Chamonix Bike Blog

Tag: race

Le Thuile: Day of the Dead (forearms).*

Last year La Thuile hosted round 4 of the EWS. It won the race of the year accolade and was raved about by racers and press alike as “real” enduro (eh!?!) with thousands of meters of descent on rough and raw tracks. Val di Sole times a million as Team America might say.

I had a great time last year, but I got smashed. The long harsh trails were a reminder that I’m not too fit and my arms are a bit pathetic. Well not so much a reminder as a mugging down a dingy back alley, but you get the idea.

So, fast forward a year and since the last race at La Thuile, I’ve broken both arms and wrists, spent almost 5 months with an arm in a brace to stop me using it, and a couple weeks ago decided to dislocate my right middle finger to balance up my pre-existing feebleness at holding onto the handlebars.

Seems like a good idea to go back to La Thuile and get some Superenduro action….

Fortunately for those of us making up the numbers, races are a great excuse to catch up with people and win at practice, which is pretty much how the weekend went. Lots of groups of riders from all over the world sitting about in the sunshine and riding some of the best trails on the planet.

The Superenduro crew put on an amazing event, the key things were prioritised: Amazing venue, great trails, well taped, relaxed vibe. The less important things came second. How it should be really.

Only one stage was completely common to the EWS, this year’s first stage which was also last year’s fifth stage. Last year this was my worst stage, the relentless steepness and braking took its toll on my arms and by the end I was having to choose between 3 or 4 finger braking, which didn’t leave many fingers for holding onto the bars. So I was curious how it would go this year, just taking it nice ‘n’ easy and preserving my energy for the lower third. Answer? 30 seconds slower. Bit humiliating that really, though at least I was able use the brakes at the end this time.

The rest of the stages were shorter, but still steep, loose, dusty and fun. I’ve said it plenty times before, but if you own a #enduro bike, go to La Thuile, it is every bit as good as everyone says. Though mibbies a wee bit rougher than it was a few years ago.

Mechanicals did seem to be a bit of an issue. About 350 riders signed on on Saturday morning. By the end of practice 12 had already had to pull out through mechanical or injury, by the end of Sundays racing another 40 were missing from the sheet. Racing the stages, the side of the track was littered with bikes missing a wheel whilst the rider tried to stuff a tube in as quick as possible. At the end of each stage other riders would be trying to fix cooked brakes, blown shocks, buckled wheels or even snapped bars. It’s going to sound like an advert for my Airdrop Edit, but it was pretty amazing to sail through all this without having to touch the bike all weekend other than to put some chain lube on after Saturday practice and tighten a solitary loose spoke after Sundays race. Oh, and stop about 30 seconds into stage 4 to switch the rear shock back from climb to descend mode, but I’m no sure I can blame the bike for that one.

So if I was such an also ran this year, why did I enjoy the racing so much? Usually I put the unrelated rant at the start of the writing then try and claw it back to some sort of bike relevance half way through. This time, it’s going the other way round. If you’re only here for the biking stuff, change the channel now, possibly to see what Ben Winder made of it all.

Dopamine. The neural transmitter that, according to the well known, peer reviewed, journal “The Sun” makes “cupcakes as addictive as cocaine” is responsible for all manner of stuff in the brain, but the best known bit is releasing reward chemicals into the heid and making you feel just smashing thanks.

It might be a surprise to you, but it turns out dopamine is a little more complicated than The Sun makes out. As well as being released following success or something that makes you feel good (say, a really tasty cupcake for example) and making you feel good about yourself, hence wanting to repeat that behaviour (that was a really good cupcake, I shouldn’t, but just one more) it gets released following worrying, scary, near miss events too (holy crap, there’s a tarantula in my cupcake! I wonder if there’s one in the next cupcake?).

Ah yes, racing long and tough courses with minimal practice. I had a clean weekend with no crashes and in control all the time, but you still spend plenty time going “eek” as whole sections of track you’d forgotten about appear, or sections you kinda remembered turned out to have changed somewhat since you rode them a few hundred riders ago. And if you’re really cracking on, you need to take some actual risks and get near your limits. That’s when the near misses (or near hits really) start to rack up and you hit full dopamine house. It’s addictive and you go back for more.

And racing in Italy being especially good? Well, what could possibly trump a cupcake other than good coffee and gelato?

Of course, the brain is way more complicated than that. All manner of other chemicals are complementing and countering the work of dopamine and messing with our emotions. But if you want to know more, perhaps consult some form of expert rather than an unqualified rant on the internet. Seriously, what’s wrong with you people.

*RIP George A Romero.

17/07/2017
Enduro des Belleville

I’ve been wondering what the point of going racing is recently. It’s great pushing yourself to be faster/higher/stronger/whatever (I think there’s some other big global sporty thing on at the moment) and all, but there’s not that much excitement in the battle for 58th place, I doubt anyone else cares any either. This is probably why I’ve not bothered writing owt about races much this season (I took my start number 256 or last-man-to-start to 58th last week in Samoens, but as mentioned already, it’s just not that interesting)

Fortunately, as in all the best bits of story telling, along comes something to save the day and provide me with a bit of content I want to write about.

Last weekend was the Enduro des Belleville. A wee (weel, 150 odd riders, no that wee) enduro race near Les Menuires over in the Savoie, run in the most relaxed manner possible and with 4 close to perfect stages. Throw in a Saturday night downhill street race, local friends to put you up in (unfinished) luxury chalets, beer at the feed stations and blue skies from start to finish: you’ve got a winner.

Even breaking the car on Saturday morning and making Nina detour a couple hours worth of driving to pick me up didn’t kill off my enthusiasm.

Saturday passed in a series of mishaps that for most races would have me far grumpier than even my standard background level of mild irritation at the world. From my car putting us a couple hours late getting to Les Menuires, then finding we actually wanted to go to Saint Martin des Belleville (I’ll read the full text of where sign-in is next time….), to heading up the hill to meet Sam for practice…..and going the wrong way so we ended up in Les Menuires. Again (though this did allow for a no-pedal drag race and a flashing “trop vite” warning sign on the road back).

Fortunately Flo Arthus was about to show us stage 4 (and how to get to stage 4, probably our bigger issue) which was good, as stage 4 was pretty sweet and getting to follow a shit hot local like Flo down it is even betterer.

It looked like we were going to be too late for the 2nd chair up to stage 3 (how could that be possible, everything had run so well till now) but a couple minutes late is the new just in time, so we got to play on that too, another great trail, maybe my favourite of the weekend.

Some more general faff later it was time for the street race. One lap to have a look-see then one lap with the clock running down through St Martin des Belleville, where it seemed like every inhabitant had turned out to heckle. The general Saturday theme continued with arriving at the start line to find I’d brought 2x left gloves and Nina’d forgotten her go-pro. With no UCI officials in sight I rode gloveless and Nina had to rally back to the chalet in the couple of minutes between runs.

After surviving a little over 70 seconds of concrete edges I was a bit surprised to hear “second place” at the finish. And more surprised as no one seemed to go any faster…..until newly met English rider Rob Newman arrived 0.23sec faster than me, followed by Julien Roissad 0.12 sec faster than that.

I’m not bitter at all about missing my first podium in a couple year and definitely don’t think world cup podiums of 5 should be introduced. Here’s Antonin Gourgin’s head cam showing what 0.26sec slower than me and last step on that WC podium looks like. Congratulations to Emmanuel Allaz for taking the win, and Nina for adding to her champagne collection with the win for the ladies.

And then there was food and beer. You never got that in my DH days. Well, not included in the entry fee anyways.

The race: Thanks to Sam, I’d been given a start number of 16, and even better I had Sam infront of me so, combined with the 30 sec intervals between riders, I would have to be motoring 1 minute quicker than a quick rider to have to worry about passing anyone. Just as well given the dust.

The first two stages were completely blind for me and anyone not local. It’s been a whiles since I got to ride walking trails (these stages are normally interdite fae the VTT, yet another cheers to the organisers for getting them for the race) blind and flat out. It’s one of the most entertaining things in my life to ride just on wits and intuition that there will be a landing behind that rock, or that the corner is going to open up instead of cliff out. Perhaps that should be most terrifying now I think about it.

Even better the taping was deliberately vague in places. I know #endurolines are a sore topic but sometimes it’s just cool as to take a guess on what’s about to happen and batter across some open ground to giggles or screams, depending on how it all works out.

The final 2 stages kept the same theme, albeit with a little more idea what was coming up. Even a return to yesterday’s levels of competence where I broke my shifter on the first real corner of stage 3 didn’t really ruin the fun. If anything not changing gear was one less thing to worry about.

Racing over, the A4 print out put me 10th senior men, with my 30 second target Sam (watching him stand and sprint up climbs into the distance was just a bit demoralizing on the final stage) in 6th. So neither of us would have made it on a WC podium. Here’s some proper race reporting and the event video to give you a better idea.

Racing to get into the top ten is much more fun than the top 100, but better still is when you get handed beer at the finish line by the race organisers, the restaurant next to the finish line is providing food, you’ve gone through the day knowing that arriving late to the start isn’t really a great issue, when the craic sitting about in the sun at the start of each stage for is one of the best parts of the day.

So it seems that’s what the point of racing is for me at the moment. Getting to go somewhere I probably wouldn’t have gone, see new mountains, ride new trails, meet new people and enjoy it all with friends. Maybe I’ll get competitive again next month.

Huge thanks for everyone involved in organising the weekend, Flo for showing us the trails and putting up with Scottish, Nina for saving me from a very long cycle to the race and usual high standards of conversation and Sam for putting us up and doing plenty to make a good weekend even better. And everyone else I met too.

16/08/2016
La Thuile EWS, Veni Vidi Perdidi*

Amongst the many, many things that annoy me (unnessecary repetition, spelling necessary, etc) is the phrase “have a good time all the time”. The idea that you can have only the good and positive with none of the bad. The yin without the yang, the single market without free movement of people…. Life needs a balance to work.

Hence the crackingness of the La Thuile race weekend; the courses, the weather, the friends, the kicking about in the pits in the sun…. all had to be balanced out by a negative, which in my case was arm pump.

I thought I knew arm pump. Turns out I was wrong. Six stages of average 800m vertical drop of steep and technical terrain showed me what arm pump really was. Fortunately pretty much every racer was getting embarrassed by the leaders of their category (U21 Men being the exception) so I was in good company with my disappointment at stage results.

All pretty much irrelevant anyway as, outside the top 10, no one other than you gives a shit about where you finish, so might as well relax and enjoy the experience. Easier said than done admittedly, but with some grand company from a Canadian infront and a Kiwi behind me on the hill for pre, during and post stage chat, it was still a pretty chilled out affair.

The practice days were probably better than the race days to be honest. The courses were without exception exceptional but better enjoyed in sections with stops to session the more entertaining bits. Practice was in a multi national crew of (probably) Denmark’s fastest enduro racers of the weekend, Nina and Frederik, plus Melanie Pugin who is France’s (probably Europe’s) fasted female enduro racer without a proper deal. Seriously, bike companies, why will none of you support her?

It’s kinda a shame we have to have races to ride like this, it would be good if you could get huge groups of riders together to rag about some trails, share the fastest/funnest lines with each other, then kick about in the sunshine after.

I’m no expert on van life, but the privateer pit area laid on seemed pretty good. Flat car park, fresh running water piped in, toilets, restaurant playing poor quality covers of pop tunes at high volume, views of massive mountain. Not much more to ask.

Well, a van would be good, which fortunately I got upgraded to when photog Tom Gaffney got upgraded from his van to a hotel, and let me use his Transit. Cheers!

There’s more than enough media out there to explain the racing and give a better idea of the trails and I was just taking snaps with the phone all weekend so try these: A proper race report day 1 and 2, Preview of the stages, and the full video thingy.

Rude & Ravanel are making it all a bit boring this year for the who’s gonnay win, but there’s plenty of interest in the rest of the field. Melanie Pugin in 6th for example. Also, I’m not getting the surprise at Sam Hill doing so well. Enduro is all about cutting the inside line, and who’s the king of the inside line?

But (other than my apparent need to keep sticking content up) the main point for the this post is this: Away over to La Thuile for the day to ride your bike. The lift pass is cheap, the trails are incredibly good, well laid out. Even if the EWS tracks aren’t on the bike map yet, the race map is easy to find (see, I just found it for you) and all of it is worth raggin about on.

Cheers to Nina, Frederik, Melanie and Tom for practice day entertainment, shuttle sharing, pit company and for lending me somewhere to sleep, Canyon and SRAM for saving me (or rather the bike) from my mechanical ineptitude and the La Thuile bike park and race crew for putting on such a great event.

*Aye, so turns out Latin is quite hard. I thought this title was just going to be a case of lifting the “Vici” and going on google translate for “vanquished”. Which is “Victus”. Except that means to vanquish, not to be vanquished, which I was, or were, or something. So after a fair bit of research and some help from other non-Latin speakers (cheers Antoine) ended up with “Vini Vidi Victus sum”, or “Wine, I saw I am conquered”. So that got changed to “Veni, Vidi, Victus sum” which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue and looks a bit odd, so a bit more searching about came up with “Perierat”, or lost, and then some conjugation and stuff later, boom, a blog title.

It’s possible I should put more effort into riding my bike and less into writing about it.

21/07/2016
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
Tignes Coupe du France 2015 #6

“Chamonix Bike Blog” does imply a blog about biking in Chamonix, so I’ll concede there’s been some mission drift with the amount of race write ups from places that are not Chamonix of late. Dinnay fret, this one’s the Coupe du France season finale so we’ll be back to proper riding for the next month.

And it’s my blog so I’ll do what I want regardless.

Tignes then. A mere 2hr away and the lifts are free, so Sandy and I headed over on Friday early enough to sample the trails. If your main experience of lift companies is in Chamonix it’s a bit of a shock to wander into the lift office, be smiled at, then given a lift pass for nothing more than your email address. And a wee leaflet explaining that pretty much everything else going on in the summer is free too.

No idea where the money’s come from, but they’ve spent a wheen on it digging and building trails. There’s mile after mile of berm-to-jump-to-berm-to-wooden-feature-to-berm standing out sand yellow against the pretty much featureless grass of the alpine landscape. Forgot to mention that bit, Tignes is at 2000m altitude, the riding is above that, you’re going to get short of breath. Or at least I did.

So after ragging about on both sides of the hill giggling off drops and chickening out of assorted gaps (I had a race the next day, it was being sensible not cowardly. And the gap’s bigger than it looks) we got down to the town to find an airbag for bikes.

Free. obvz.

I did want to try a backflip, and considered nicking a BMX off a 10 year old that was hitting the airbag too. But then he looked fairly tough and he might have had a big brother of like 12 or something who’d beat me up. So I tried a whip. Pretty easy really.

Back to the apartment and part 2 of the team arrives, with Nina, Anna and much missed non-racing Spence who’d for some reason had decided that last summers sitting about in rainy carparks waiting to change a tyre, then clean bikes, then cook food wasn’t the best way to spend his weekend and went riding instead.

For the final round we went back to the rallye format of obligatory practice on Saturday then race day on Sunday, but with the wee innovation of a cheeky timed race run on the Saturday, giving 5 timed stages in total. Even better, the liaisons which helped the course wander between Tignes, Val d’Isere and Les Brevieres were downhill. Hell, one liaison was 800m vert of descent through bike park, it would’ve been a stage in most places. Instead it was the dangerous combination of relaxed cruising and long trains of racers trying to show off whilst pretending not to try. I don’t think anyone got too hurt, but there were a few unforced mechanicals….

I like this format, getting a stress free day to cruise about the trails chatting to folk and not having to pedal too hard. What’s more, I can run half bald tyres and try and save the good ones for race days. Hence I wasn’t quite so happy about the 1 race run in the middle of the day, but that’s what it was.

The specials were a welcome change from Valloire 2 weeks ago. Still quite physical in places, particularly S4, but with much more fun in between bouts of pedalling. If you want a better idea of how they looked, then there were pure hunnerts of photographers out there documenting. Try Velovert, Pinkbike and the event video.

Everyone seems to find their own wee groups at these races, generally with folk about the same pace as you. It should be cut throat competition, but mostly you end up cheering on and helping the very people you’re trying to beat. Sport psychologists probably have fun with that one.

With such gladiatorial combat in mind it was good to be finishing so close to Anthony Martin and Sam Gerret. Like really close. Within .1 of a second at times. Even better, we all managed to get some stage times that we’d hoped we could do but to date hadnae. Sam killing Sunday’s 2nd stage to go 28th (after sharing his headcam footage with me on the lift up, ta Sam!). Anthony grabbed 26th on the 3rd stage, only just beaten by me in 25th, less than 7% slower than some Jerome Clementz lad who’s turned up to take the win for the weekend.

Anyway, a grand weekend of racing over and the series totals tallied, I ended up ranked 45th in scratch for the season. None of the top pilots rode the full series due to EWS clashes, but given the level of enduro riding in France I’m pretty happy with top 50, what with a full time job, no sponsor and all that. Better, when I start playing the “niche” game, I can jump to 39th if you get them pesky fast juniors, dames and masters out the rankings to leave only men aged 19-40. Then there are only 2 riders above me with nothing in the team column on the results table. I can even score 1st in the UK licence category…

Enough self aggrandisation, turns you blind or something. Was a great season, plenty of type 1 fun, some type 2 and no type 3.

As ever, big thanks to eveyone that organised the series. We might grump about various niggles over the weekend but it’s a pretty amazing effort that’s made to create these events and I don’t think anyone’s getting rich out of it somehow. Particular thanks go to the commentator who manages to pick my most exhausted and panting moments to try and get a finish line interview out of me. Also, Sandy, Sam, Nina and Spence for all your help, advice, lent bike parts, shared car journeys,random cooking and quality chat.

Next year?

27/08/2015