MTB Mayhem at Afan Argoed

The scene was set, End of Month ride at Afan Argoed. I met Jon, Dave and Dan at the leisure centre, we put the bikes on the racks and headed off to South Wales for a planned ride around the W2 trail.

Jon and I stopped off for a Burger King breakfast on the way and we got to the visitor centre at Glyncorrwg where we met Jay, Brad, Matt and Woody who had made the trip across from Bristol. They were all ready to go so after a bit of a pre-ride pfaff whilst I got ready we were off onto the Trail. The Bristol contingent missed the first turning but were soon back on track for the first climb of the day. I actually quite enjoyed the climb, but I’m not so sure about the others. It wasn’t long before we were heading back down though and enjoying some top class fats flowing singletrack, some rockier singletrack descents and even some north shore for good measure.

Matt was having a bit of a nightmare with three punctures and Brad’s knee was swelling up but everyone was enjoying the trails and the sunshine, even it it was taking quite a bit of time to cover the distance. In fact we were enjoying ourselves so much and blindly following the W2 trail markers that we managed to go wrong and soon found ourselves back at the Trail head at Glyncorrwg, obviously having missed the high level link across to the Wall at Afan. Not to worry it was an ideal time for a lunch break, Pizza for me and a few others and Matt managed to get the biggest tuna sandwich ever. Good stuff. Then we refilled our camelbaks, did a little bike maintenance (and swapped bikes or Matt) before heading off towards Afan and The Wall.

Brad came along to the start of the trail and then headed back as he knee was hurting and we all carried on in the sunshine. This time it was a long hot fireroad climb. Matt was on his Stinky now which slowed him down on the uphills, but at least he didn’t puncture on the downhills. Jay was struggling a little by now, but is getting some fitness back. Then it was more of usual bumpy descents, little climbs and then the final ZigZag descent which was all going well until I cam around the final bend to find Jon on the floor with a big laceration just above the knee. With the help of Matt they already had him away from the bike and had a inner tube tourniquet on to stem the bleeding. We then moved him a little to get him comfortable and allow us to elevate his knee and apply compression to the wound which was about 4-5 inches long and deep enough to allow us to see all manner of muscles, bones and other internal bits and pieces. As the other cam down behind every one sprung into action. I was holding Jon’s leg and doing my best to stop the bleeding whilst helping him stay on top of things, although I had to get Dan to help with this after a while once his leg got heavy!. A couple of people (Dave and Woody I think) were sent off to the visitor centre to get some help Dan was on the phone dialling 999 and organising the emergency services and a couple of people were stopping others people coming down the trail so that they didn’t hurtle into us.

We’re not sure exactly what happened but the end result was that a fast spinning brake rotor had become a meat slicer and sliced though his knee.

After a while a ranger and rapid response paramedic were on the scene and the air ambulance was on its way. A Jay and Dan were then down guiding the helicopter in and apparently marvelling at the way the pilot decided to land UNDER some power lines!

Once the air ambulance crew were on the scene we bundled Jon onto a stretcher and then we all carried him down to the waiting helicopter before sending him off on his way to Moriston Hospital. The Ranger then helped out by giving the car drivers a lift back to Glyncorrwg so that we didn’t have to ride back in the rain (Yep, somewhere in the proceedings it had started raining!) and then we got ourselves organised before everyone headed off and I went to Moriston to find Jon.

When I got there they hadn’t really done much, just the usual heart rate and blood pressure tests and he was sitting there waiting for them to take a look at him. I guess the fact that he wasn’t a top priority was a good sign in a way but he was starting to feel the pain and get a little bored with waiting after a while. The doctor soon arrived though, gave him some morphine and removed the dressing which, despite the morphine looked as though it was pretty painful. The decision was then made that it was too bad to stitch up with a local anaesthetic so it was off to theatre for surgery under a general anaesthetic.

I headed home once he went off to theatre and then after making lots of phone calls to let his family know where he was and work know that he wouldn’t be in I headed back down to Swansea to collect him. He looked a lot better and was free to go, hobbling along on his crutches. It sounds as though he was quite lucky and missed everything important other than his muscle so hopefully will heal pretty quickly.

All in all a great days riding with some excitement at the end. Everyone responded perfectly though and Jon should be back out and riding soon.

It’s official, it’s a scorcher. The weather station here at Borth and Ynsylas has recorded 27.1ºC today, the hottest day of the year so far.

This weeks Ystwyth-MTB night ride was in the Dyfi Forest. Just Dave, Jon and myself this week and as Dave and Jon are pretty fast I had a pretty hard ride doing my best to keep up.

It was a good ride in lovely conditions, hot and sunny. A little too hot really but we shouldn’t complain about that. We started out along the ClimachX trail, up the long climb and then along the first two bits of singletrack, then up the next little climb, by which time Dave and Jon were starting to leave me behind and I was struggling at the back. We stayed on the ClimachX Trail for the next two bits of singletrack before leaving it and heading off down the steep, muddy but lots of fun 3 in 1 descent.

From here it was a long climb to the top, back onto the ClimachX Trail and some more singletrack. Then on the rocky climb, instead of turning left and onto the singletrack across the top, we carried on up before heading down a steep descent into the next valley. From here it was a traverse around the valley to the first climb of the Dyfi Enduro. By now I’d come alive a bit and actually climbed this really well, overtaking Dave in the process and doing my best to keep up with Jon. I did of course know that it was the last climb of the evening so did put in quite a bit of effort.

All down hill from here on the final descent which was really good. It changes everytime I do it and tonight was no exception but I did manage to stay in touch with Dave and Jon and had a really good ride.

Click here for a Google Earth file of the ride.

I took my new camera along for the ride as well, getting a photo in before the ride an one halfway down the final descent.

Just got back from a lovely windsurf session in the estuary at Ynyslas. Its that time of year when Ivor, our local katabatic wind is on top form and with a gentle NE wind forecast and sunny skies he was up to his usual tricks. Funneling down the valley at 30-35 knots making for perect windsurfing conditions in the estuary.

Ivor usually peaks at around 8.30 and today was no exception. The Weather Station recorded a maximum gust of 30.6 knots at exactly 8.30am. The weather station isn’t directly in Ivor’s path though as the wind is very localised so it would have been an extra 10 knots or so on top of that in the estuary.

I was on the water before 8am and had a 5 star session. Well powered up the whole time and making some super fast speed runs on the flat water to the lee of the sand banks. I forgot my GPS though so don’t know wuite how fast I was going, but on kit that isn’t built for speed it certainly felt fast.

Back to work now, but this is exactly why I live ‘A Simple Life of Luxury’ as  a Freelance Website Designer in Wales as it allows me to indulge in  spontaneous windsurf sessions whenever the conditions allows.

Once I got off the water I took a few photos of Nick with my new camera. He went out kitesurfing for  5 minutes but then decided it was too windy to be out there on his own.

I haven’t had it long so this isn’t a full review, but my new digital camera arrived the other day so here are my first impressions.

After some deliberation over which waterproof digital camera to get I chose a Pentax Optio W60 as a second, go anywhere camera to compliment my Canon EOS 450D SLR camera. It looks nice, its just the right size to slip into your pocket, but isn’t so small that it is difficult to handle and the buttons become too fiddly. It doesn’t look waterproof which is nice, the styling is just like that of any other compact digital camera, and although I haven’t tested its waterproof capabilities yet, it is supposed to be fully waterproof. I shall be out snorkelling with it if its nice at the weekend.

The LCD on the back is large and bright and easy to view, even in bright sunlight and the operation is simple. As a man I played around with it before reading the manual and managed to work out all of the options and settings without having to revert to the manual once. I did subsequently read the manual and find a few little features that I had overlooked, but nothing major.

Photo quality is good too. It does suffer from a fair bit of noise at high ISO, but so do most cameras and it tends to up the ISO quite quickly in low light when in automatic modes, but this could be over-ridden if needed. I shall have to investigate the best modes to use for keeping the sensitivity low and adjusting the shutter speed / aperture first. Talking of modes, it has loads of them! All the normal presets modes such as full auto, program, portrait, sports, night are available and a host of others such as underwater, pets (you even have to tell it the colour of your pet!), food and text! It also has a built in panoramic mode that allows you to take three photos and the it stitches them together for you within the camera. I’ve tried this out and it seems to work pretty well and saves time in Photoshop later.

It also has face recognition, smile capture and blink detection. All of which are very clever, although once again I only played with these and haven’t used them in earnest yet. Other things to play with will be the high speed continuous shooting and the time lapse photography feature. It does of course record video as well.

So far so good, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. As a 2nd camera to compliment my SLR then it is ideal. Small, rugged and versatile, just what you need from a camera that can go everywhere with you and with a little bit of experimentation it will produce high quality images as well.

I’ve been quite pleased with my Mountain Bike maintenance skills lately. I took the rear hub apart on my Commencal Meta 5.5 the other day and gave it a good clean and re-grease and last week it was time to service the air can and check the seals on my rear shock.

Jon wanted to do the same so we bought all of the relevant bits and pieces and decided to do it together. I can’t believe I spent over £50 on a collection of washers and seals, but thought as it was the first time I was doing it and the shock was still under warranty that I had better do it the right way with all the right bits and pieces. In the future I’m sure many of the bits, especially things like the bushes could be obtained at a fraction of the cost.

I’ve got a Fox Float RP2 on my bike and Jon has a Fox Float RP23 on his so they are a little different but the procedure was the same for both.

1. Let all of the air out of the shock.
2. Remove lower end of the shock from the bike. We had a bit of problem with this on my bike but once we worked out how the rocker system was put together it was easy.
3. Crack open the air can.
4. Remove the shock from the bike.
5. Clean and re-lube everything.
6. Add Fox Float Fluid.
7. Reattach to bike

Jon followed this, but I had a bit of play in the lower bush, so I added an extra step of replacing the bush using a little bush removal tool to remove it and replace the bush and the reducers with new ones. That all went well too and the little tool I’d bought from eBay made it really easy to do.

I then added the correct amount of Fox Fluid to the chamber and reattached it to my bike. Jon had a little bit of trouble re-attaching his, but I won’t embarrass him with the details. Once I took a look and spotted his mistake it was as easy as could be.

We then checked it all and got out and rode! Well, actually it was quite late by now so we didn’t, but I have since been for a ride and all seems fine. I can’t feel much difference other than the fact that there is now no play in the lower bush, but I’m sure servicing the shock regularly will prolong its life and the life of the various seals and washers. The fact that I can’t really feel any difference in the shock itself probably means that I serviced it at the right time, before it started having any degradation in its functionality.

We’ve now ordered some suspension fluid and expect to be doing the same for our forks later in the week.

If this is a task you’ve been thinking of doing but have been putting off, then just do it, it’s actually a lot easier than it looks and you need very few tools to do it.

Some guy producing a guidebook contacted Dave asking for some photos of people riding the trails at Nant yr Arian, so instead of a normal early morning ride we had planned to meet up for a bit of a photo shoot. We had hoped for a few people but it was just Dave and I who braved the early morning midges.

My new camera has yet to arrive so we did a few shots using my SLR on the Hippity Hops before heading off over the moorland and down Mark of Zorro with just Dave’s trusty little compact. The SLR would have been better but I didn’t fancy lugging it all the way there and back.

It wasn’t the best of days for a photo session with a very overcast sky and a drab, grey, flat light, but we got a few shots and tried to capture the nature of the trails at Nant yr Arian.

After taking Morgan for a swimming lesson yesterday morning, in which he didn’t do as asked as usual, we heaed off for a walk in Penglais Woods where there was a special craft day going on.

We had a nice little walk along the footpath from the entrance opposite the university and then in a beech clearing found a few people doing various crafts. One guy, a tree surgeon, was demonstrating tree climbing, there were a few people turning wood on tradition lathes and a a guy with some things made of wood. There was also the opportunity to decorate your own bowl using Raku. Raku is a pottery technique that has it’s origins in 16th century Japan, the firing proceeds at a rapid pace with the wares reaching temperature in as short a cycle as 15-20 minutes, follwed by raipd cooling. This compares to the more traditional method of firing that lasts 8-24 hours followed by cooling phase that lasts 12-24 hours. Good news for us as it meant we could get hold of the bowl we had decorated without a huge wait.

Unfortunately there weren’t really any instructions and we didn’t really know what we were doing. Before getting there we knew nothing about Raku, there weren’t any finished products to give you an idea opf what could be achieved and all of the bowls coming out completed looked pretty much the same. Black with the odd blob of colour here and there. The blues and greens didn’t really show up too well, the copper colour which produced a metallic glaze was good though, so we were glad we’d added some of that to our bowl!

Morgan then made a little wooden pendant with a print of a beech tree on it and we wandered off through the woods looking for more things. We did come across a man making an owl sculpture with a chain saw, and had a nice view out over Aberystwyth, but nothing else. I think there were some stall down in Aberystwyth itself, but we didn’t find them and the promised childrens games and organised sessions that were meant to take place never seemed to materialise. It was still a nice walk in the woods though and Morgan enjoyed making his little pendant and hitting logs with a stick!

I think I need to make a trip to Scotland soon. There are loads of really good mountain biking centres there and the new Red Run on Ben Nevis opens soon, June 24th to be precise. It is graded as a Red, XC route, but has a Gondola uplift to the start at 643m, and then a vertical drop of 543m to finish at the car park at a height of 100m. The overall length is around 5.5km and judging by the video below it looks amazing. Steep, rugged an tough but not too full on and scary like most downhill runs with gondola access. The timber sections look pretty mad as well, they’ve certainly gone to a lot of effort to build it.

The Gondola uplift costs £11.50 for a single trip or £25 for a day an is open from 10.15am – 3.45pm.

More info from the Nevis Range here.

It isn’t available yet, but the new Garmin Foreunner 310Xt looks like an intersting bit of kit. I have a few GPS devices already and love my Garmin Foreunner 305, this just take it to another level, being more rugged and waterproof.

Finally, a GPS-enabled training device that isn’t afraid of the water. The rugged Forerunner 310XT is the triathlete’s indispensable training tool — a GPS-enabled, swim-proof trainer that tracks bike and run data and sends it wirelessly to your computer. This multi-sport device has up to 20 hours of battery life, tracks distance, pace and heart rate (optional), and goes from wrist to bike in seconds.

Could be good for swimming and windsurfing, as well as biking and other sports, and I may have to get my hands on one when it comes out. It seems to have most the  features of the Forerunner 305, including the useful Virtual Training Partner. It is also slighter lighter, has a better battery life, is ANT power meter compatible, has wireless syncing capabilities and of course is properly waterproof. The Heart Rate Monitor appears to be an optional extra with this one though and it doesn’t appear to be able to store routes. This last omission seems a little od as the routes are used to allow the Virtual Training Partner to work , but otherwise it looks like a great piece of kit.