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Four have fun in Finale

It’s de rigueur to make some sort of “season finale” style pun in reports on the Finale EWS round, what with it being the season final in Finale and all. Instead I thought I’d go with a nod to insufferable English kids books of the ’50s.

A reference that it seems will be lost on many of you as Google analytics tells me more than 50% of readers are “not UK” so you probably didn’t suffer Enid Blyton at school. I also wonder why quite so many folk are interested in this crap, you can’t all be robots (01001000 01100001 01101001 01101100 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 01101100 01101111 01110010 01100100. Yeah, I still rock that engineering degree. A prize of the only joke about binary if you work it out, thus also ticking my box of “try to engage with your readers” and “encourage feedback” which apparently all good bloggers should do).

Obviously, we were down to race, which is a serious business and not fun at all, but before that there was some riding, and some pizza, and some swimming in the sea, and some coffee, quite a bit of coffee actually, and practice.

Only practice didn’t quite go to plan as no one remembered to order good weather for the full week, and with promises of 120kph winds and biblical rains on Friday the EWS instead chose to let everyone practice all 6 stages on Thursday only and close the trails on Friday, so all you had to do was ride the full 106km and 4300m of climbing of the course, and session the technical trails, and remember it all.

This obviously wasn’t going to happen until Spencer gave up his chance to ride for the day and instead racked up some 140km of driving the other 3 of us about the tiny coastal roads, all the while battling the other 400 or so riders trying to do the same.

Yay for enduro’s environmental credentials.

We did get pretty slick at putting 3 bikes onto the back and roof of the car though.

The trails were a mixed bag and the general chat about town was that they could have been better. S1 was the rider favourite. S2 was the fit rider favourite. S3 and S4 were fun, but scaring the pro’s ‘cos they have to actually go fast on them. S5 the looong one, but pretty good trails and S6 was just a bit dull. Nobody said they liked it, a shame to end the season on it really.

After a day of twiddling thumb’s watching the wind, drinking coffee, watching the SRAM crew get more and more pissed off with the entire field trying to get their bikes fixed for free, and checking out the head cam footage, we could go for the race briefing.

Due to the bad weather forecast for Saturday, racers favourite S1 would be cancelled. This got a boo from the crowd, much to Enrico’s disappointment. After the events of Colorado and Spain then it’s only fair the organisers were playing it safe, and the tragic events just a short distance up the coast in Nice showed how serious Saturday could have been. It was still a blow to spirits but.

Bof, same for everyone, on to Saturday.

Go liaise. Then race. Then get the excuses ready.

S1 Ok, then lost chain, S2 Good, then crash, S3 Didn’t really commit, S4 Really good, then started to get tired, then make mistakes, then bigger mistakes, then crashed. S5 Err, actually can’t find an excuse for this one, I’m just not fit enough.

Still, it all went better for me than for Sandy who made it about 200m into S1 before the slick ground took him down breaking his bike and forcing him to retire.

Nina was fast when the trails pointed down, but they didn’t always point down this year. She still finished higher in category than the rest of us despite having avoided pedalling uphill for the entire summer.

So why race if that all sounds so meh? Because every race I still get at least one stage where everything starts to click, nothing else exists and the world is solely about you going as fast as you can. If you’ve never felt it, it’s as free as you can get from the worries around you, addictive and beautiful and pointless.

Sometimes there’s a calm measured voice in the back of you your head softly saying “brake early, exit fast”, “rotate the hips”, “look through the corner”, “drop the heels”. gently guiding you down the trail in a fast efficient manner.

That was the first 6 minutes or so of S4 on Sunday morning.

Then, drowning out that voice is “CORNERARRRGE-BRAAAAAAKE-PEDALLLLLLLLLLLFULLLLLLLLGAZZZZZZZZ-CANT BREATHARGROCCCK-WHATTHEFFUANOTHER CORNERRRRDRROOOOOOPPPCORNERNAILEDIT-EEK”

This voice is not efficient or fast, but it’s shit loads more fun to deal with. That was the next 5 minutes of S4.

Then, inevitably, there’s “Oh god my arms, I can’t feel my arms. Am I pulling the brakes? The fingers don’t seem to be working either. Wait, is that tape ahead, there’s spectator cheers, should I be turning left or right? Is it me or is the ground getting a lot closer? Bugger. Ow. Should my leg be through the bike like that?”

That was the final 2mins 41seconds of S4.

Nico Voullioz arrived at the finish 2mins 1second earlier, thus saving these issues for the liaison where it doesn’t seem to matter so much, the cunningness of a champion.

Anyway. My arse was kicked and I coasted home tail between legs in 121st and 16% off the pace but still hungry to get better. And eat. And drink beer with the the folk you meet on the liaisons and were so good at getting out my way on the stage (28 passes in the weekend I think) And go for a swim in the sea (more successful for some folk that others…..)

Ciao* Finale.

*That’s also de rigure b.t.w., to finish the report with ‘ciao’ instead of something in english.

06/10/2015
The joy of Sixt

This week it has mostly been autumn.

Autumn is not a bad thing per se, the trees go a pretty colour for example. Holiday season is over so the hills are quiet. Everyone’s jobs dry up along with the tourists so we have more time to ride. These are all good things (except when rent/chainreactioncycles still needs paid)

No, the problem is it gets cold and the lifts are closing. You want to make the most of each lift before it shuts, but there are only so many good weather days to do it on. You want to make the most of each lift before it shuts, but lots of the bestest rides take most of the day so you don’t get much use out of the lift.

Autumn also means better light for photos, even when overcast and snowing, so it’s a picture heavy post y’all. Which is good news, as all you ever do is read the opening paragraph then look at the images. Skimming over the words too quickly to notice the spulling mistakes and insults.

Anyway, preamble done, I need to cunningly tie in the title with some words that both describe the ride and make it seem like I thought about this, all in the hope some editor will read it and offer obscene amounts of money and free bikes in exchange for a few thousand words a month.

The joy of sex. A ’70’s book telling people how to have sex. With beards. The full stop proving the importance of punctuation. You’d think the continued existence of humans would suggest that we’d managed it already (then again, if the ruling classes canny work out what species to interact with, maybe more education is needed), and that if you’re curious enough to buy a book with that title, you’re probably curious enough to work out how to have good sex. The book went on to sell big.

The joy of Sixt. A hastily thought up title for a blog post about riding from Chamonix to Sixt along a couple of trails which we’d been told were really really good. A blog title that initially sounded good but the further I get into trying to write something around it, the more I’m regretting being a smart arse.

I could try something along the lines of…..”In mountain biking the whole technique improvement thing is getting big. There’s plenty of coaches out there keen to help you improve your riding technique, or sell you a video or app. Or you could just watch it for free on the internet…”

But frankly it’s too much like hard work to draw parallels between a bike ride and a 40 year old sex manual, here’s the usual dull we-rode-here-then-there-then-finished-and-it-was-good overly wordy copy, with this many pictures I need lots of words to fill the gaps.

On a forecast of 55% sunshine and no precipitation, we head up the lift from Chamonix to Plan Praz in the drizzle. Today was going to be minimal lift, maximum distance riding.

We’d all heard stories of an epic descent from Col d’Anterne to Sixt and figured the only way to verify its quality is to actually go and do it.

The Col du Brevent doesn’t arrive easily, but it arrives more easily going up from Plan Praz than it does heading down from the top station of Brevent. Or at least, it seems less disappointing to push and carry uphill than it does to push and carry downhill.

From the col the trail is initially moonscape, then a bit rubbish for a few hundred meters (we pushed about as much as we rode) then it’s fairly good for ages. It would be even better in the dry, but it wasn’t dry so we had the added fun of rock slab skating rinks.

First down done, we go up to the Refuge Moede Anterne. A sentence that’s pretty easy to write. The push was less so, but not that bad. A water tap and picnic tables in the gloom served for lunch. You could probably go inside and order some food, but see second paragraph above.

Refuge Moede Anterne to Col d’Anterne. Looks bad, but the signpost claims 45mins so you should be quicker. Sure enough we took half that.

Things look a lot better from the top. If you look left then they look like the Dolomites with towering limestone cliffs. If you look right then they look Scottish, with lochans nestled between rolling green hills. Even the weather got in on the split personality act with blue skies and a biting cold wind.

I mentioned it was autumn didn’t I?

It’s a pretty good descent from here. Not top 10 perhaps, but still pretty good. Big open sections with multiple lines then narrow technical singletrack through boulders and a nice wee flat bit alongside the lake to break it up. Only one short section directly above the Refuge Alfred Wills beat all three of us from riding cleanly.

After the refuge there’s a wee bit more fun on rolling singletrack across the empty open expanses. This open stuff is a bit of a change for us Chamonix valley dwellers, you really don’t get anything flat for several hundred meters without a house being built on it.

Another short climb and it’s on to the third descent of the day. It starts innocuously enough with a cow trodden path tapering muddily into a rocky gully, but picks up quickly into more steepish, rocky singletrack. Again not top ten, but fun enough. Eventually the trail opens up a bit and the speeds creep up, well, jump up considerably.

Then it ends in a carpark.

We thought we’d be clever here and take a wee path marked “Cascade Rouget” left off the carpark.

Don’t. I’m not saying that in a “Don’t, but really I mean do, it’s amazing” way. I mean just don’t. It’s partly unrideable but not in a challenging way,just in a climbing down roots above a river way, and partly a bit dull. And partly not very clear where to go.

After Lorne drew the short straw and not only guinea pigged the knee deep river crossing right from the end of the trail, but also the unridable hunters trail climb to the left, he turned round and went back to the road. Sandy & I persevered with the uninspiring looking track in front and eventually landed back on the road after some interesting down climbing.

Turns out if you just stick to the road then there’s a series of cut throughs that keep you on the dirt and moving just a bit faster than we’d been.

From the Cascade Rouget (which is a fine cascade, but a bit outclassed by some of the others kicking about the valley) there’s more road/cut though/road/cut through riding but nothing that inspiring and boom, you’re on the valley floor rolling along the tarmac into Sixt.

Do I sound a bit disappointed? I was. It wasn’t a bad ride, far from it, and looking back through the photos I realise just how much good riding and scenery there was. I think we’d got too many high expectations of it, built it up too much and suffered from the last sections being nothing like the quality of the trails higher up. And I guess our local standard is pretty high.

If you’ve got a Grand Massif lift pass, a better day out would be up the Samoens lift, down to Flaine, up to the top there, then a huge descent down past the Chalets du Plate, across to Plaine Joux, then a wee bit of a climb to join our route and back to Sixt then Samoens in time for tea and medals. But we don’t have said pass, and even if we did the lifts are closed, and if the lifts were open we’d probably just piss about under the GMC lift in Samoens. So meh.

Thank assorted Hindu deities there’s nowhere near that rhymes with ‘Sutra’.

22/09/2015
Road

A change is as good as a rest. Apparently. Road biking is definitely a change from mountain bikes, but I’m not sure it’s a rest.

A game of word association is unlikely to link Chamonix and road biking. Or me and road biking for that matter, but I tried a 29er once (twice now I think about it) and it didn’t seem that bad so might as well give this road biking lark a go. That and I had friends in town who wanted to go road biking.

Hence a quick bit of internet research later a very much not lycra clad crew of riders and borrowed bikes rolled out of Chamonix from a relaxed 10am start. Progress was initially slow as said combination of riders and borrowed bikes resulted in frequent stops to raise saddles, angle saddles, re-align saddles.

By Vaudagne we’d all began to bond with our bikes and, having negotiated the roadworks…road bike tyres not being as forgiving as mtb tyres when faced with potholes… started making progress past Servoz and along the back roads towards Sallanches.

With the cliffs of the Fiz range towering above us on the right and the Arve valley spread out below us on the left there was plenty to distract, but those slick tyres descend at a fair lick and the handling isn’t quite what I’m used to, so generally best just to ignore the sights. Easier to ignore was the Chaine des Aravis in front of us, which we were planning on riding behind.

Past Sallanches and still we were able to crack on at a fair lick. So far so easy this road bike game. A convenient back road takes you parallel with the autoroute along the Arve valley, but far enough away not to be disturbed by the sound of the road. Even when the back road ended, the 10km along past Magland to Cluses passed quickly, probably because we were heading for the first food break of the day.

From our brief research into the world of road biking we’d learnt that cafe stops are key, we were more than happy to comply with this rule. Espresso and panini prepped us for the main event of the day, the climb to the Col de la Colombière .

Another part of our research had revealed David Millar’s words on the Col de la Colombière from his 2010 Tour du France. “From the lowest slopes of the Colombière, I was adrift, unable to stop my rapid slide out of the back of the bunch…..There were just under 180 km remaining in the stage and four mountains to climb. I was unequivocally, irredeemably, fuc..” well, you get the idea.

The climb starts pleasantly enough. You cruise out of Cluses and past the first marker post, declaring 17km to go to the col, and currently you’re climbing a 2% gradient. As each marker post past, kilometre after kilometre, that gradient would rise and rise. Still for now, in the first 10km as the road winds through the trees, the climb is deceptively easy. But then, as you leave the trees into the full glare of the sun, and the gradient passes 8%, David Millar’s words start to ring in your ears.

With 3km to go, the col is in clear sight, and is getting closer with every turn of the pedals. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get any lower. Instead the road just seems to rear up steeper and steeper in front of you. As if that wasn’t demoralising enough, by now my backside was beginning to really feel the difference between my 160mm travel, fat tyred, fat saddled mtb and the skinny tyred, razor saddled rocket I’d borrowed. Sure it was fast, but did it have to be so painful to achieve it?

The col eventually fell below the wheels, with the view of the Borand valley opening in front and, perhaps more relevantly, the cafe appearing to our right, a healthy number of patrons already installed and recovering from their efforts.

We were half way round, and no matter what we did, it was downhill for a while again. Somewhere between the Col and the next village of Grand Borand we were skipping along at about 50mph, making up time from our slightly slower ascent. The descents always pass quicker than the climbs though and soon enough we were dropping down the gears and climbing towards La Clusaz.

There’s an open boulangerie in La Clusaz which we rode past as there was nowhere to sit. surely there’d be an open cafe further into town. After much searching we discovered there wasn’t, but the next climb, the Col des Aravis, was only 400m. We’d last until the cafe at the top.

After the length and gradient of the Colombiere the Col des Aravis is a walk in the park, barely breaching 8% and soon we were at the top looking through the options for food. Unfortunately these options mostly seemed to be closed until 1830 and with the way the clouds were gathering we were keen to be somewhere else by that time. Anyway, it’s downhill from the col, we could stop for food in Giettaz.

Whit a downhill it was too. Descending on a road bike isn’t the same as the frenetic melee of mountain biking, but has it’s own rewards. Less action movie, more like the opening scenes of the Italian Job, working a classic car through the corners. Drop gear, drop gear, brake, turn into the apex, straighten up, pedal, up a gear, up a gear, coast and repeat. The descent from the Col des Aravais wound beautifully down the hill into the very quiet village of Giettaz and its open boulangerie.

The open boulangerie which had run out of sandwiches, and pretty much everything else. Onwards to Flumet.

Flumet also turned a blank. On to Praz sur Arly.

There was no repeating of our La Clusaz error, at the first open boulangerie we stopped and bought the last 3 items in the cabinet. Ham and cheese croissants. The owner even got some deck chairs out for us to sit in whilst we savoured our savory snacks.

Suitably refreshed we got back in the saddle for the last push. They might be uncomfortable, but road bikes cover the ground a lot faster than a mountain bike, in no time at all we’d given up on more food in Megeve and were starting the long descent down to Le Fayet. A descent that was spurred on by the view of Sallanches slowly getting enveloped by a rain storm slowly rolling up the valley.

From the Le Fayet train station it’s just 500 meters of climbing back up to Chamonix, but then, there’s several station bars keen to serve you a cold pint of lager, and that rain storm was getting a lot closer, and it was starting to get a bit dark. To cut a long list of excuses short….we caught the train home.

.

16/09/2015
Pila. Pinning/pining.

A long time ago in a galaxy (small highland town) far,
far away….

The first copy of “Dirt the downhill mountain bike magazine” arrived, some time later than it did in the rest of the UK as that’s generally what happens when you live in the north of the UK. For a bunch of kids who were doing a mix of BMX and motocross on bikes totally unsuited to the job at hand, and definitely not wearing lycra, it was a revelation that there were actually other people like us. All over the place.

Obviously we all started buying Dirt.

Several issues in (canny mind how far in, it’s not important anyway) there was an article about a bunch of riders deciding that the southern English DH races were shite (and they were back then) so piled in a van and drove to Pila to race a round of the Italian series.

That seems pretty reasonable now, but back then it was unheard of. If you were the best of the best at DH then obviously you spent much of the summer driving about the alps to race the Grundigs (and get drunk and smash stuff like a true Brit abroad), but the idea that as a normal rider you could just head off and ride this amazing terrain straight off a lift (this was before the Nevis Range DH was accessed by the lift, you still had to push up) was a revelation.

But there was more to it than that. There was the idea that bikes, DH bikes, weren’t just something you did at the weekend or as a kid, but a lifestyle like skiing or climbing. I’d always known that getting out the country and heading to the mountains for the winter was a perfectly sensible thing to do, now I’d had the epiphany that you could do that for the summer too.

A lot has changed since then. My #enduro bike is years ahead of any DH bike of that time, Dirt has just ceased publication. I now spend most of my summer riding some of the best trails in the world as and when I want to.

And now I’ve finally gone to Pila.

It was a long time coming, year after year I would be planning to go only to get injured, break the bike or, most frequently, the Mont Blanc tunnel be too busy. The blog’s even made it there before I did. But finally, I’ve made the 40 kilometre drive from Chamonix and caught the closing day of the 2015 Pila summer.

For 7 short hours Lorne, Sandy and I lapped and lapped and lapped the bike park, both the shorter (500m descent) upper chairlift accessed main park and the lower (1150m descent) home runs. We even failed to stop for coffee during the day which, for a trip to ride in Italy, is probably a first (and the only low point of the day).

I’m not going to describe the trails, it’s boring to write and worse to read, and Lorne did a good enough job after his first visit. Also we never really knew what trail we were on they all cross so much. But…I will make mention of the IXS DH track as it’s without doubt the hardest ‘official’ bike trail I’ve ridden if you stick to the quick lines, and probably even if you don’t.

I’ve new found respect for the strength of DH rims and tyres, absolutely nae idea how you can land in some of the rock gardens at any speed without writing off the wheels. Pretty much anywhere else something that hard would be closed most of the time, but if it’s not hard how can you progress? Talking of which, was pretty cool to see so many weans out on the trail and riding fast. Though what do you aspire to when this is your local hill?

Anyway, thanks Dirt for opening my eyes to another life all those years ago, I’m off to price DH bikes.

11/09/2015
ESI Silicone grip review

Ever heard a mountain biker whine about a bikes contact points? Grips, saddle and pedals all seem surprisingly divisive for lumps of plastic and metal. Riders sound like Goldilocks as they flit between grips. Too hard, too soft, too thin, too thick. Over the years my preferences for set up have varied (obviously never following fashion and whatever the worlds fastest have been doing) from steep brake lever angles to almost horizontal. Narrow bars to wide bars (well, narrow was all you could get back in’t day) short bikes to long (again, for years you bought the smallest frame size you could find just to get the standover height) but my 1 constant has been:

I hate fat grips.

I also hate grips that spin about on your bars as soon as there’s a hint of moisture in the air.

I used to glue or wire onto the bars whatever was the skinniest grip I could find from Oban Cycles (internet shopping for bike parts wasney a thing when I was a wean, or inventive shop names for that matter) and hope that I didn’t need to take any of my controls off the bars. Then along came lock-on grips which cured the ‘spinning on the bars but still able to take them off’ issue, the only problem is that they need to be that wee bit thicker to take account for the plastic collar and the outside lock is pretty uncomfy under the hand, so we’re back to seeing racers glueing and wiring their grips to the bar. At least we can take the controls off a bit easier these days.

So along comes silicone (that’s silicone, not silicon) grips which promise good grip, light weight and skinny diameter. And no worthwhile reviews on the internet.

I bought them, put them on the bike and rode them for 4 months, 6 Coupe du France enduro races and an EWS.

They’re still on the bike, they’re doing ok. The grip is much easier to damage than a lock on (the end caps lasted all of one ride as I have a habit of clipping trees) but a bit of electric tape around the last 1cm of the grip seems to stop the damage getting worse and if I’d thought of it before I sent me and the bike cartwheeling through the undergrowth it would probably have stopped the grip ripping. Or I could have not cartwheeled through the undergrowth.

There is plenty of grip in the dry, though I needed to wear gloves in the wet or if my hands got sweaty otherwise it all felt a bit insecure.

More, without the hard plastic layer the grip really does take a bit of buzz out of the trail. Not so much that I’d buy them for that reason, just let a bit of air out your tyres, but it is a help on long rides.

Will I buy them again? Undecided. If it was for long rides back in Scotland on a shorter travel bike them maybe. For riding fast down hills in the alps with 160mm of travel and 2.4 front tyre, I think I might go back to a skinny hard grip that feels a bit more solid under the hand.

Was that any help?

04/09/2015