New blog to read and alot of self indulgent waffle

WAFFLE ALERT..readers continue at your own risk..I take no responsibility.....

Sorry for the following self indulgent rubbish..a painful back and neck has woken me up in the wee hours and I'm filling in time til it eases and I can get back to sleep.......

Proud mother again...looks like Ben has become a Yeti enduro team rider..see the addition to my blog roll. (pix lifted from the felt blog..tnx guys)


What differentiates MTB from road/track riders, apart from the funny addition to the helmet, the baggy shorts(although not in this pix) and the unfortunate need to wash and maybe even re-build your bike after every ride, seems to be that MTBers have FUN! even while training hard they have fun..not for them the grind of a million intervals around a boring 250m velodrome or even the slightly more exciting ditto on the road .

As one convert from the bush to the velodrome commented the other day after a rare venture into the bush on his duallie...I'd forgotten how much fun it is. It was of course great cross training for him, although since he's become a trackie he's bulked up and so struggled to keep up on when the track tilted upwards.....

Which reminds me of when I first joined my current bike club - a group of us were meeting in Yarra Glen for a team time trial practice session. My contact, who was a trackie through and through, told me we'd meet up at the car park on the main street..the one near the "big hill"..which left me initially totally confused and then much amused since there are NO hills of any note in the centre of that town...just very gentle slopes! Ah!..perceptions.

Similarly the World Masters Time Trial course in St Johann is described as "flat"..which I guess it is for people living in Austria but not for us Aussies, living in the flattest continent in the world 'cos at about the 8km mark there seems to be a bit of flat that tilts upwards just a bit too much...granted not for very long, but it always bit me in the bum whenever I rode the course....this graph from Bikely.com, the one below from Mapmyride.com..same ride, different looking graph..both sus, the Bikely one more so. On both programmes I set the drawing properties at "follow the road", so it should be accurate, but clearly isn't. As you can see from the map below, the ride is along a valley and is pretty well flat expect for 1 hill as previously mentioned which is NOT at the 6km mark as shown on the MMR graph below!


To get back to MTB....my MTB, a Gary Fisher Sugar 2 from wa-a-a-y back..one of the first XC bikes with rear suspension..is not only almost stuck to the bike rack, its on the bike rack UPSTAIRS, where the rarely used/waiting to sell bikes are.

So, memo to self..get the Sugar 2 off the bike rack and use it..in fact, have a bit of fun!