Labour of love

I often hear it said that self-knowledge is the key to happiness, which I guess is fairly a fairly obvious statement to make but potentially difficult, at least for some people, to put into practice.

For myself I have come to the recent conclusion that being self-aware is not something that I am very good at. This conclusion I have drawn from the fact that, as I am careering at breakneck speed towards being forty years old and middle age is beckoning, I have only just come to realize in the last few months, in fact only in the last few weeks, that I have an obsessive personality.

More specifically I have a tendency to become obsessed by very specific tasks or objectives. For me, the final and conclusive evidence has come from my latest labour of love, the ride-tribe route profiler.

Before we go any further, what the f**k is the ride-tribe route profiler? Well, check out the Resources section of the ride-tribe website to find out. It’s the latest edition to the website and is ride-tribe’s gift to the world of mountain biking. What it allows you to do is plot your own route on a digital map, anywhere in the world, and then display a graphical representation of the route profile as well as some vital statistics about the route. The vital stats that are calculated and displayed include the three big ones that any mountain biker wants to know about a particular route; these being:

• How far do I have to ride?
• How much climbing am I going to have to do?
• How much descending do I have to look forward to?

I must say I am pleased with the end result. What’s more, it tickles me that I am able to claim an affiliation between the tool and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); though the link is somewhat tenuous.

But the conception of this child of beauty was far from immaculate. The first idea sprung to mind back in September last year. I made the first tentative steps to realizing the dream from about the start of October. Since that dawning epoch, it has been a slow process of prototyping and refinement that has slowly meandered its way to the conclusion that can be seen on the web site today.

The pain, at times, has been almost unbearable. I have experienced almost parlysing bouts of frustration as the project has hit a dead-end, or some aspect of the underlying technology has failed to work as it should do, or my own, unforgivable, incompetence has resulted in whole afternoons or evenings of banging my head against the nearest available brick wall. It almost makes me feel weepy to think of the titanic quantity of hours that I have poured into this project. Whole days have been lost, gone from my life. Days that I can never get back.

So although it is true that, right now, I am as close to the end of my life as I would have been had I not bothered to undertake this project in the first place, yet I cannot help the nagging feeling that my time could have been better utilized, and resulted in more enjoyment for myself, had I done something else instead.

And now that it is finished, and the lost hours start to become a distance memory, I have an even more nagging feeling. What the f**k am I actually going to do with this bloody thing? Is it actually of any use whatsoever?

Mr L

DIY snacks

These days Mrs L and I are not flush with cash – not least due to the fact that our income stream is much attenuated from the heady days when we both were holding down steady jobs.

This fiscal situation has forced us to invoke a general programme of austerity. The latest one on my part is that of eschewing commercial fitness food products, such as energy drinks, bars and gels, recovery drinks, isotonic drinks, and so on and resorting to cheaper alternatives.

Actually part of the motivation for this is a return, on my part, to old-school thinking on trail snacks. So once, when it was considered that the only way to get through a six hour bike ride was the steady consumption of isotonic energy drinks and gels replete with slow metabolising carbohydrate compounds, electrolytes, anti-oxidants, minerals and vitamins, now a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches and a packet of fruit pastels will do the same job just as well.

My first foray into DIY snacks was baking a banana cake, consisting of the following ingredients:

• Bananas
• Orange juice
• Self-raising flour
• Egg whites
• Brown sugar
• Mixed spice
• Cinnamon
• Olive oil

One slice per ride of that seems to keep me going for a while. Tastes all right as well.

The next experiment was with home-made muesli bars. I guess it shouldn’t have, but it came as a surprise to me that one of the chief ingredients of a muesli bar is – well, muesli. The ingredients for the recipe I used are as follows:

• Oats
• Muesli (which in itself is home-made)
• Raisins
• Dried apricots
• Dates
• Figs
• Dried apricots
• Honey
• Egg whites
• Apple juice

And the end result? Well, I don’t think my cottage industry in muesli bars is going to be challenging the commercial positions of Isostar or Science in Sport. But I contend that a home-made muesli bar tastes twice as nice as one bought in a shop and I would commend DIY snacks to anyone.

Mr K

The end of the road for the mighty Enduro?

Let me start this blog entry by paying tribute to my awesome mountain bike. The mighty Specialized Enduro and I have been together for the best part of four years now. During that time the beloved bike has been forced to endure incredible hardship and physical stress.

It has been and come back from the four corners of Blighty. It has successfully negotiated, and with some aplomb, the trails of Glentress, Laggan, Innerleithen, Mabie, Kirroughtree, Golspie. It has been to the top of the Cairngorms and back down again, no questions asked.

It has been to the French Alps and made easy work of all that the downhill trails of Morzine and Les Gets could throw at it.

It has come to the Sierra Nevada in Spain. And, in contrast to all predictions that it wouldn’t last six weeks in the harsh terrain of the Alpujarra, it has absorbed all the bumps, jumps and drop-offs. It has been battered against trees and rocks. It has torn its way down dusty trails and kicked up clouds of evil material that has insinuated its way into every moving part of the bike.

It has suffered from broken pivot bearings, dented fork stanchions, bent chainrings, broken rear derailleur hangers, a smashed pedal, a creaking bottom bracket, threaded bolts, etc, etc.

It has been stripped down virtually to its constituent parts to be thrown, unceremoniously, into a bike bag and to be at the mercy of the whims of baggage handling staff at Heathrow and other airports around Britain and Europe.

It has been left to rot and decay for weeks at a time, covered in a corrosive mixture of mud and road salt. It has endured indescribable torture at the hands of pressure hoses.

It has been through all of this and more, and taken it all with unfathomable dignity and dogged perseverance in the face of adversity. Recently it has been riding better than ever.

But now the mighty Enduro has suffered a further violation that will put its legendary powers of recovery to the severest test.

The bike has been run over by a car.

Specifically, it has been run over by our car. More specifically, it has been run over by our car driven by our very own Mrs L.

The circumstances were as follows. Mrs L and I were spending the day exploring the trails of the eastern Alpujarra. We were doing this with vehicle support. One of us would ride, while the other shadowed in the magnificent Nissan Terrano. We would then meet up at various opportune rendezvous points. At one such meeting point I dumped the bike to discuss route options with Mrs L who was sitting in the car. Upon agreeing the next stage of the route and the next meeting point, I bid Mrs L a fond farewell as she set off in the car once more. The only problem was that where I had dumped the bike was right in front of the car and out of Mrs L’s line of vision. Mrs L stopped the car promptly on hearing an excruciating crunching sound, which both of us first assumed was a problem with the car.

But it quickly became clear that the problem was not with the car, but with my bike currently stuck under front left wheel of the car.

The damage report could have been a lot worse I suppose, and consists of no worse than a bent front wheel, a bent crank, a flattened saddle and a broken quick release skewer. The frame seems to have miraculously survived somehow.

Let there be no doubt, the patient is in a critical condition. But I am optimistic I can pull through this latest trauma and rise once again.

Mr L

awaiting the internet

We're back! Admittedly, we haven't actually been anywhere, but we have been missing home internet for a good few weeks.

We've moved (again), this time to what will be our long-term home for the next year or so. In doing so, we have all the pain of paperwork that we encountered when we first moved here to go though again. Happy days!

Well, remember the fun we had with the postie? This gets even better.

We now live in a little farmhouse, or cortijo, just outside Bubion. Next to our farmhouse is a big house, with the same name. Only we're the Cortijo, and they're the Casa. The Casa is owned by a nice lady who's only here in winter, and for most of the year her mail gets delivered to another lady in the village proper.

You can see what's coming next can't you?

Well, at our old address all we had to do was go to the town hall to pick it up. Now we have an extra parameter. Is it in our mailbox (fat chance), the town hall, or a random address somewhere in the village? Thus far, the latter.

Things amped up a level the past couple of days as we awaited for our ADSL kit to arrive from Telefonica. First we get a text message saying it's on it's way. Next comes a phone call saying it'll arrive tomorrow. Tomorrow comes and goes, with no ADSL kit.

MrL bravely phones the delivery company to find out the chat. All we learn is that it's been delivered, somewhere, but they don't know where. They will call him back.

Hmmm.

Sometime later the phone rings. Our package has indeed been delivered, to an hombre in Capileira. If I wouldn't mind running to the end of the street and standing there he'll pop by.

Er, okay.

Off I jog to the end of the road (feeling not unlike Anneka Rice in Treasure Hunt), and lo and behold, ten minutes later a bloke turns up, with the parcel. I still don't know what it was doing with an hombre in Capileira, but sod it, I'm just pleased to be online again!

I'm not getting soft, honest

I tend to think of this more as symptomatic of the benign weather systems that dominate in Southern Europe than any evidence of me becoming soft after living away from Scotland for the best part of ten months. But yesterday was only the second day since being here in Andalucía that I had cause to go riding in the rain.

It was an obligation really, since we had guests who wanted us to take them out riding. So out we went.

A sobering experience it was, but interesting from the point of view that the trails remain safely ride-able in the wet. The rocks tend to retain their grip and the underlying soil still seems to provide fantastic traction even when there are streams of rainwater flowing across it. However one thing of note is that the application of rainwater on the soil produces a gritty paste that covers your bike and probably has the same (negative) impact on the moving parts as taking an angle grinder to them.

I did feel a little sorry for our guests who, I suspect, were not expecting to come to southern Spain with their bikes and finish the day shivering, drenched and caked in mud. But nonetheless we still managed to ship an absolutely superb day’s riding.

The High Tops

Last weekend we ventured up on high with our
trusty mascot, Delilah. It was the first time we'd been up there on our bikes and set off determined to get as close as we could to the summits.

What a fantastic day! It's days like these that make up for all those tedious bureaucratic challenges we face every day!

We climbed up from the barrier to the Mirador de Trevelez in an uneventful and sluggish 1hr 45. This was an interesting statistic in itself though, as MrL and JamieBell have completed this in a somewhat intimidating 1hr. To be fair, JamieBell thought he was going to expire by the time he got there, but his relentless tenaciousness helped him put thoughts of death to one side.

The importance of this number is that we can do postulate the following:

• JourneyLength(MrsL) = JourneyLength(MrL) x 1.75
  

This knowledge is of significant value when it comes to working out trail days, although does make somewhat depressing reading for me. Bah.

Anyway, I digress.

All through the morning we had been deep in cloud, at some points with less than 50m visibility. as we continued climbing past the Mirador we emerged out of the clouds and started looking down on them - not unlike being on an aeroplane! The views were stunning, with the peaks appearing in touching distance, albeit still some miles away.

We continued climbing up and around the Caldera bowl, then the Rio Seco bowl. At that point we had to call it a day, as I was completely sh*gged and despite being downhill 99% of the way, I was rather concerned about that remaining 1%.

Luckily for me, Delilah took the opportunity to get up close and personal with some Ibex (and boy, did we not have a leg to stand on with that one, thank god her legs are too short to keep up!), and it was generally decided that it was time to head home.

We kept crossing over with large group of Spanish bikers who had come over from Pradallano that morning, and they were fascinated at Delilahs antics. They kept asking MrL how fast she could run, as he boasted like a proud father of speeds of 45 kph.

Needless to say by the time we got home we were all a bit knackered - Delilah included. After all, the poor pooch had to climb all the way up and down again!

Power

Now, back on Blighty power cuts are really a thing of the past. Not so here in Spain, and certainly not when you live in campo like we do now!

Since the night before last it's been blowing a hoolie around out temporary home. When this happens, the electrical cables can touch shorting out our supply, along with 3 other cortijos on the same circuit.

So after a night of flickering lights, high winds and rain we were please to have emerged unscathed, until about 9 o'clock yesterday morning when everything went dark. This was not a good scenario. There was no light, no power, no internet (zoiks!), no phone, no heating, and the worst? No water, as the pump was out. But hey ho, we still had the hob!

We retreated down to the village and continued working in t'office, which was thankfully up and running. Coming home around 3ish we were confident that everything would be back in action. Uh-oh. No such luck! It wasn't until 3 hours later we were finally back online.

I'd always thought of power cuts with and air of childhood nostalgia: digging out candles and huddling together for half an hour or so. Now? Well, mostly they're just a jolly bit pain in the *ss!