Start of the yearly affair.

I must be in love. Its an infatuation. I have no choice in the matter. Theres no backing out now. Its a little out of control. This weekend will see the start of it all. I'll find myself in that state of mind, an opiate-like trance in a random carpark up country, waiting for my rendezvous with the most passionate creature I've ever encountered. Hopefully she'll be kind to me. But the reality is often different. Like the good looking dead-cert you are throwing all your charm at in the night club, only for the lights to come on and her to turn into Godzilla; bike racing is seldom straight forward and never easy. If it was we'd all be winners and podium-girl-kissing experts. Yup, racing can be ugly. It takes a lot of love and passion to show up, get a hiding, then go home and plan the same for next week. But there are ways to get a good start, things, and people, to avoid. ******************It all starts in the wee hours of the night before; You need as much of your gear ready, prep done before you get near the race itself. Have your gear stacked in order of putting it on, have your number already pinned tight,your helmet should have a cap and gels in it, your shoes sitting beside it. Try to pack the car, Honda 50, bus or whatever your transport the night before. Spirit away toilet paper somewhere too, pre-race nerves often affect your insides in fun ways. And using your new gloves to wipe your butt is always a false economy. **************Packing your bike away the night before is practical too in that it stops you looking at it, tinkering with it, raising the saddle a fraction of a mill or tightening something just enough to shear a bolt and cause a mild anxiety attack, call to Care-Doc and fears for your mental health as you crawl around on all fours looking for a bottle-cage bolt in the shed at 2 A.M. Get your ass to your LBS and get it sorted and leave it be! *****************Next, try not to be too friendly. Shooting the breeze in the car park and catching up with all your auld pals can seriously damage your chances of doing a warm-up. You find yourself belting out the road trying to do a 40 minute warm-up in 15 and gasping like an Austin Healy in the Alps. And then you are dropped. **************Bottles. Too many bottles is always better than 'Ah the curse of the hairy camels on it!' as you take out the bike and admire it's lightness, only for it to slowly dawn on you as to why. Put the bottles on the bike in the car, put a large bottle of water in your bag, have a spare bottle for the warm up and bobs your uncle. If you are uber-organised you might have a to-do/ to-bring list and keep it in your gear bag so you can use it for every event. ***************Tyre pressure. Are you one of those gobshites that asks everyone around you for a track pump? Stop being a figure of hate and get yourself together. When you ask for a pump you are eating into another rider's prep/ warm-up. Its not fun for them. Multi-tool? Same. Bring your own. Why not pump your tyres slightly over the mark the night before? Maybe not the tubs, but your clinchers for sure! The idea is to tick off as many boxes that lessen your stress levels as possible. *******************And what about the pressure? The other pressure. Try to stay away from it all. Personally, if a race is due to start at 11 A.M. I try to get a warm up and switch off and saunter back as close to kick-off as possible. It stops the stupid stuff; Getting cold, or listening to the gimp [every race has one] who wants to tell you he is flying, how he isn't training but did 5000km over the winter and why he didn't win the last race or how they 'could have gone to Belgium' if they'd wanted. Unnecessary, head-filling shite. They'll be dropped faster than grease outside a kebab shop but will have left you unable to concentrate. No, go do that warm up and get your head together all by yourself. *************The Hype; its a simple fact of cycling life; If someone is going on about doing little training and hoping to hang on, they've actually been doing the sneaky spins, getting out with different cyclists during the week, bringing the bike in the car to work and sneaking in rides at lunch or after and blaming traffic for getting home late, never telling their team mates the truth. And the ones that tell you about all the numbers they are hitting, sustaining and surpassing, numbers, numbers, cycling bingo... are too busy looking at their Garmins to notice the break filtering off the front. Just don't listen and get out and race!************* After the fact; Pack the bike, put on the compression socks, have a drink and go home. Just like coming out of a Leaving Cert exam, theres nothing to be gained by a post mortem, unless its your own team that messed up. You can work it all out on the cycle/ drive home and plan your next moves in the silence of your own head. Stay off the kakao. Some cyclists highest heart-rates and best moves are kept for group chats. ***********Afterglow; Go home, look at the bike, enjoy what you have done. Think of next week.

100k stew.

What a day was Sunday! Sublime. All the ingredients for an epic. We had the lot thrown at us; the weather, an apocalyptic route change, fit cyclists, greasy roads, lineouts...a little of everything. It was an epic day! But for me it began last Wednesday with a strep throat and no biking. You know how the head works...little doubts have sprouts, so by Saturday I was thinking of not doing it. But I had managed to get to a gig in Dublin the previous evening and not felt too bad. I could hardly not ride the 100k yet sing and carouse at a Fun Lovin Criminals gig. And the forecast; look, no disrespect to the boys in Met Eireann but we live on a rock on the periphery of Europe. Forecasting has to be bloody haphazard. Hence the outlook changing daily in the run-up to yesterday. Like menopausal isobars. Fine, showers, rain, sleet, the boys couldn't make up their minds. I had my Hydra on and it turned out to be the best choice. In fact the hydra was so good that water ran down the outside of the sleeve, and filled my Sealskinz gloves! Rookie mistake but we all make them, don't we?. So I felt like a king-crab cycling along, outsized hands weighing four kilos holding the bars. Every sip from a bidon allowed the water to swish around in the gloves, like a sad, horizontal lava-lamp. But otherwise it was not a bad day at all. Only the enforced detour, up and over the rocky road was an irritant but at least we didn't have to cancel. Some road for a sunny day, just not for the day we got. I digress! There was a great group there at the sign-on, people relieved to be out of the training bubble and re-united with society again, if only for 3 hours. It hasn't been a long winter but its been a tough one. Personally I've killed a rear hub, bottom bracket, six brake-blocks, two tyres, four cables and a crow in my journeys. As always its great to see your friends and make new ones. We all have a healthy outlook and are pleased to be once again in the tribe to which we belong. Beards, legs, stomachs all trimmed. Once we rolled out it was good fun until we were jettisoned by the lead van on the back roads to Mullinavat. Then you don't get to talk much, you concentrate a whole lot and mind your house. Being in a lineout before the sixty kilometre mark was a novelty. I don't really see too many lineouts at A4. So to witness baggy, flapping rain coats {not rain-capes}, gynormous saddle bags that must of contained a spare tube and two infants, and an assortment of mudguards last seen in speedway, all in a single, rapid line, holding on for grim death was good craic. The silence too was deafening. You see, we were all super lucky to escape onto the roads for a few hours out of our week, yet the weather and course were snakey enough to require all eyes down, like biking bingo, drying up the banter. And as the ride got to the interesting bit, the sinuous, unforgiving road from Stonyford to Bennett's Bridge, the real work began and concentrion was key. Its a sloppy, short road. If you could afford to look up you'd see stud-farms, stone walls and ranch-land stretched along a serpentine , roller-coaster route that wears out brake blocks and patience in equal measure. People go backwards quickly here. Like living in Louisiana. And then, after a lull, the festivities really began; gels consumed, fireworks resumed. Riders off the front that should not have been, pace being pushed, hopes being crushed, limits found. Those who are fit find the front. The longest spin I've done all Winter has been ninety kilometres. So it was ironic that at exactly 89.9 kilometres I felt my thighs tighten!I laughed to myself on the long drag out of picturesque Inistioge, watching the Garmin humming way above my best pace up there, even though I was in pain and the 53, trying not to blow, Ciaran Power giving me a sling to keep the pace up. And then it was sublime. I recovered, got going again, found a new level and drove on. And despite the jockey wheels on my derailleur dying on the Ferry hill, I'd done what I'd wanted to do. I stood looking at the botched mech {it having died through the effects of a grit-driven Winter and neglect} and I felt pleased. Not for the mech. And then the delicious stew.... The smell alone had calories in it! Riders smiling through dirt covered faces, heating up in front of steaming plates of nourishment. Bliss. And that's what we all forget. The good people that did the sign-on, the kitchen prep, the tea-stop, George in the back-up van, the road markers and all the incidentals that we forget because we are in a bubble ARE the 100k. If I could have put in the same effort in the event as those organising it, I'd have been in the front group, first to a plate of spicy stew!