He’s a family man with a job who loves being outdoors. He’s not a full time journalist or a team-based athlete just does it.

Like I said, up until now it’s been aspirational as I haven’t put any plans into action. Until last night that is. It was the back of 8 and I fancied a cuppa and on the way to the kitchen I looked outside and figured it’d be great to have that cuppa on the bench at the top of Blairadam forest that I’ve sat on many times.

The bag came out, the stove went in and I pedaled off into the dark.

And there you have it; me, sitting on the bench after dark with a steaming mug of Rooibos in my hands. Oh, I’m not smiling because the smiling pictures didn’t turn out too well.

It was a good night for it, the mist lending the air an other worldly quality which you can definitely see mingling in the steam from my tea. The roads were nice and quiet, with any drivers I did encounter giving me a wide birth. That’s probably through some mixture of incredulity at encountering a cyclist and the 240 lumens I was using to light the road.

Next time it’s a tent and a local hill.

I’ve attempted to cycle over to the Pillars of Hercules before though I didn’t make it all the way across. That was either last summer or the one before and it’s safe to say that my fitness has come on in leaps and bounds since then. I also have semi-slick tyres which makes a big difference.

So this time I made it. An 85km round trip in shorts and t-shirt, the only time I covered myself up with anything more was a brief stint of wearing a windproof while having my lunch at the Pillars. I took a short detour to the local farm shop after lunch, pictures below.

The ride back was a bit slower then the one going out, but I had a quick stop in Kinross for a restorative Bru and that put some energy back in for the pech up through Blairadam Forest.

The evening was spent in The Villager to celebrate Chris Brown’s birthday. It was great to see a bunch of people I haven’t for a while, but it also reminded me of how much I hate being in city centre pubs on a Saturday. That scenario is not for me. I’d rather have a bike and a road.

Turns out, the “something different” was to carry a camera round the course for the BBC show Country Tracks. It also involved me doing some to-camera work as well, a sort of video diary of my day at the race. I’ve no idea how it’ll all turn out, but it’ll be broadcast to the nation at some point and unlike last year’s Rat Race show on C4 you’ll be able to see my face. And hear my whiney voice. There are altogether too many recordings of  me available online these days, but never mind.

The act of carrying the camera was as awkward as I’d feared. They didn’t have a head cam so instead it was a fairly standard-sized palmcorder, loaded with a 40 minute tape. This meant I had to keep starting and stopping the recording when I thought something interesting was happening. Like I say, we’ll find out if it worked when it’s broadcast.

Even when racing and carrying a camera, my time spent marshaling still managed to kick in. On the way to the scree ascent, the headtorch belonging to the girl behind me gave out which makes the race more than a little dangerous. So I offered to run at a pace that meant we could both see by the light of mine. We did that and managed to post a fairly pathetic time of three hours.

As with last year, Sunday was a bimble round the red run in Glentress and we had a big turn out for the event.

Photo stolen from Pyro who wrote up an official and less-official report of the weekend.

A good weekend, new friends, new experiences, new brakes and new scars. They don’t come much better.

We set off a bit late and weren’t properly underway until 10:30 but we made reasonable time through the woods around Nevis Range though the innacurate Explorer map didn’t help. Some resurveying needs done there. In fact, all the way up the Lairig it was fine and not even all that steep (all hail SPDs). Though I did manage to bounce my balls off my saddle once or twice, as my expression will attest;

However the weather held and we were soon at the bothy which heralded the start of the last major climb.

And here’s where the rot set in for me. The climb from there was a horrible, rocky, muddy path that was ridable in places. The downhill on the other side wasn’t much better. By the time we made it to the river cross I wasn’t in a great mood and feeling resigned to the fact it was going to be a long slog back along the old military road.

This was only about halfway round so the prospect of another several hours of bouncing around off pram-sized boulders didn’t exactly fill me with joy. Tim and Sandy, top blokes that they are, left me to stew at the back which is exactly the thing to do with me; never get far enough ahead that I think “where the fuck are they?”, don’t stop so often that I think “patronising gits!” and don’t try and and cheer me up. I’m happy on my tod working through bad thoughts in my head.

However, after a couple more hours it was clear we were all getting very tired. I look pretty wasted here and Tim’s struggling to keep the camera steady.

I never felt as tired as this as I did on the last epic, but we had the weather on our side this time. I think this was about the point where I donated my emergency gel to Tim to get him back up and running and we pushed on. By this point it was starting to get a bit dark and I was the only one with lights. I think it’s fair to say that I disagree with the others on the idea of going out for a ride without illumination.

On the last push I was tired enough to just forget about the brakes and go hell for leather down the forestry track back to the b-road and home. I probably hit speeds I wouldn’t normally get to when I’m more awake.

A good day out though I do prefer ground that doesn’t make me feel like I’ve been a few rounds with a professional boxer.

All the photos are Tim’s, except the last one which is Sandy’s.

Doing three of the Seven Stanes’ red routes in a weekend was a reasonably taxing undertaking. I could tell that as by 3/4 of the way round on Saturday’s second trail my vision started to go. I’d spent a couple of minutes trying to blink away something in my eye before realising I really just needed to stop and eat something. Good times.

I was too chicken to try out any of the black route tricks but a few of the others were more adventurous.

Funnily enough, this was where “Snakebite” Charlie blew his second inner of the weekend.

50km of single track over a weekend is a decent achievement but I could have really done with either a co-pilot or a satnav for the way back up, preferably a co-pilot. The journey north took more than an hour than necessary due to stupidity and tiredness.

Other News

In other news I did my first show of this year’s Fringe last night and went to see the always entertaining Adam Hills with Alex and Despina. A good night which I got home earlier than usual from as I decided to take the car in. Even so, I still didn’t get as much sleep as I needed, so I’m off to get some more.

The weekend just gone was the second attempt at a trip to the Lake District and this one was much more successful. We did a variation on the Walna Scar route on Saturday with an extra loop which brought the distance up to 37km. A decent day out but a little too much pushing the bike on the way back over the Scar. Also, my brakes were bollocksed by the end of it and a bit of attempted maintenance back at the youth hostel resulted in brake fluid spillage.

Due to the brake fiasco, I had to hire a bike on Sunday but this proved very easy in Keswick and surprisingly cheap at £20 for a day’s hire of a very well maintained bike. It was certainly appreciated as we biked over the Borrowdale Bash. A great route, despite the Lakes’ propensity for very loose downhills.

So Monday was spent in a waking daze, Tuesday was tai-chi and woo! I can now pretty much make it to third Bhudda. Last night was Zombie Night (and probably the least attended so far) and now I’ve got Dead By Dawn. The astute will notice there has been no running in the last week and the previous one wasn’t much better. I definitely need to start abandoning my lunchtime book and start getting some more kilometers under my feet.

The following is the dull movie round-up.

Female Agents

Pretty good though I did comment to friends that it was as trashy as I’d hoped. Probably the presence of Sophie Marceau should have alerted me. But yes, as a female version of the Dirty Dozen it was a lot of fun and exactly the kind of nonsense I needed when I watched it.

13 Tzameti

Weird, indie, monochrome French movie. Highly recommended. Penniless roof repairman puts himself in the way of a well paying job but unfortunately it just might kill him. Watch it. Fantastic.

Breach

A bit of Hollywood for a change. A solid enough movie but one that is constrained by the medium and necessarily has to focus more on the human aspect (though we get little of the villain’s motives) than the nuts and bolts. Being a fan of spies and espionage, that is what would have interested me more but that’s what books are for where you can flip backwards and forwards. Good though.

Let The Right One In

My word! A vampire movie I didn’t fidget through and actually enjoyed! Reasonable to excellent performances from the child actors and a good twist on this overly tired genre.

Coffy

A blaxploitation classic and deservedly so. Most people will probably not enjoy this for the usual reason that the originals are not like the parodies. Planet Terror? Yeah, I’d like to see the b-movies that were anything like that. Very good film and I want to watch more Jack Hill. Speaking of which…

Switchblade Sisters

Othello remade with girl gangs in 70s America. Brilliant. Sadly, as usual, I had to leg it before the end of the film to catch my train but I was thoroughly enjoying this slice of exploitation. There’s a DVD purchase in the offing for this one. I’m choosing to ignore the stand out tasteless scene. It’s hard to understand why it made it in, it really is. If I say Straw Dogs you’ll either know what I mean or not.

It started off well on Friday morning when Tim and Sandy turned up. We had a roof rack this time so I didn’t have to suffer a bike wheel bouncing off my head. We made good time through the wind and rain, deciding that heading to the trail at Mabie on the way down was the plan. As we drove through Dumfries itself Tim noticed that the warning light for the car’s water was on. We dutifully pulled into a side street and got out to inspect/stretch legs.

Tim’s car isn’t new, it’s a 15 year old sports coupe and so on finding the water level to be fine he put the problem down to a dodgy sensor. We jumped back in and headed to Mabie.

Although a little on the cold and damp side, we had a great time bouncing round the red route. Teas, coffees and a Mars bar at the cafe later and we were ready to head to Cumbria with just a quick stop at Halfords so that Tim could purchase some water in case of further problems. Two  minutes out of Halfords I noticed the light was back on so we pulled into the car park of a Travelodge and got out to inspect. This time, it was clear that water was being lost at quite a rate.

After much swearing and experimentation by Tim he was positive this was Game Over. I used my AA membership to get a second opinion and they concurred. However, it would probably be possible to limp home most of the way if we kept the revs down, the heaters on and kept topping up the reservoir.

And so we did that. Tim kept us moving with the revs as low as possible and we varied between cooking when the windows were closed and freezing our nuts off when we opened up to let the heat out. Eighty miles later we were back in Edinburgh without having had to top up more than a mouthful.

By the time I got back it had been a twelve hour+ day for 2 hours in the saddle. Mind you, better that than if we’d had to limp home from the Lakes along b-roads trying to keep the revs below 2k.

Instead, I had a lazy day of Saturday, watched two disappointing films and then went out to Blairadam forest this afternoon to find trails. I managed to leave my helmet at home though so any heroics would have to be left to another day.

EPIC FAIL WEEKEND!

The route covered some of the same ground as the Pentlands Wan Dae from last year so I waved to my checkpoint on the way past. Despite my fears of coming over the handlebars (as usual) I made it round the entire route happily without any moments of pain. I pushed the bike a couple of times, but only when I felt I had lost control to a dangerous degree. Next time I won’t be so nervous, I’m sure.

30km of off-roading was definitely good for the legs, and so was the speedy run I did on Monday night. Eight miles on 1:03 is a decent speed and should make for a new PB if I run like that in the half marathon on Sunday.