway between Whaw and Tan Hill, but the weather and lack of fluid made the road a safer option. One day though.

Food: 20 jelly babies in one jersey pocket (100% of my RDA for sugar!) and 10 dried apricots in another. Four slices of toast with honey in my bag. Should have taken more - I bought two iced fingers and a bar of chocolate (and two litres of water) at the Coop in Barnard Castle.

Distance: 70 miles (map)
Climbing: 4199 feet
Surface: On- and off-road
Time: 10 hours
Weather: wet
Bike: Solitude Singlespeed (34:18, with 2.2″ tyres)

Went for a local mixed ride (map). I intended to ride to the bridleways just north of Richmond, but a combination of getting lost (a junction on the fold of the map meant I left left when I should have gone right, returning me to Stapleton instead of getting me to Barton), getting a puncture (hawthorn) and bad weather made me cut the ride short.

Revisited a nice bridleway that I’ve not ridden for a good few years that would make a good link in a round-Darlington route, and found a nice singletrack road with grass growing down the middle (the best kind of road).

Distance: 23.5 miles
Climbing: 797 feet
Surface: On- and off-road
Time: 2.5 hours
Weather: wet
Bike: Solitude Singlespeed (34:18, with 2.2″ tyres)

Total: 114 miles (6,428 feet climbed)

Worst month of the year, distance-wise. But, rode at Hit The North earlier in the month, which was a great event despite lotsa rain and a mechanical stopping me from putting in a decent ride - with just one of those I’m sure I’d have kept going, but both just made for miserable riding. Ended the month with eleven consecutive days of not riding, which is the longest spell of the year!

Total so far for 2008: 1265 miles
* average of 5.9miles per day - on course for 2174 miles for the year