Friday, November 27, 2015

Hampers

As I sit here at midnight nursing a clicky knee and hip like an old, faithful Labrador long past it's best before date, I'm trying to be upbeat. Another murky day rolls away to make room for more of the same but I won't allow myself to wallow in self-pity considering all the bad stuff that could befall me or mine.In a week's time the first of two Hamper races I hope to enter this year is on. Gammy joints or not and as I'm relatively cycling fit, I feel it's my duty to race them. You see, memories always quicken the pulse, harden your resolve and make you think you can re-live those times again. You know, the older I get the better I was. And for me, the Hamper races I have entered down through the years have always been eventful. So when I click in for the Conor McCabe next week on the 6th of December or the Wexford Wheelers hamper race on the 13th I'll be half living in the now and half in a land of nostalgia. As a young fella of twenty I won my first hamper race around the Barrowland circuit in New Ross in a two-up sprint. That was at the end of a devil-take-the-hindmost. I beat Dessie Kent up the drag to where Tesco is now and I thought I'd be turning pro soon after.It was one of only two hamper races I won! But it wasn't my best. That was 1994. King Kelly had just retired, seeing out his last season with Catavana, and to celebrate, the town of Carrick put on a neutralised sportif with over a thousand riders in it, the last 20-30km being a free-for-all. But it wasn't just a bunch of freds and trolls out for a Sunday spin. There was ICONS in the mix....Fignon, DaSilva, Stephen and Laurence Roche and a certain Mister Merckx. And I rode out of my skin. But its funny, it was BMX that got me to the finishing circuit in Carrick that day. When I hung out with a bunch of bike-nuts as a 14-year-old, a young lad called Val Dunne showed me how to wheelie and bunny-hop. I got the wheelie up to 200 metres and the bunny-hop routinely up to a foot. I'd like to say my skills got me all the girls but they didn't. Why do I digress? Well, it was that bunny-hop, learned in an empty Swimming Pool car park after dark as a kid that got me to the circuit in Carrick many years later. As soon as the flag went down it was chaos. For some reason, 998 cyclists that day thought they too were fleet Gods. When the pace went up, the uninitiated went down. Hard. There was a touch of wheels as a big split occurred and a frantic scraping of metal on tarmac. And, in a line-out, I looked up to see some guy flat on his back, his bike hell bent on blocking my path and without a second thought I was back in the swimming-pool car park clearing a chunk of wood that we used for practice. I thought I wouldn't clear the bike and I touched it's rear wheel as I went over. Yet I stayed up and was last man in the selection that made the circuit before the barriers locked us in to that furious rat-run around the river. I probably got 25th. And I was a good kilometre off the fight for the win but I do remember passing Laurence Roche up the drag off the bridge on the back of the circuit each lap and he returning the favour in spades on the flat. He was riding for TonTon Tapis as a pro and I was riding for the ham sandwiches in the hotel afterwards.I stood up to sprint for the craic and I smiled for a week after it. So I returned many times. When Mark Scanlon was World Champ he raced for the hamper in Carrick the week before Christmas and it was a shit-fest on a windy circuit [a couple of kilometres had grass down the middle and more bends than a yoga instructor on difene]. He disappeared up the road and made us all look like grannies shopping in Supervalu. Another year I was passed by Cassidy and Kelly. I had a HRM for the first time and knew when they went through our group and chatted that I was in for it. My heart-rate with 15km to go was 198. The Slaney guys ran a race based on Scarawalsh maybe 15-16 years ago in the middle of a big freeze.I won an uphill sprint against Johnny Carroll from Dublin and remember feeling bad because he had mudguards and all the winter gear just shy of a yeti. And my feet and hands were so cold I placed them in the fridge to thaw out. That last fact may not be actually true. But I thought about it. My brother Stephen rode bloody well that day. We loved hard races.And then Wexford Wheelers started having extraordinary events in the back lanes of Ferrycarrig. Fast and furious as no doubt the one on the 13th of December will be. Twenty years ago people would race with tinsel on their bars or helmet, perhaps a santa hat. Now its break out the carbon finery, catch up with your local peleton and dig deep. A real race with the fun afterwards over a cup of tea. I don't quite know what it is about their appeal. A mid-Winter test? A rehearsal for two months later? A chance to taste Belgian toothpaste and get stubborn dirt into your jersey? Funny, but whatever the reason I don't know anyone who races for a hamper!

Friday, November 20, 2015

Hydrate or die

Being manipulated like a slab of beef on a physio's plinth can be a wonderful experience. Sometimes. Being turned over like a pig on a spit with an orange in it's mouth, kneaded, beaten, stretched to breaking point and beyond, all in the name of sport is a little unfair. My Patella tendon, something I didn't know I possessed, is giving me grief. But I knew something was wrong because I was weeing like Brussel's Mannequin Piss for the last week. Apparently with my quads tighter than a snare drum, they were refusing to absorb water. I drink a minimum of 2 litres of water a day, so instead of being absorbed it was looking for a way out. My patella is being pulled unceremoniously upwards like a guide wire on the Golden Gate bridge by my tight quad. And as the only time I usually stretch is for the vinegar in a chippers, its got to the point where something has to give. Ice, foam roller, stretches. Forty Seven years old next month and I've only been to a physio five times in my life. I am the lucky chap. But if I don't change, starting yesterday, I'll be living on a plinth by age forty eight! Add to this my Carpal Tunnell'ed wrists and tendonitis-prone feet, sure you may as well turn me to glue today! But I am going to embrace change. I used never do intervals. Wondered why I got dropped. I changed training and got better. I used never put in miles, never had endurance. Changed that too. Funny as it may seem, I would rather do uber-hard intervals now, would rather come back shook, than wander aimlessly around the roads calling myself a cyclist. Age has another effect though. Its made me conservative in how I expend my energy. It may just be that I am stubborn but I know in a race or event, I have X amount to give and I'm not going to throw it away. Its probably an awareness that I am not twenty years younger too. A young lad has a whole box of matches to burn in a race, Maguire and Patterson couldn't keep up with a twenty-year-old in a race. But I'm more aware of what my body is capable than ever. For example, a two-day race is beyond me now. I cannot recover, despite wearing everything but a compression willy-warmer, bathing in a vat of protein shakes', getting a rub from ten Turks, sleeping at altitude on Glenmore hill, eating chicken with my porridge and being carried around on a litter by a bunch of Lilliputians. No matter what I do to stay fresh I'll wake the next day with someone else's legs, notably an eighty-year-old smoker's. Oh, and I need sleep. Six hours does it but any less and I become a fist-dragging troll muttering monosyllables. Can't ride a bike if the bags under your eyes get caught in the spokes. Oh, and I need wine, a glass or two-ish. Swear by it! So don't feel sorry for me as I roll my wrinkled limbs like Mary Berry arsing around with dough. Please don't laugh as I walk like Captain Ahab without his white nemesis, or shop in circles in the supermarket because my tracking is off. I'll be right as rain when I get some sleep after a dinner of wine, stretch my quads like playdoh, beat my patella down to a measly bit of gristle, ice the offending limb 'til its colder than an Eskimo's chest freezer and find my way down the stairs for tomorrow's bike ride like a king crab with saddle sores.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Soggy bottoms

Ya wouldn't want to get your hopes up these days. The forecast on TV seems to have bad news even when its good news. Any chance of sun is laughed off as though we are stupid for getting our hopes up. 9.30 every evening I see more isobars than before, the lows seem to have lows and if I see more fronts I'll think I've woken up at Spring break in Miami. My opportunities for escape [sorry, I mean windows for training] are tighter than Cavendish's stem bolts and whatever the weather is firing down I have to get out. Use it or lose it. Train or go insane. Athlete or fatlete. But this time-management nonsense needs planning. My house is a combination of a Fire Station and Wallace and Grommit's "The Wrong Trousers". Five minutes from work I'm in the door. The bike is ready from 7A.M. with a full bidon, kit is waiting turned right-side out and ready to put on. Puncture canister, gel and glasses are all in the helmet in the bag, beside the shoes. Shut the door, turn on Nespresso, dress, wheel bike to door, drink espresso, instantly stoked and gone down the road. And today was no different. Muck, leaves, wind, rain. How I love being Belgian. Well, I must be, revelling in what most people think is a sh**e day. Up to the Sky-road through farmyards, scutter, clay, branches and silence. I wouldn't change it for anything. Except that the sun came out as I returned over by Listerlin and I'm sure I heard a laugh, or a scoff coming from the fading, low-lying clouds. But I don't have the luxury of waiting for the better part of the day as Tony Ryan once did. Gotta make do. An 80km/h descent off the BallyMartin ridge in the rain isn't as cool as the dry but it still rocks. Sliding on off-camber bends is a seasonal bonus, Moorhens and gurgling water a better soundtrack than sticky tar. Each to their own. And hosing the bike white again, filling the washing machine with some of the days labour and some farmer's soil is cathartic. Shower faster than a Gypsy's card trick and back in work on time, blood flowing, stronger, faster, smarter. Of course that all sounds like a Bollywood production...perfect choreography, colour, smoothness and a little magic. What actually happens is a discombobulated clusterf**k of mayhem behind closed doors. CCTV would reveal a struggling idiot fighting with every sleeve, leg, ratchet and piece of Velcro until he resembles a lycra-clad tumbleweed rolling towards and out through the front door and down the hill. My bottle probably empty, chain a forgotten amalgam of ginger rust, odd socks or inside outs, time already running so low I may as well just return to the house and hose the bike already. Who needs an espresso when your heart rate is already 185 from the lunatic escape routine you just performed while getting your Velotoze wrong again? Seriously, if my neighbours only knew! Although they might,considering I live in a semi-detached and I regularly curse the world and it's mother in a high-pitched whine while desperately trying to dress myself mimicking a break-dancer. Ah yes,I look good out there, flick through town like the local pro, giving off the vibes of a winner. Just look closer and you'll see a chamois on in reverse, left overshoe on right foot and you'll hear a squeeking chain and the wheeze of an old, overwhelmed git on borrowed time....

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Something has to give.

There's a lot on my mind lately. A few conundrums. A few questions to be answered. How to treat my fellow man fairly, what etiquette is, should I follow my heart or my heart-rate? I'm hurtling towards a 2016 cycling season at the speed of light and I'm in that tunnel, that frame of mind that borders on psychosis. I know what I need to do in my fitness regime, when to do certain aspects, at what rate and where. But as with most endurance sports, everyone has a different approach to achieving the same results...a win or two at certain events or at least a top performance. I know what my targets for next year are, at what level, and at what personal cost. The problem begins when you put a large number of cyclists with similar goals but different approaches into one group and expect them to function as one organism. Cyclists, unless they ride for SKY, are not creatures to be harnessed and function in unison. We may not heft .22 rifles around with us but we often are by nature loners, off-gridders by default.Cycling also possesses an inordinate amount of personalities. To spend your time killing yourself all over local roads, fighting friction on a turbo, or talking to yourself, planning minutely like a Bond villain for world domination, putting up with biblical weather, an uncaring world and bad roads takes a strong personality. Throw all those lone-wolf types into a 'unified' group on a Sunday ride and, well, I don't have to spell it out, do I? Its ok for a newby, they think all the chaos is actually routine, so riding too slow on a hill and too fast on a descent is like a learning curve for them. Its ok for the guys who are happy to just be there, hanging on for a new PB. The ones I feel sorry for are the lads who know what to do, what's the right pace at the right time, when to back off and when to push on. Those guys, like myself, have picked up all of their experience through the osmosis of hanging out with talented cyclists or listening to decent coaches or learning by our mistakes often decades ago. We sure aren't making it up as we go along or tailoring a group ride to suit our own needs; that's what the other six days of the week are for. And yet due to ill-communication good guys often get dropped or don't know the outcome of the task ahead. Yet most clubs get it spot on. November/December spins are for endurance and if you want to have a shot in the last few kilometres knock yourself out. What's the point in being in a club when you are dropped, forgotten or too fatigued to think? Club is a communal entity. Not a dictatorship. You have to park your personal aspirations unless you are planning on racing unattached come next season. When you roll out this Sunday, make sure you are getting what you need from your fellow club members, get what you want from the spin too but remember that you will get fitter and smarter collectively. If you don't mind leaving your club mates back the road somewhere, remember karma. Unlike those you leave on the road, karma always catches back up.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Sloppy seconds

St Moling has a lot to answer for. Seems to me everywhere his name appears on a road sign within 15 miles of home there's a killer hill lurking in the undergrowth nearby. Yesterday was no different. But I'm getting ahead of myself. A murky morning skulking along in the group was enlivened by two sprints for town signs. Two second places. Their cumulative effect was like a butcher using a tenderiser on a slab of mutton. Which is apt as we were lambs to the slaughter by the time we climbed up the sky road near Saint Moling's well heading due south out of Thomastown. Its a beauty. Perfect surface, ramps, flats and a view on a good day. More sheepdogs than cars and a tough grade if, like me, you'd helped to celebrate four birthdays in the preceding week. And two helpings of apple strudel. Great craic though! Soon afterwards I turned off with Colin to zigzag home by Ballymartin windfarm and on to the quarry climb, a full-on haggard of shite layering the road. I like my climbs. I only do one three hour endurance ride a week and I like Malcolm Elliott's old approach to make it pay. Go hard, mix in climbs and hardship and drag your sorry ass home in a bag. The rest of the week I do intense stuff, sufferfest without the screen or marketing. I guess this time of year is often seen as the silly season as people move club and try something new. But no matter who goes where, the sloppy long stuff has to be done regardless. More base than a cocaine lab, more hardship than a mother-in-law, more sweating than death-row. It just can't be avoided. New kit can make it fresher but you still have to feel the pressure. So after an October not very sober and the seasonal rest and nourishment enjoyed I have to push on into the darkening gloom of days and make something of the most important time for cyclists. It may consist of gloopy days in the lanes alone or, sun-split days blinded in the countryside with frosted ditches and your own skewed views of the world for company. But it doesn't matter as long as you make yourself happy and fit.