Can’t believe a whole year has gone since the 2010 Hastings and St Leonards CC Battery Hill Climb. We arrived a bit late, just as the final riders were grimacing up the steep slope. Pete Tadros produced the fastest time of the day, which should bode well for his ride next weekend at the National Hill Climb.

Each day consists of a selection of timed “predominantly singletrack, predominantly downhill” stages, linked together by “predominantly ascending untimed Liaison Stages”. Most stages begin with a minibus uplift, allowing a greater proportion of downhill riding to uphill, although the latter is still considerable, at around 1350m per day.

Compared to other enduro events, especially those like the hugely popular Megavalanche, T-P is very small – only 55 riders. However, because of the quality of the route and organisation, it attracts the very best enduro riders in the world. This year, entrants included Nico Vouilloz, Fabien Barel, Jerome Clementez, Mark Weir, Mark Beaumont, and Tracy Moseley.

Having been glued to the videos and coverage of T-P 2011 over the last week, I came to the conclusion that this race is without a doubt something that I want to ride more than any other. I can’t think of anything else that really tests the skills and abilities that real mountain biking demands more than this. It’s not enough to be a one descent wonder – you’ve got to be resilient enough to keep the focus and drive throughout seven consecutive days, and be ready to push hard downhill after riding up big steep hot hills.

Now the Nomad is built up I’ve got the perfect machine for the job. I really want to enter the 2012 event – I just need to figure out if I can really commit enough time to the preparation, and also come up with a strategy to possibly include my then wife and little daughter – perhaps they can be the support crew?!

I’ve linked the Vimeo films covering this year’s event below.

Trans Provence Day 1 from Trans-Provence on Vimeo

Trans Provence Day 2 from Trans-Provence on Vimeo

Trans Provence Day 3 from Trans-Provence on Vimeo

Trans Provence Day 4 from Trans-Provence on Vimeo

Trans Provence Day 5 from Trans-Provence on Vimeo

Trans Provence Day Six . from Trans-Provence on Vimeo

Trans Provence Day 7 from Trans-Provence on Vimeo

Trans Provence

So here they are…

The Cotic X – Late for work from Joe Bowman on Vimeo.

Snowdon Ranger Path – Easter 2011 from Matthew Cope on Vimeo.

Osiris Shoes – Ryan Nyquist & Arik Elstran in Milwaukee from Osiris BMX on Vimeo.

Aaron Ross | 2 Texas Cement Parks in 3 Days | Empire Bmx from Empire Bmx on Vimeo.

Chris Akrigg THE MAURICE.0 from chris akrigg on Vimeo.

CRC/Nukeproof team – Prepare to Succeed from chainreactioncycles on Vimeo.

Revolution Cycle, part 1, Dublin to Colombia from revolutioncycle on Vimeo.

Revolution Cycle – Part 2 – China to Dublin from revolutioncycle on Vimeo.

2X from Jin Yeah on Vimeo.

A Taste of The Toast from MikeL on Vimeo.

Denton/Fort Worth TX from Mutiny Bikes on Vimeo.

Game of B.I.K.E. | Aaron Ross VS Chase Hawk from Empire Bmx on Vimeo.

Tesco Rutland-Melton CiCLE Classic 2011 from Andy Waterman on Vimeo.

The Ride from Anthony Fernandez on Vimeo.

To Live & Ride In L.A. OFFICIAL TRAILER from TRAFIK on Vimeo.

There are a number of sartorial dilemmas that can cause the style-conscious cyclist a good deal of head-scratching. Issues such as short length and sock colour are amongst the most hotly contested. Then there are philosophical conundrums, such as the Armwarmer-Tights Paradox. (You are wearing armwarmers and full length tights. You get hot. You can only remove your armwarmers if you are wearing shorts, but you are not wearing shorts, so your removable armwarmers are no longer removable, but instead have become temporarily fixed to your jersey sleeves by incontestable sartorial logic.

Just as with the bicycle itself, less is usually more, though there are various adornments that can add a bit of style – a well-chosen cap, or a pair of sparkling white oversocks. Accoutrements beyond this point (especially eccentric flourishes like silk ‘kerchiefs, or garbadine capes) are best left to the urban dandy.

The question of eyewear is one that poses a number of questions. As we all should know, the foremost and vital function of a pair of sunglasses is looking good. As far as cycling is concerned, their secondary purpose is to help one see where one is going. Regarding the latter, it is useful if the eyewear in question is capable of blocking out a healthy proportion of the sun’s rays, though not so much that, on entering a wooded area, you are rendered temporarily blind. As far as the former is concerned, rather like a cheap pair of shoes with a decent suit, glasses that look shit will drag down the overall aesthetic of even the very best turned out rider, so if you don’t make the effort you may as well give up with the rest of the outfit.

Of course, if like Alan Sugar you look like a hairy little troll with no discernible vestige of elegance, sartorial or otherwise, it doesn’t really matter what you use to keep the sun out of your eyes.

In the good old days, chaps such as Ottavio Bottecchia (below) sported natty little goggles – these kept both sunlight and dust at bay, often causing an amusing panda-eye effect by the end of the race that apparently went down very well with the ladies.

In the post-war period, Fausto Coppi apparently favoured Persol sunglasses (modelled below by Coppi’s legendary domestique Chris Brown, as well as team car driver Steve McQueen – top). Persol eyewear seems to be currently making a comeback, and I will revisit it later on.

The golden era of cycling eyewear ran from the late 80s through to the late 90s, and was characterised by the crazy, space-aged lunacy of Oakley and Briko. Oakley were originally a little Californian company run by a madman (as so many are) on a mission to flog amazing, freaky alien invasion type glasses. Modelling original Oakley Eyeshades below are Andy Hampsten and Adrian Timmis.

Then there was the M-frame (modelled here by Sean Yates), slightly less crazy, and still in production today.

The apogee of the crazy-tech coolness curve of Oakley’s product development was the Sub Zero (below). One of my schoolmates had a pair of these. They looked very cool, until he put them on. Then he just looked like a cock. Herein lies the problem of spaceman glasses. Unless you have the visual personality of an MDMA-soaked rocket scientist (i.e. you’re Mario Cipollini), they are quite hard to pull off.

Oakley seemed to tone things down a bit after the Sub Zero, but during that retreat they did fire a Parthian shot in the form of the Overthetop. These ludicrous specs were absolutely fucking crazy, but this incontrovertible fact didn’t stop a number of celebrity sportsmen from fielding a pair, most notably (in cycling) David Millar in the 2001 Vuelta prologue. Civilians would never be able to pull off such a look, but Mr Millar at least proves that the professionals are able to push the boundaries a little further and (vaguely) get away with it – in this case, aided by the aero helmet. Still, I would heartily suggest that you don’t try them on the Sunday cafe run.

These days, Oakley are a huge company, with a massive range of glasses as well as a load of other stuff too. I bought some Jawbones last year – they do seem to work very well, and the hinged frame that allows lens swapping is nicely designed. Unfortunately, it is still hard to not look like a bit of a cock when wearing Oakleys. I think one has to approach their use with a fair degree of forward thinking. If you are riding long hard miles, in the sun, with lots of bugs in the air, or you’re riding in a forest when you might get crap in your eyes, wear the Oakleys. If you are wearing your fancy kit, riding your fancy bike, and are hoping to catch the eye of that millionaire widow in the droptop Mercedes, perhaps some other eyewear might be more appropriate. The exception to this Rule of Oakley is the Frogksin.

Backtracking a bit, the other eyewear company worthy of serious adulation is Briko. Briko was the choice of the badass Euros back in the 90s. Mario wore Briko, which gives me another excuse to publish the photos below.

Marco wore Brikos too. If Marco and Mario both did something, it is probably worth doing. Coke and hookers, for example…

Briko glasses were ace. Zen, Shot, Stinger – I’ve had them all. But again, whilst I thought I looked pretty cool wearing them, it’s fairly safe to say that the majority of people outside the cycling fraternity probably assumed that I was a cock.

So, what glasses should you wear if you don’t want to look like a cock. First up, the Oakley Frogskin, as previously mentioned.

Next, the Steve McQueen Persol.

Lastly, may I suggest the Oliver Peoples Altman.

(I completely failed to find any examples of mid 20th century cycling eyewear that was in any way interesting, unusual or downright horrid. If anyone has any suggestions then let me know!)

Whilst waiting for my English I have been musing what to do with my venerable Litespeed Tuscany. It’ll become my second bike – something to use for racing (especially when I think there’s some crash potential) and something for the winter. It’s fairly understated, with pre-carbon Campag Chorus drivetrain and brakes, but with some new FSA SLK additions. Wheels are 32 spoke Mavic Open Pros on Ambrosio hubs. What it really deserves is a ti seatpost. I’d really like to go to work on it, sanding off logos and graphics from the bars, stem, cranks and forks, removing the (slightly peeling) downtube decals, etc with the aim of turning it into a sleek, metal and carbon beauty.

In the meantime, check out some other tasty Ti offerings…

First things first. It’s not a “comfort stop”. It’s a piss. Or a pee. Or a public display of bladder emptying. “Comfort stop” is yet another idiotic euphemism that has entered the road riding lexicon, along with the equally irritating “nature break”. I’m sure it won’t be long before saddle sores are referred to as “pressure pimples”, and emergency defecation as “dropping a powerbar”. For the record, a comfort stop is when you stop riding in favour of lounging in comfort. Rather like Big Jan and the Klodenmeister in the image below.

Right then, sportives. I rode the Hell of the Ashdown at the weekend. An excellent early season event on some fabulous roads, well-organised, well-signposted, and pleasantly challenging. I rode most of the circuit south of the M25 last November, but managed to go off route a few times, and so had been looking forward to riding the course without having to resort to the repeated extraction of a dog-eared map from my jacket pocket.

The thing that’s weird though is the manifestation of competitiveness in the cyclosportive environment. As a low-level amateur road and mountain bike cyclist (with aspirations towards low-level amateur cycle racing) I try to affect an air of casual indifference towards competition, the overtaking of others, timings, speeds, and the multitude of other metrics that define performance. Over-competitiveness when you’re crap is not only something to be ashamed of, it can be so cringeworthy when considered in retrospect that you sometimes question whether it was you acting like that rather than some sort of auto-character-assassinating doppelganger. Not everyone shares this trait. Many riders are content to pootle around, not phased at all when they are passed, and when they pass others it barely registers. (Of course, you shouldn’t confuse those people with the ones who are also affecting the aforementioned indifference with a greater degree of verisimilitude than I am usually able to muster. They smile gamely when they’re overtaken and you think, “What a nice chap” when in fact said chap is already plotting your death by water bottle beating. These are the same people that, when the shoe is on the other foot and they are on the attack, pedal up to their intended victim with all the gusto of a Olympic pursuit finalist and then just before they come into view, take a deep breath, relax on the tops and cruise past like a Frenchman delivering onions.)

I, on the other hand, admit freely and honestly that I am a compulsively over-competitive cyclist. If I get overtaken (whether it’s by an old lady on a Brompton or a heavily doped European professional (both examples being entirely that as, to my knowledge, neither have actually occurred) it spoils my day to the extent that, unless you’re planning to announce a second series of Nathan Barley, you would be best advised to stay well out of my way, at least until the following morning. If the reverse occurs, and I manage to overtake somebody myself, especially if that person is aboard a fancier bike than mine, joy and rapture, the black mist is lifted and I sing and dance and offer to pay for people’s shopping in the supermarket.

I find the sportive atmosphere very slightly weird because it’s not a race, but there are plenty of people treating it like one. We chose to ride the Hell at a moderately steady pace, and stopped at both the feed stations as well as at the time control in the Ashdown Forest. As such, I had to bite my tongue when one of the many overtakers made some snide comment (as I would’ve done, probably) about what my (borrowed) Powertap meter might be registering as I span gently up the hill. I ended up not really interested in my time, knowing that time had not been the main aim of the day – a sociable ride with my chums in the spring sunshine.

But within 12 hours I was poring over the finish list, correlating positions with the lap breakdown on my Garmin. Obsessing over the minutae of power levels. Figuring out how much better placed I would’ve been if (a) I hadn’t stopped (admittedly this would’ve meant that I would’ve missed the self-styled Alf Cappuccino, purveyor of overfilled cups of tea and Tommy Cooper recitals at the Ide Hill feed station), (b) if I’d pushed hard from the start rather than the better late than never effort at the end, and (c) if I’d roared like a lion and ridden around with my mouth wide open like Michael Boogerd.

The culmination of all this cerebral timewasting is that (a) my fiancé has yet again drawn attention to the underlying inferiority complex driving all this mental effort, (b) I have set myself a target of riding the event in under 4 hours next year, and (c) I have decided that I need to do some road races.

You see, I’ve figured out that road racing is probably the ultimate cure for an over-competitive streak. Last time I did one (a SERRL event at Fowlmead) I managed to stick with the bunch for about twenty minutes before getting unceremoniously dropped. It proved in an instant, and with undeniable, absolute clinical precision, that I was crap, unfit and tactically retarded. There is no messing around when it comes to a race. Nowhere to hide, no excuses. It must be done…

(I’ve just realised that, out of the four pictures of me at the Hell, I (entirely unintentionally though probably subconsciously decisively) chose to use the one in which I’m overtaking someone. The icing on the cake, etc.)

Hell of the Ashdown
Cyclosport
SERRL

Nice stuff I’ve seen recently…

Nicolai
Intense
Yeti
Point One Racing
BOS
Moots
Speedvagen
Richard Sachs
Ricky Feather
Ritte
Canyon
Tune