Back to my ROOTS...

Sunday:
Today I went to do a Mountain Bike race. It started at the top of the Superbagnere ski resort in the high Pyrenees. Very hot, lots of Altitude… . It sucked-ass! The course was shit, mainly field crossings, some off camber singletrack that had a sheer drop on one side, (but a lot of climbing that was good) blah blah blah. I got hit by a tourist on the course going down an uphill section, he came round the corner and rode straight into me, the race lasted almost 3 hours, about 70% of the field didn't finish, I crashed twice = inflamed knee and inflamed ankle, finished 4th (but didn't know it) didn't hang around at the end and went straight home ie: missed out on some 4th place money.

Catching up.

This week I’ve been feeling a bit rough. My knee and ankle have been hurting. Tuesday I got in 4 hours again, with some TT intervals in the morning and a long ride in the evening, Intervals on Wednesday, Thursday it rained so I did 2 hours of intervals instead of my planned 3 or 4 hour ride. It’s been nice to have our visitor, I like having people around.

Sunday I did yet another Mountain Bike race. I don’t know what is happening to me but I’m getting slowly back into Mountain Bike racing. I say slowly because I suck at it now. I’m fairly fit so I can hold my own, but my technical riding is just plain embarrassing. So raced the Rialet MTB race. I came home a little disappointed, but I’m not sure why because I did quite well. I was 5th. Alphonce was 2nd, so that was really good to see him up there kicking some assio. There were some good riders there, including the Espoir women’s French National Champ who I think was 5th or something at worlds. I felt really bad because I had never heard of her. The day went well, I didn’t crash or anything, but I did notice I can hardly turn corners on my MTB, and I’m really slow when we hit technical stuff. (When I say really slow, I mean comparatively of course. I used to be a very technical and smooth rider…)

Thursday
Well yesterday I finished all the kitchen work. I did the plumbing, built a sink structure and work surface etc etc. Yesterday Pat and I went to the Sidobre to get some bits of black granit work surface to finish it all off. It’s been a lot of work, but I’m really happy with it. The kitchen now looks like a kitchen, where as before (as most of you know) it looked yucky and crap.

I’ve been feeling very tired this week, but still getting in my rides and intervals.. I’m guessing I’ll either flop this weekend and the tiredness will catch up with, maybe even as a cold; or I’ll pull through and feel really good… who knows.

This coming weekend I’m either doing a road race in the name of Jalabert, or a Mountain Bike race in the Pyrenees. As usual I can’t decide…

Visitors:
So… I’m waiting to see in this seasons (expected) revelation John Parks is going to come over to do some racing. If he does we’ll do some racing in northern France, the Pyrenees, some TTs etc.

Tim Dingus and his new wife Beth will be arriving for their honeymoon on September 19th. That’ll be really fun and good to see them again.

In October we should have 3 people coming over to ride for a week. One of them is Rick Martinez… so those of you wondering “what’s happened to Rick” well I might be able to tell you in a little while. I’m not totally sure if they are coming over, but that’s the plan.

Oh… silly me, I forgot to mention some… we have some people coming for about a week I think arriving on Tuesday, and I think we have some old colleagues on Pat’s from England arriving some time in October… the usually Green visitor spree… I love it.
Anyone else wanna come over? :-)