Boxing Day

5am, the alarm rings to the tune of Paul Simon's "The sound of Silence". Ugh, I hate alarms. Role over, the sounds will go away...
Sadly the Sound of Silence persists, so I get up, stumble into the kitchen and grab a bowl. In goes the cornflakes and a chopped up banana... followed closely by the milk that miraculously stays within the contours of the bowl. I flop into a seat, eyes half open, and start gingerly shoveling food into my mouth. Next thing I know I'm clad in French Lycra riding down the wrong side of the road on an Australian highway heading to the "Coffee Club" in Mooloolaba to join a few people for a pre planned long ride.

Turns out there is a big group out there, including recently retired Pro cyclist Henk Vogels. And so we embark on a longish ride into the hills inland from the coastal magnet that seemingly attracts all Australian buildings, leaving the back-country devoid of life. The pace is slow to start with and remains slow for a fair bit of the ride. This part of the world is littered with short steep hills. The kind of hill I hate. It reminds me of Africa a bit, or of the US. The roads are so new that they haven't had the time to "settle" into the countryside like they have in Europe through centuries of Romans and clunky old Citroen 2CVs trundling along them. Here they seem to just shove down the tar-mack over whatever is infront of them without cutting out roads.

After a couple hours of pleasant and quiet country roads in a group of cheerful and friendly Aussies, we come to an intersection. One way leads home, the other leads to a 6km climb. I persuade Tahlia (a young member of the Queensland Institute of Sport) to make a left turn towards the climb while everyone else heads home.

Tahlia has got some races coming up, so she's in "real" training. I thus get roped into doing some 30second sprint intervals up the 6km climb of Montville. Montville is a great little local climb, that takes you up the side of a hill through Eucalyptus trees. Half way up the climb, the trees disappear leaving you with a stunning view all the way back to the coast. The intervals were painful. I have not done any form of interval for about 2.5 or 3 months, and having just got back into regular riding a week and a half ago after my 3 or 4 week winter break, I was in the hurt box and seeing stars!

The Climb up to Montville with stunning views of the coast...

Still it was a fun ride, and the reward after a steady spin back home with 3.5 hours on the clock was a cool fresh fruit juice in Mooloolaba by the blue ocean...

Life.... is... tough! :-)

X-mas Day

Food food food and more food, with plenty of beer...
A perfect Christmas day, sunny and warm yet not too hot, a morning ride followed by coffee on the beach.

That's a big fish...

Then it was time to get the Bar BQ crankin' and do us some eatin' and drinkin'. Shep prepared a great spread of chicken, fish, shrimp, salads etc etc (the list is long), which was only interrupted every 10 minutes with Shep's excited call of "BEER ANYONE?"


French wanabee Australian: "BEER ANYONE?"

Once food was ready we sat down to an afternoon long meal, before tucking into a desert of Blockus (a board game) before heading out for a paddle in the boat... we suffered a few "ma-overboard" moments but shark attacks were luckily avoided on this December day!

Hey yo, hey ho, it's off to boat we go....

"MAN OVERBOARD...."

"Tis the season to be silly, tra la la la laaaa, la la la laaaa...."

MERRY CHRISTMAS ALL!!!

Oh dear oh dear... Christmas is upon us once again.Here's wishing you all very merry Christmas... Personally I am back down in the southern Hemisphere getting away from the cold and winter of my native France for the second year in a row (and loving it I might add!!!). Christmas day will kick off with a 3+ hour group ride in the morning with a few very dear friends, followed by the traditional (traditional for this upside-down world of Aussie Rules) Christmas Barbeque with some well deserved cold beers. Whilst I'm at it, I'd like to send out a special Christmas wish to: the 6am Mooloolaba Coffee Club riding group (Shuttles, Tahlia, Jeff, Wendy, Evan...); the Warrenton Cycling Center in the USA, Darren and Lychelle Lill in South Africa; my buddies and training partners in my home area of the Tarn in France (best training place in the world BTW), and of course my mom Pat, My Grandad and my uncle and Auntie Dees and Mike.

So, Cheers! Bottoms up, and Merry face-stuffing. :-)

And hopefully you'll all have less of a hang over than this guy will tomorrow morning!!! ;-)

Australian Drivers Beware.

Australia is one of the most stunning places I have ever been. And I must say it is GREAT to be back here. Great weather, stunning scenery and lots of good riding with great people. The Aussies are a great people too... except for the driver who are probably the worst I have come across world wide.

Aussie bike riders seem to let themselves get pushed around by cars, and don't enforce their right to be on the road. In France we let back drivers know when they aren't playing fair.

So here's what happened to the last driver who annoyed me! So Aussie drivers beware.

OH DEER !!!

Kilos of good food.

The cold spell in the US had me off my bike for a few weeks... combine that with deep fried everything covered in "out-of-a-can "sauces over there and I landed in AUS with a few extra kilos hanging off my usually bony frame. Now granted some of those extra kilos might have been water retention etc from the flight (or at least that's what I keep telling myself), but a few days of good rides and the return to some good wholesome summer food of fresh veggies and tasty salads with olive oil have me heading back down towards a healthy weight.

From snow to sun

A couple days before jumping on the plane for a nice 3 day flight of 26 hours (confusing huh?! the date line comes into it somwhere) we took part in the FREEZING cold Christmas Parade in Warrenton on our bikes with a few people from the warrenton bike shop ( http://www.thecyclingcenter.com/).

And then it was off to the sun soaked beaches of Queensland Australia...

The flight wasn't all that bad. Getting here to the sun wasn't as strange as I thought it would be, it was just plain heaven.

Graig took a day off work and came to pic us up in Brisbane, and kindly took us straight to the Coffee Club coffee shop right on the beach to sit and sip coffee while taking in the heavenly, sunny, hot view. Ahhhh..... We're here!

Sim gets new Time Machine

I've got a new Time Trial bike. Just before leaving the US for Sunny Australia I got my hands on this sexy BMC time trial bike. I'm still playing around with the position a little bit, but this is one sweet ride.

Warrenton Cycling Center Antics

Pro riders usually have their name somewhere on their frame... but the gang at the cycling center took it one step further. You know you are special when you find this on your bike. The bastards where nice enough to stick this on my bike the other day. It took me a while before I noticed it. I'll get them back.

The Evil duo mastermind culprits.

It's a laugh a minute at the Cycling Center... The Gang (Radio and TV presenter Chuck Williams, Store manager Rick Paulson, and "Jock Strap" Todd Fetters) get down and boogie!

Apart from that. I had been getting in some really nice rides around the stunning state of Virginia, but a recent cold (Extremely cold) spell has pushed me inside by the heater... with a beer and the freaky shop company for entertainment. Oh well, only a couple weeks until the heat and sunburn of Australia!

Trouble in USA

It's been almost a month now since I landed in "Election land" and caught up with all my old friends in Warrenton. Things got off to a good start with nice weather and great rides, however things took a turn for the worse as I ran into a little trouble with the law. Evidently I was speeding going through town... on my bike! Yep, speed limits are really low in the US, only 40kph in town, go down a hill and you quickly break the speed limit. Anyway, the police caught up with me later in the day at the bike shop in town where I was hanging out.

Just a precaution sir, there's nothing to worry about... Do you currently have any weapons or needles on your person sir?

I argued that I didn't have a speedometer on my bike and had no idea how fast I was going, but the Officer wouldn't have it, even showing me the video with the speed display proving I was over the speed limit. Oh well... :-(

Sir, I have video of you breaking the speed limit right here...

Apart from that all is going well. I've been enjoying frequent rides with the locals, and although I've been fighting half of them as (much like the Aussies) they have a tendency to want to ride way too fast for my liking at this time of year, it's been fantastic to catch up with old riding buddies and local legends. Riding with an old Team mate from France and giving Chris (I won both your stupid blog competitions Sim) Hayes has also been great. Only down side of being over here (apart from the drivers who don't know how to drive) is the diet.

The weather still pretty good here, there was a clod spell of a little over a week, but I'm back to wearing a T-shirt again now, so that's good... and of course next on the books is the sunny, golden Aussie wonderland! Look out Shep, here comes the invasion again!

Season Ended

Well there we are, that's it, the season has officially ended. Yesterday was my last race, the TT champs. Sadly for us Air Cameroon went bust (again) and we weren't able to go to the Tour of Cameroon again this year, so the season wound down at yesterday's TT champs. Except for a couple of our guys who are heading off to the Tour du Burkina Faso with a "selection" team.

Having done nothing but boring crits since the Journalist World Champs I was really looking forward to this TT. Sadly I have been sick all week, so that put a bit of a dampener on things.

However come the day I felt fairly good, and even though my HeartRate was sky high and through the roof (I assume because of my being sick) I enjoyed myself and finished a respectable (though far from exceptional) 6th.

And that's it! Iin 2 day's time I'll be landing in good old Virginia USA. As we ride off into the distance and sunset, we look towards next year and what the future holds... with more "big" names is cycling to be announced as "positive" over the next few days, I'm still convinced I can call myself a "cyclist". There's not many of us around...

Journalist World Champs (5th and 7th)

Friday: Time Trial World Champs...

Dropped Chain with 2k to go(had to stop, get off bike etc), having past my 2min man at half distance. Broken seat that happend just after the start, I thought I'd crasked the frame or done something to the disc wheel... UGH. 7th! V dissapointed needless to say!

Saturday Road Race.

Horrificaly cold, wet, misty day, couldn't feel my hands... small group of 8 or so came to the line. Sadly it was doomed to finish in a sprint, so I was 5th... even more dissapointed this time as I think the win is well within my abilities...

I attacked a few times, partly to try and get away, but also to try and get warm. It was a very negative road race. But hey, C'est la vie.

Cameroon TV fame?!??!?!!

Don't ask me how I found this, but it's quite funny. I guess this person singing is something of a celebrity in Cameroon. Anyway, you see a bit of Castelsarrasin jersey right at the start, then if you have the patients to listen the rather repetitive music for a while, you eventually see a bit of coverage from last year's Tour of Cameroon... the quality is pretty poor, but a very keen eye can spot some Castelsarrasin riders and an even keener eye might even be able to spot me for a billionth of a second...

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VhqPrqByJ9w

Obelix in Wales

Sim Green dons the Pez Cycling (AKA Obelix) kit and hits the roads of hilly Wales. Probably not the best world cycling destination, Wales has plenty of quiet roads, stunning views and fantastic colours to offer cyclists.

Land of the wet yet beautiful
I started racing bikes as a Junior in the UK. The UK is where I first turned a crank in anger as a young mountain-biker. Having raced in Europe the US and the UK, I still maintain, believe it or not, that the UK has the best Mountain Biking I’ve ever come across… or maybe Santa Rosa… Anyway, there’s GREAT MTBing in the UK, no doubt about it! However, I have avoided the “land of the wet and miserable” as I call it, like the plague over the last 7 or so years. I have memories of training in the UK in August in tights and thick winter jackets. So when I recently found out I was going to be spending 10 days in Wales at the end of August, I wasn’t exactly jumping out of my skinsuit to go.

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday rain…
Despite my “glass half empty” attitude, it wasn’t long before I was forced to turn the glass upside-down and take on a “glass half full” view of things. On my first day in Wales, I put on my leg warmers, my long sleeved jersey and my winter hat and headed out the door to ride on the wrong side of the road with a slight grimace aimed at the low lying clouds. Within 40mins of riding however, I was forced to smile. I struggled up a stupidly steep narrow British country lane to find myself in front of a stunning Welsh Vista. As the clouds clung to the hills in the distance, a lonely Red British phone box overlooked an otherwise deserted pond. What the phone box was doing out in the middle of nowhere I still haven’t quite figured out. But needless to say, that from this moment on, despite the chilly weather, I was keen to discover what else Wales had to offer to cyclists.

Roads
Although the UK is hugely overpopulated, vast expanses of the countryside are still untouched and left to lye in stunning natural beauty, only to be disturbed by the odd sheep munching away at the emerald green grass, of the sound of a freewheel zipping past. A portion of my 10 day visit took me up to the coastline of North Wales and around the area of Snowdonia. Although British roads are heavily used, there is a plethora of quiet side roads at your disposal. And even when you are forced to ride on the busier roads, the British, in their typically hesitant and gentlemanly mannered ways, are courteous and respectful of bike riders (who wouldn’t be after the recent performance of the Brits in Beijing?)

Mountains or Hills?
Although the UK doesn’t have any proper mountains, there are plenty of short, very steep hills to kick you when you are down. A sign post during an afternoon ride announcing 25% seems to be engrained in my mind. Coastlines often offer stunning views, and Wales is no exception. There is plenty upon which to feast your sun-starved eyes as you meander along rolling country lanes. Winding my way through the slightly busier roads of Snowdonia, I couldn’t help but think of what a great place it would be to hold a big international stage race. Lots of nice long climbs, great views, and the whole lot steeped in the history and local flavor of quaint old mining villages.

When to go?
The UK might not be the first place you think of when planning a cycling holiday, but it’s well worth a visit. When is the best time of year to go? Well, it’s up to you, you can either go in winter, when it’s wet and cold, or in the summer, when it’s… wet and cold. You must go prepared. It WILL rain, and it WILL be a little chilly, but take a few worm riding clothes and soak up the… atmosphere. Even as I returned to my sun-melted 35 degree roads of southern France, I must admit, my trip to Wales was well worth it, and I wouldn’t hesitate to go again. Maybe see you there next time.

Wales

Friday 15th: Grand Prix Castelsagrat

I was in the right move, in the break all day, I formed the 13 man break, but was lacking punch when the going got tough. I could hold on and follow fine, but the intermediate sprints and attacks are where I felt my lack of form.


In the end I watched 4 riders ride away with 10k to go and couldn't jump with them... then I tried but couldn't jump on the last hill coming up to the finish.

What's going on back there? Have I done any damage yet?

In the end I was 8th and very dissapointed. Actually that's pretty good for someone who hasn't raced in over a month and a half... but it was frustrating not having any kick at all.... it'll come back with a bit of racing and training

Col de Latrape - Cirque de Cagateille Pyrenees Race.

A Race in the pyrenees taking us up the Col de Latrape and onto the Cirque de Cagateille where the finish line sat atop this little known Pyrenean mountain.

I wasn't feeling great going into this race, but seeing as I won it last year, I kept a little hope in the back of my mind that I might be able to pull something off. Sadly that wasn't to be the case. I decided the guy to watch was probably the guy emblazoned in Credit Agricole National Champion colors, and a guy in a decidedly Aussie looking jersey from Marseille who was second to me last year, and won the overall Pyrenean Hill Climb series (I wasn't able to do the last round as I was at the Tour of Cameroon).

Sadly things didn't go quite as planned and no one really wanted to work. We watched a group of 3 ride up the road and they held it all the way to the line.

Work damn you!!!

As soon as we hit the final climb on our way to the mountain top finish, I could feel I didn't have my climbing legs of last season. The Credit Agricole guy attacked, looked behind him for a second, which is when I countered him. In the end I finish 5th, feeling like crap. I was pretty disappointed overall. Although 5th really isn't bad after about a month and a half without racing, I think it was the way I felt on the climbs that disappointed me. Oh well, there you go.

I then spend a few days in the Pyrenees riding but never felt very good. I just hope I find some form again soon!
Maybe all that slow Bikestyle riding during the Tour wasn't the best way to spend July. ;-)