Bike: Hunter
Distance: 2 hours fartlek with an hour pissing about in the middle
Playlist: Eagles Of Death Metal

Taking time off from making (and drinking) Brodies Beer the Raouligan was asking for advice on white road shorts. Cue the usual ribbing about kit that writes cheques your legs can’t cash. Obviously there are some commentators who can get away with white shorts, but for most of us mountain bikers white and mud just don’t mix.

Anyway a few weeks ago I’d been in the market for some bib shorts as I was down to one aged pair of Endura 500s and a new pair of Enduras in VeloCake colours. As seen in earlier posts. At the time I did try on some white Castellis, but decided instead to play safe and bought some – quite comfortable and lovely actually – sensible black Endura bibs.

Of course since then we’ve had hot dry weather and black kit has been, well, a little hot and sticky. Even wearing my white top with black shorts my Northern metabolism is finding the Souths positively Mediterranean climate a little warm.

Another sunny day in black kit. A tad warm.

So sod it. Poncey white top? Tick. Poncey white shoes? Tick. Ability to match? Not in a million years. So I might as well go for “the look” and get me some white shorts. I can rationalise this by convincing myself that Mayhem this year is going to be a dust-fest and they’ll help overcome heatstroke on those hot dusty early afternoon laps on day 1. By the time we come to mid-day on day 2 I’ll be broken anyway.

As it turns out white road shorts are actually bloody nice to ride in as they do stop your thigh muscles from absorbing all the heat from the sun. The two biggest, hardest working, and above all heat-generating muscles in the body do stay cooler. Hey, if white is good enough for the Stormtroopers on Tattoine!* it’ll do for me.

So I made up for looking like a fat bloke having a mid-life crisis** by treating todays ride as fartlek training. There are two approaches to getting fit for Mayhem and one is to put in hours and hours of riding. That I don’t have time for, and besides, it only teaches you how to ride steady. The other approach to endurance fitness – and there is actually a scientific basis behind this method – is interval training. This helps your body learn to cope with the lactic acid that you’ll inevitably suffer from, and to ride through the pain. So today everything was a sprint. Especially if it went uphill. Then just as I’d normally give up I’d force myself to kick again until I really did hurt. After a short rest, look for the next potential finish line and repeat. I flew*** the local figure of 8 loop.

Still not as fast as I looked like I should be going though.

* Speaking of which, whatever happened to bike mojos? Asterix raced with me during most of the 90s, until he transferred to the tandem. Bicycling used to have a page of them each month. No prize for whoever can tell me which month and year it was had the fishing rod and Bass, except the smug self-satisfaction that you are properly old skool.

** How perceptive.

*** For a given value of flew.