this weekend

was the weekend where the endless rain was just getting too much and i had to get out anywhere. even so my prospective trip to the north west was still being washed out so thanks to a brief flicker of memory we ended up going to fochabers for 10 more in moray where, quite unbelievably, the sun stayed out and, aside form the drive up, there was no rain!

see the proof here (scroll down for 10 in moray)

what a brilliant day! i started off ignoring t's advice that maybe racing with a cold wasn't the best idea and despite paying for that these last two days i've no regrets at all. the course was easy, easy, easy but that meant you could fly round it and properly race if you wanted to, something that's absent in too many scottish xc races. not only that but as i got used to it i could go faster.

true i've been neglecting my back exercises of late and equally true it did feel on my last hard tail lap as if my spine was going to pop out. and even more true it wasn't a course that needed a full suspension device but, given the back pain and the rattling, it was the right bike for me to finish on. i'd been a bit ginger the first couple of laps but on the full suss i had some catching up to do. there was a lovely swooping section of single track with a nasty right hand bend over a far too large drop that was the only potentially dangerous bit and a brilliant rooty singletrack downhil at the end. after my previous caution i remembered that rooty singletrack is what i cycle on and it was dry so flew down it with a big fat grin on my face.

it wasn't to last. my lungs were sounding like an old accordion and my legs were cramping up despite the attentions of the very nice massage man. i had a very close off with a pedestrian on the last lap - why do they do these things! - and decided that tiredness + speed was definitely going to equal crash. i'd been blethering with some bloke earlier about laps and he'd said that he didn't much care, what was important was coming away with a grin.

and that's what i did. a great day on the bike. very mellow, very laid back, lots of kids running about and none of the tension that seems to affect the likes of tenundertheben. next year i may give that a miss and focus on moray again and kirroughtree. nice one fraser et al.

and of course many thanks to t, who packed the van, got me into it, filled me full of beechams, drove me home and poured me into bed