Pyro's Yard v2.0

Ho Ho Ho. Happy New Year and all that festive chuntering to anyone out there who reads this. I realised, when someone linked to my blog from theirs, that it's been quite a while since I wrote anything here. You must all have become terribly frustrated at the lack of blethering waffle with which to fill five minutes of your day. I apologise, wholeheartedly. Anyway, a few things are up and running. I left one job and started another - now Data Analysing once more, for the NHS. I still haven't escaped Leeds, but I'll manage it at some point. I've bought some skis and played around in snowy parks, bought a playboat and paddled it a couple of times (I'm still useless, and in answer to various people's retorts, no, I am NOT going to start paddling at Holme Pierrepont every week). I've had some amazingly beautiful snowy night runs, and some horrendously muddy trail rides, and at the moment I'm up in the Lakes having a lovely, peaceful, quiet Christmas and N...

So, the Coast-to-Coast is done with. It didn't go as well as I'd hoped. A combination of factors, mainly physical, a little technological, maybe a bit mental as well. These are just some assorted memories from the race, good, bad and ugly, and a few thing to pick up on for the future. Start Introductions, banter, catching up, the sun rising over the sea, watching dawn chasing us, having a brew by the beach and getting sorted for the off. Praying for fine weather, preparing for rain. A brave Provost greeting, the sound of the horn and away. Stage 1 - Run, 11km. 1:11:15. Taking it steady, knowing Phil was behind me, until he caught me again. Rewarding myself with Jelly Babies, cursing myself when I felt like I needed to walk. Pins and needles in my left foot, a blister on my right. The beautiful red sunrise off to the left, over the hay field. Up the drive of Cawdor castle, "You're going the wrong way, Pyro. The teashop's that way" , into the transition, f...

So, the latest batch of lunacy looms. And it's a biggie. The Nokia Coast-to-Coast, the focus of a summer's ( ahem ) training. 160km across Scotland, run-bike-kayak stylee. And guess what? I'm nervous. A wise old man (or was it a doddery old goat?) often used to tell me that being nervous was natural, it showed you were taking things seriously. Well, I often try to pretend I'm not taking it seriously, but in this case, it's a definite lie. I'm taking it really, really seriously. I'm in Expert category. That's not a refection on my abilities as a racer, just that I have the skills and desire to put a long kayak section into my race. I may be the least Expert of the Experts, and there's only 40 of us. I'm competitive, if only with myself. My only aim is to complete the course, irrespective of ranking or time. I am going for a long day out in the hills. It will hurt. I know all of this, I keep repeating all of this to myself. But the truth is th...

More work to be done, more training to be done, more life to experience, more to do. Always. I've made what is for me a rather large change in giving up caffeine in the evenings. To help me to sleep better, ostensibly. Feeling less dehydrated is useful as well. Last week was far too sedentary though. A little bimble on the mountain bike, a wee bit of walking, a toddle around on the roadie. Nothing much, nothing fast, nothing hard. Enough - a session most days - but not enough to feel like I'd done anything. Oh well. Live and learn. Sort it out and move on. The weekend was a fun one, Timmy's stag do, up in my old stomping ground of the Dales. A nice wee ramble up Ingleborough on Saturday morning, a couple of hours up and down, including some dithering at the top in the mist. A phenomenal day of falconry and archery, including hunting with a hawk, and a nice ride around Gisburn on Sunday. No crashes this time, though, though the technical bits at Whelpstone Crag did get t...

First 'proper' ride out on the road bike today - I'm still awaiting the new rear mech for my mountain bike after Porage the other week, so there's been a few days of tweaking and a decision to get some road miles in. I went out for a short spin on Sunday to see whether a bunch of my hopes and fears about owning a roady were right* - some were, some weren't. I can, contrary to my own belief, climb on a big double chainring. It's not necessarily the sat-down spinning I'm used to, but I can do it. I still can't, for some reason, get my head round riding on the drops (the lower bit of curly road bikes bars, for any non-riders out there). The posture just feels weird, the upper half of my body feels weighted but unsupported, and it's just not quite right. I therefore spend most of my time resting on the brake hoods - not particularly aero, but easier for me. And I still feel as if I'm perched on top of the bike, not sat in it. That might sound odd, ...

"And so it came to pass, that the Revolving Head of Porage spaketh, and it invited the people unto Scotland and it said "Race! Run, ride and be happy." And the people heard, and ran, and rode, and raced, and were happy. And then cameth the steps..." Okay, a slightly bizarre intro to a race report, but a slightly bizarre race to be reported upon. The Man of Porage is a bit of a strange not-quite-a-race not-quite-a-group-ride kind of thing. There's a trophy, you get invited rather than entering, the organiser changes every year, and it's quite a long way. I've Porage'd before (see an old post  for what happened last time), twice in fact, and had been last both times. I wasn't really expecting anything more this time. I knew I'd have company at the back of the peloton this time though. When the invites went out, Ross, Rachel and myself decided to ride together and make the most of it. Rachel later decided she'd rather get the nav practic...

Another longer loop around Leeds. Myself and Giles set off to do the Meanwood loop, but I took the OS map out in case I fancied a longer ride. Come the top end of the trail, Giles opted to head back and I continued North up across the fields towards Eccup reservoir, Harewood, and the Emmerdale set. Just shy of 30km in the end, about 3 and a half hours of nice steady pacing. A couple of map/food/faff stops, and a beautiful evening to be out and about. The view across the crop fields - very pretty, although the pic from a phone camera isn't the best! And of course, it wouldn't be complete without me trying to bag some trig pillars. Picked up the pillar north of the Adel jumps on a short out-and-back, pictured with the bike below, and the pillar embedded in the hedge at Brandon Lodge. The one at Tunnel How is still defying me - GPS tracks show I'm near it - very near! - but the new-ish plantation and a lot of undergrowth mean it isn't visible, and it will take some b...

It's a road bike. And no, those pedals aren't staying on it. They were just so I could sort the saddle height out...

Just had a fantastic weekend of racing up in the Dales, the Open 12, with Steve Hutton (MEng). Steve's first multisport race, and my first in a while, so a good tester for both of us! Next races are Porage and the Coast-to-Coast for me, London Rat Race for Steve. Thanks: Big thanks to Steve for putting up with me, waiting for me on foot and following me on the bikes. Thanks also to Dave, Portia and Mark for the swim safety and banter. And to Open Adventure for such good organisation and fun. Distances: Day 1 - 7hrs - 18km trek, 1km canyon, 22km bike, pool dive. Day 2 - 5hrs - 60m abseil, 11km trek, 600m swim, 23km bike.   The good: The special stages - Hell Gill canyon, Hardraw Force pool dive and abseil, and the Semer Water swim. Especially the Semer Water swim. The scenery - jogging across stone slab footpaths through fields of clover and buttercups, the view from Wild Boar Fell. All awesome countryside The running - a slow plod, perhaps, but run/jog/tabbing furt...

So, I'm slowly going crazy trying to get all my kit together for the Open 12. As always happens the night before a race, the kit-geek in me runs rampant: "Shall I take this? Will we need that? Ooh, that might be useful. Is that too much gear?" D'you think I'm compensating for something?* Anyway, race strategy is to go out and have fun. Start slow and taper off. Enjoy the sun and have a giggle. We should manage some of that, I reckon. Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast... *I meant my lack of fitness. Wash your mind out...

So, a run and bike day, a week before the Open 12. Carrying a full race pack, as practice. 13.5km run, about 1:35. Trails are nice and dry, got the trig pillar in (keeping with my traditional mission!). A little more time on tarmac than I would have liked, but you can't really get in any distance without road running a bit, eh? 25km MTB ride, 2:25, started off as the Meanwood Loop as well, but then became a bit of a "Ooh, I wonder where that trail goes?" womble up to Eccup, Harewood, the Emmerdale set and back trying to find another trig pillar (failed - just above it, I think. Missed by yards!). All in all, a rather pleasant day out in the sun, dry trails, a good giggle, and now sore legs to match the sore arms from Thursday. Yey!

GPS track of the Meanwood run route I've been doing a couple of times a week recently - well, one of the many variations on 'route'. There are so many small trails in that section of woodland that you can create as many variations of the theme of 'route' as I can on the theme of 'running'... Run anticlockwise, the blobby bit at about 3 o'clock is a little quarry where I run short hill reps. To also do some shameless promotion for a friend, my increase in running recently has been helped a lot by a good gait analysis and shoe advice from Stuart Hale and the team at Accelerate  down in Sheffield. I'd been having big issues with blistering in my arches during runs, which is not what you need when you're wanting to up your mileage. Stuart ran the gait analysis for me, talked about my normal running style, terrain and mileage, explained (very patiently, in words of less than 3 syllables) what was causing the problem, what the possible solutions w...

...Part motivation. The last one of the three is usually the hardest to muster. So, Bristol Rat Race marked the start of the summer season, both working- and racing-wise. A fantastic weekend was had by most, the water crew especially, who had a wonderful time kayaking at Redcliffe, pontoon-rafting by the Cottage, and paddling and abseiling at the NADC quarry at Chepstow. Today's sermon kind of follows on from the weekend activities, and it's a tricky one. Motivation to exercise can be hard work, harder than the exercise itself when it comes down to it. There's been lots of great phrases that have come up over the years, lovely snippets and soundbites that we can all quote. We use them to make ourselves feel better, or to justify our own actions, or just to divert attention from the fact that, as smug as we are in quoting them, we haven't had much motivation ourselves. Some can become a mantra, words to get us through the bad patches. Some become a target, words to a...

"When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, it was beautiful, magical. All the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily, joyfully, playfully, watching me. But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical. And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical. Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical, liberal, fanatical, criminal. Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable." (Supertramp - The Logical Song) Isn't growing up a joy?

"Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." - Helen Keller A big part of my enthusiasm for the outdoors comes from my parents. Both of them like being out and about, and have always encouraged and supported both myself and my sisters to do the stuff we wittered about wanting to do as kids. Kayaking, orienteering, mountain biking, all of it. Obviously there were limitations, but we got the chance to do as much as we could. Something that's been on my mind recently has been something being your own adventure though, and I think that's another thing that relates back to mum and dad. Let me expand, at vague length, on what I mean... When I was a kid, we went away orienteering a lot. Sometimes it was fantastic, and looking back now it did wonders for my navigation skills and base fitness. But I didn't always enjoy it, and I remember particular patches where I REALLY didn't enjoy going. I wanted to stay in, play computer games, play rugby etc. I sulked ...

Continuing tonight's 'Pillars' theme (this could go on for a while, y'know...) A second route, a Monday night run to bag another urban trig pillar. 9.1km, 59mins. Would have been quicker but for the horrendous blisters my shoes are inflicting on me, despite tape and two pairs of socks. New shoes to come in the not-too-distant future, methinks... Still, an enjoyable hour on a beautiful spring evening. Long may it last!

I've been trying to take some inspiration, and some motivation, from others recently. Sometimes it's nice to take a others ideas and see how you can twist them to fit yourself and your own goals and aims. Sometimes they're profitable, sometimes not, but like most things, they're usually worth a go. The latest one is thus: The German posted an article to his blog a while back about a mission to collect trig pillars in his local area - for those who aren't familiar with these (shame on you) they're concrete pillars used by the Ordnance Survey to base their theodolites on when surveying the UK. In the days of aerial cartography they might be more-or-less redundant, but they're still around, marking what is often the end of a laborious climb, a stopping point for hillwalkers everywhere, and a convenient amusement to stand on top of and pretend to be the Statue of Liberty. Anyway, the key to Graham's little mission, and to this one of mine, is that these ...

"Don't argue amongst yourselves Because of the loss of me I'm sitting amongst yourselves Don't think you can see me" I'd written out a nice cheerful blog, about how I've lost weight, caught up with old friends and sorted some bits of my life out over the Easter weekend. I'm not going to post it because, frankly, right at the moment it seems like the wrong thing to do. Why? Because on Tuesday I got a call to tell me that one of the girls from the Leeds Uni Canoe club, with whom I and many others had paddled, drunk and partied, had been involved in an incident on the River Coe in Scotland, and had sadly passed away. I'm not going to go into details, there's no need. It's a tragedy whenever someone young dies, and made more so when it's someone you know, someone who was popular, ever-cheerful, and full of potential. She was a very promising paddler and loved pushing herself and others to fulfil their aims and ideals. Amongst the ...

The grainy sepia-toned picture resolves itself. A man, sat hunched at his desk, typing away on a computer. The bowl of soup in front of him says it's lunch time. He clicks around the screen, flicking from site-to-site, link-to-link. The shot changes and his face is shown, illuminated in the glare of his monitor. His grizzled, bearded visage bears the thousand-yard stare and faintly disturbing grin of the exhausted but happy. A crackly voiceover crackles its crackly way through the speakers, a voice like an old sleuth chewing on a fat Havana. "Monday morning and I'm shot through. This weekend just about finished me off. First, some crazy dame and her old man turn up, bundle me into their car and escort my ass way-the-hell north, to some one-horse town in Scotland. Then, they dress me up in all this lycra and send me out to run myself ragged. The Mighty Deerstalker, they called it. Like an invite to a duel, but I'm an old hand, I've run that race many times befo...

Well, the Rodeo went well, the Safety and Rescue team working hard for the entire weekend, but a very satisfying time all-in-all. This weekend - THE MIGHTY DEERSTALKER !! I'll be dead on my feet by Monday... Pyro

The ranks are expanding! The regular Tuesday night Team Dogger (or 'Respectable Cycle Ride', according to the canoe club sweary-filter) Meanwood expeditions have swung up to a massive 7 riders of an evening, which fortunately means I don’t get suspicious looks for wandering around in the dark with a Frenchman any more.   Last Tuesday night was a normal ride. Meanwood was pretty wet, so we figure-eighted the loop to try and avoid some of the soggier patches, with varying degrees of success. One comedy snakebite, a couple of comedy crashes, slips and slides, new boy Charley missing a turn and leading some of the others astray and quite a lot of giggles and muffled swearing. All in all, a bit of fun.   I finally got round to sat-tracking the ride using the rather spiffy Nokia Sport Tracker software on my phone, so there’s a map of the route below. Meanwood has so many little trails and interlinked bits of singletrack there’s a pretty limitless variety of rides you can do, and ea...

Just had a cracking weekend with the crew from Extreme Care , the guys I do Water Safety & Rescue and First Aid work with. With the 2010 event season starting soon with probably our most intense event of the year, the National Student Rodeo , we were keen to get everybody up to date on the latest doctrine in First Aid. Dave was updating his assessors’ qualification as well, so he put on a 3-day First Aid at Work course for us, with both him and us being assessed. Of course, with us working as a rescue team, that means the 'at work' part is generally a riverbank and the level of First Aid we might have to do is a wee bit higher than the normal office based scenarios. So, out with the sticking plasters and ‘there there’ commentary, and in with the drowning victims, C-spine immobilisation and head injuries. Excellent...   We ran the course over two weekends, with plenty of time in between for revision. Well, sort of. Okay, I might have glanced at my notes once in a week. But a...

Disclaimer: Anything contained herewith may be a complete pile of cobblers and may not be the opinion of anyone, even the author. Apologies to whoever does the Shimano Corporation's marketing. "Your will to say 'yes' is only as strong as your ability to say 'no'." I'd love to claim that phrase was a bit of self-professed modern philosophy, or a lightbulb-lighting lightning bolt of raw intellect from some new-found guru of deep-thinking, but it's actually a piece of marketing spiel from Shimano for one of their new disc brakes. Still, I'm sure they paid someone a lot of money to come up with that, and as commercial philosophy goes it isn't bad. Good, original, semi-mystical gibberish is hard to come by these days. I read it once and went "Hmmm. That's interesting" , scrolled down and read about the brakes. They’re very shiny. I scrolled back up the page to read the spiel again, read over it a few times, and went "Wai...

So, as part of Operation Lardarse, we need to establish a routine. I know, routine is boring and saps your life away, “variety is the spice of life" etc etc. But I'm not going to try to living on spices alone, so there has to be some routine somewhere, and it may as well be here. Tuesdays are, and have been for some time, biking night. The good, the bad and the ugly of 'Team Dogger' (see this post for an explanation of that one) head out for a night ride, usually on trails we all know quite well, either the Meanwood loop from Headingley or one of the loops out around Temple Newsam/Kippax/Aberford area from Laurent (the Frenchman)'s house. Usually a couple of hours riding at least, with the odd stop for gossip. Over the winter I've dodged these on the basis of not getting back from work until after the others have set off - well, that's been my excuse anyway. Mainly I've wimped out of them. If I make sure my bike's in the car on a Tu...

So, it's that time of year again, the time for resolutions, 'never agains', maybe a hangover or three, sir? Well, if you don't mind... Ahem. Time to throw out old bad habits and replace them with new bad habits. Time to forget last year's regrets and set out to get yourself some new ones. And lots of time for looking downwards wondering what the large squidgy thing overhanging your jeans and blocking the traditional view of your toes is. The excesses of the festive period have been, well, excessive, which isn't normally a problem, but unfortunately my normal counter-attack on the waistline - the paddling of numerous cold rivers - fell at the first when the rivers were all either empty or frozen. This, as you can imagine, poses a rather insurmountable defense, so we went sledging in the boats instead. I towed my kayak 2km along snowy trails like a pulk. We drank well, ate well, and slid down snow-covered hills in kayaks. Very good fun, but not what you'd ca...