A Little Trip to France

Well i feel i should apologise somewhat to the avid readers of this blog, all 3 of you that probably is, but after a snowy, sleety unrideable afternoon in the North West of England i logged into my account to see if anyone had messaged me...etc and realised the last time i updated this blog with information regarding what i have actually been doing was quite a long time ago. I could make up a massive list of half decent excuses but the stark reality is that i have been exceptionally lazy.

So without further ado this is what i have been up to over the last couple of weeks. I finally finished work at Waitrose on the 5th Feb and my god what a relief it was no longer will i be rocking up back home at 10:30 at night with a body in ruins, i am sure all of you riders out there will appreciate how painful walking around for 9hrs as a bike rider is...ouchy. Having said that i would like to extend a massive thank-you to almost everyone at Waitrose, i know some of you are reading this, for making the last 6 months of work a complete laugh. After my last shift the members of my Section all headed out into town for a curry as a farewell meal where i preceded to show everyone how much i can eat, which incidentally is a lot.

The weekend after i finished work literally flew by, i managed to ride for just over 4hrs on both the Saturday and the Sunday, with the afternoons taken up organising my life as on Monday myself and Phil Gale, teammate for the season and all round sound geezer, were off to France to drop our gear off, pick our kit up, get our licences sorted and generally get sorted for the season.

Monday morning soon arrived, my car was packed and the sat nav set to my first destination...Phil's house, after the best part of 5hrs i arrived at Phil's and after a quick turn around and way too much coffee in a short space of time we were on the road again heading to Portsmouth ready to get the Ferry to St Malo. Having been on the go for the best part of 10hrs i was glad we had a cabin booked for the overnight crossing and soon the snores of two tired bike riders was drowning out the sound of the diesel engine powering the boat along.

The morning soon arrived...or rather it didn't, forgetting the consequences of the continent being an hour ahead on time, we left the boat at 8:45am still in the dark which was a little disorientating, but we were on the road heading to Hennebont and with Ian Brown on the CD player it was all smiles in the Astra.

After 2.5hrs of driving we reached our destination and headed into town for a coffee, before going to the Presidents house, running errands, going to the doctors...etc all boring things that i do not really need to talk about here. A lovely evening meal with the Presidents family followed however it was soon off to bed ready for the 6am wake up to get the ferry back to the UK. Now 8hrs on a boat during the day didn't appeal to me much before and certainly does not now, fortunately myself and Phil were pretty tired so managed to sleep for most of it but man was it a drag. On our way back into Portsmouth though we did manage to capture some pretty good pictures of the sunsetting, goes to show that there are some decent places in the UK too.

The view from the Ferry entering Portsmouth, nice i think you will agree.

Once we hit the port i dropped Phil off with his Dad, who had rather kindly offered to pick Phil up in Portsmouth thus saving me about 3hrs on my journey back up north, filled up with Petrol and smashed it back up north back in time for tea...well not really.

After missing 3 days of riding during my travels i decided to put a hard block in over the last weekend, doing 3hrs on Thursday, 4.5hrs on Friday, 5hrs on Saturday and 6hrs on Sunday with a 50mile reliability thrown in for the mix, i think my form is about right as i was still feeling pretty strong on the Sunday, having done some efforts in each of the preceding rides also. It is a nice feeling to know now though that when i get back from a ride i do not have to rush round to get ready for work, i can eat and get a quick nap in to aid the recovery.

With me off to Gran Canaria on Saturday to meet up with Phil again i am spending the last few days in the UK relaxing and riding as much as the weather will allow before heading to Gran Canaria for 2.5 weeks and finally to France for the season on 12th March.

You couldn't write this shit!

Well where the hell to start? I suppose rather fittingly i should start with Marco Pantani, the late great 'Il Pirata' was the first cycling superstar i remember, being slightly too young to be aware of Miguel Indurains efforts in the early 90's, in fact it would not be wrong for me to say that if it wasn't for 'Il Pirata' i wouldn't ride a bike at all. Watching his scintillating attacks in the mountains on his way to the 1998 Tour de France as a young boy i was memorised, the speed, the colour the panache the pain etched across the riders faces as this little Italian wiped the floor with them had me hooked, little did i know and the time that this wonderfully colourful and extravagant sport had such a dark underbelly.

Fast forward to 2010 and after watching the Tour de France for numerous years and finally getting my leg over a top tube for the first time 5 years ago i am finally a half decent bike rider myself, with a height of 5ft8 and a racing weight of 57kg comparisons could easily be drawn to the diminutive stature of Il Pirata himself. Unfortunately Marco's future, which must have looked oh so bright in Paris at the end of the 1998 Tour faded away, until on the 14th Feburary 2004 he was found dead in his hotel room alone from a cocaine overdose a victim of the system this beautiful sport of ours produced in which you have to give your all and sometimes end up giving too much...he never failed a dope test.

Now there is a new Pantani in the world of cycling, Ricardo Ricco, unlike his hero Ricco has already failed a drugs test for CERA and almost completed his 20 month suspension which rather fortunately for him finishes the day before this Milan San Remo arguably the greatest one day race in the World which could see him lining up with his new best mate Mark Cavendish who recently described Ricco 'a parasite coming back', now then nobody can deny the damage Ricco has done to the sport but come on Mark describing Ricco as a 'parasite' when your own mentor confessed to using epo before the 1996 claiming to have only used it for a week as the effects were too great for him to handle is a bit rich! It will be interesting to see how this latest spat in the world of pro cycling develops over the coming season, comparisons could be drawn with the relationship between Il Pirata and Armstrong after Pantani put him away up Mont Ventoux in the 2000 Tour...namely they hated each other.

I took this photo after the 2008 Tour stage which finished in St Brieuc Brittany a few weeks later the Tour was blown apart for the second year in a row and not due to what was happening on the road, i've always wondered what was in that bag!

But Ricco's problems do not stop at having the stroppy Manx man first in the queue to give him a kicking, oh no as if Ricco's own doping story could not have been enough on the eve of his comeback to professional racing his long term girlfriend and mother of their child herself tested positive for CERA. Instead of Ricco coming out to defend his partner she is his partner no more unless the doping charges against her are dismissed, a nice touch after she has stood by him for the last 2 years since his positive at the 2008 Tour. Lets just hope we do not have another Pantani on our hands.

If the Ricco merry go round isn't enough, Schumacher is still trying to get his doping charges dropped against him, despite testing positive during both the 2008 Tour and 2008 Olympics, Di Luca has finally been caught and handed a lengthy suspension, Valverde cannot even enter Italy for risk of imprisonment a sanction which still maybe extended to world wide competition but which has not stopped him racing in the early season, Boonen seems to have stopped powdering his nose for now, but the coup de grace has to be the announcement today (15/02/2010) that the French courts have issued an international arrest warrant for Floyd Landis, yeah remember that piss taker, after his coach allegedy hacked the accounts of the anti-doping lab used in his case and changed some of the data stored.

What does the future hold for Valverde? Another period in yellow or a prolongued rest period?

Yet despite all this the sport lives on and it always will, the panache, the verve, the speed and the colour i witnessed during that 1998 Tour will always be there as will the pain etched on the faces of the defeated and in some cases of the victors, no amount of bad press can ruin it for me because this is our sport, it's our passion and our lives and i love it.

Thanks Prendas

I am not going to lie, this post is a blatant plug for one of the ‘unsung heroes’, if a company can be called such a thing of the UK cycling scene. It was a while before Christmas when I decided to see if someone other than my parents could help support me in my up and coming season abroad, many an email was sent, not many were replied to and even fewer offered support. However, Andy Storey of Prendas was one of the few people I managed to get on my side and agreed to help me out.

Fast forward until about half way through last week and I am opening a box of goodies from them, including numerous pairs of their legendary socks, for those in the know Prendas socks are one of the few pairs around that fore fill the official height requirements set out in the Euro code for cyclists, the amount of pairs of these socks I have got through in my riding career is unimaginable. However amongst the arm warmers, socks, oversocks and track mitts I also found 2 items I didn’t order, namely a pair of Prendas ‘Super Roubaix Gloves’ and a pair of Prendas ‘Windtex Gloves’. Why are you telling me this you may ask, well because they are good and I mean really good. I think I have done 4 winters now in the UK, or maybe 5 the years run into each other for me just like the miles god knows what I will be like by 30, and up until last Saturday when I put these on in tandem I have not previously found a glove wearing approach as good as putting the ‘Roubaixs’ on under the ‘Windtex Gloves’.

Previously I have tried everything and I mean everything, one set of DeFeet Dura Gloves, under a pair of ‘Windstoppers’, two pairs of DeFeet gloves under a pair of ‘Windstoppers’, at some points I have even go out with a pair of the rubber gloves doctors use under the DeFeet gloves under the ‘Windstoppers’ and still in the depths of winter my hands would loose feeling. Infact it got to the point this winter, where myself and my riding mates began joking about the fact that these supposed ‘Winderstopper’ materials should really be called ‘Breeze Stoppers’.

So Saturday came around and I thought I’d crack the new toys from Prendas out, after all they couldn’t be any worse than anything else I have worn to try and keep my hands warm. It soon became apparent though that these gloves were good, or as I said before really good imagine my joy as I returned home on Saturday able to change gear and feel my brakes all when the temperature hadn’t risen above 2 degrees all day. I actually could not recommend these gloves enough to anyone other than the fair weather cyclists out there, they are mega.

So thanks Prendas, for the stuff which will keep me looking sweet in the season, and also for the gloves that will keep my hands toasty in the last few weeks in the UK.

For anyone wishing to get some Prendas kit, click on the icon on the page and it should take you straight to the main site.