a sub optimal start to the season and a fun start to 2014

it seems like only a few weeks ago that i last stuck a safety pin through a number and a skinsuit into my lower back and rubbed embrocation directly into the shaving cuts in my legs and yet it's time to load up my life into backpack and spend Friday nights making my thumbs bleed into cork brake pads and Saturday mornings kitting up in a fast food joint or portable toilet. Huzzah, Hooray and Hallelujah it's the time of year for lycra stretching handlebar bumping bicycle racing action again.  In the last three weeks I've been to Mexicali, Tucson, Santa Barbra, (snowy) Campo and (sunny San Diego) to pedal in circles.

This time last year I was racing in la with @philgaimon . Phil's now in San Luis doing pro tour type stuff. I'm now in a jack in the box next to the border putting on a skinsuit 

not pro tour tamales 

Given that dull moments are well, dull I've done my best to enjoy them. It's fair to say that my efforts to avoid mundanity haven't enjoyed much in the way of a symbiotic relationship with my efforts to do well in bicycle races. My mechanical curse continues to follow me with, in no particular order a broken hub, flat front tubular (when warming up, another compelling case against warming up), a snapped chain (apparently they are only tested to a measly 4 figure wattage) and , perhaps most spectacularly my venerable Audi literally going up in a plume of smoke by the side of the 101.

the Audi's last Hurrah, maybe my naked butt cheeks as i changed in the passenger seat were an affront too many

the car story was quite entertaining, in a short period of time the oil light came on, we pulled off the 1, the car began belching smoke and we stopped. After filling up the oil tank and soliciting advice we tried again, this itme the smoke was worse, so bad that we could roll through red lights as nobody at the entire intersection could see if the light was red or green. I couldn't help but laugh as we cruised around Ventura in a James Bond style smokescreen of our own creation. In fact i decided to crank the stereo and found an old rock station, the Audi went down rockin' fortunately my friends the Ryan family lived nearby and were willing to put us up for the night and help us get the car to a garage the next day. They lived 6 miles from where we broke down, if they lived 7 miles we'd still have only driven 6! the next day i hopped on a train and, 5 hours later i was back in San Diego. I left with a car, a bike, 5 wheels and two bags, i came back with  a bike and a backpack.  It's good to not be too attached to material things and this was a well placed reminder.

On the bright side, I have got all my bad luck for the season out of the way, i'm living the green lifestyle without a car, i got to reconnect with some old friends when i turned up at their house covered in acrid smoke and 5w-40 motor oil AND i now have a legit excuse to just sit in the car drinking coffee until RIGHT before the start of races, tubulars aren't cheap!  I also managed to distinguish myself by taking the "first dude in the pro race with a beard" category in each and every race I entered, earned a Tamale in Mexico (which may or may not be beard related given my "vagabond chic" look).

In order not to die , medicinal pie

I've also been dogsitting for a friend, and nothing bad can make me feel sad when i have a four legged companion to come back to every night. oh and i had a wonderful chunk of cherry pie today. AND my spidey skills (read cx experience) got me out of a stack at Wednesday world's today.

Chess is completely dead. It is all just memorization and prearrangement. It's a terrible game now. Very uncreative

Bobby Fischer  (http://en.chessbase.com/portals/4/files/news/2006/fischer16102006.mp3) 

I was riding my bike the other day, past some little children in a park and thinking about when i was little. At the tender age of 11 not only did i reach my tennis playing peak, i also followed my calling as a Churchillian leader of men to a brief captaincy of my school chess team. Chess is an interesting game, what was once a way of developing the tactical nouse of military commanders has become an exercise in memorization. Today whole games can occur without ever leaving "the book" . Previous catalogued grand master games are studied by amateur enthusiasts and, if both players are well enough read and don't fail in their recollection, whole games can occur without either player ever making one unique move. What was once a substitute for war becomes nothing more than a spectacular undramatic form of theater. Both players adopt a role and simply go through their lines.

It seems to me that bike racing is headed in the same direction, too many people spend too long studying, analyzing, reading not riding and staring at screens instead of stems. Go on a group ride today and  everyone has read in bicycling magazine that they need to be at the front on a hill so they can drift back. Everyone wants to conserve their efforts and win the sprint. it makes for boring racing and even more boring spectating. Races follow a repetitive pattern with an early break of sacrificial pawns, straight out of the book with each team sending one rider to cover each move until one sticks.  These pieces move idly in the open space while the more powerful pieces are arrayed. Later the pawns are swept away, cannon-fodder, the knights and rooks set up the stage for the endgame, which again rolls directly from the well worn chapters of the book with a few possible variations: the late break, the bunch gallop, the mountaintop finish or the hill sprint. Just like in chess the whole battle can be a reenactment of previous conflicts .

 in his last game against the Deep Blue super computer in 1997 (which i can recall eagerly awaiting the results of on the BBC news) grandmaster Gary Kasparov played an extremely unorthodox Caro-Kann defence, his theory being that an opening move so rarely seen would confuse the machine with its extensive memory of previous grandmaster games which seldom used this opening. later in the game Kasparov would make other moves charachterized as foolish by commentators, notably in his 11th move which finally forced the game out of the book and challenged the super computer to think.  Kasparov would ultimately be defeated in just 19 moves. He went hard, early and got dropped hard and early. after the three previous games had resulted in a draw Kasparov went on the offensive, and it cost him his reputation and a large prize fund.

recently i was riding with a less experienced rider who, at the top of a climb proceeded to ride in circles in order to complete a 20 minute interval. This strikes me as not dissimilar to the chess player who, rather than playing more chess in order to improve his tactical ingenuity, takes to the annals of matches past in order to memorize previous chess games. Great cyclists are not those who can ride at an exact wattage for an exact time, they're those who can do enough whats for long enough to get to the finish line first. What i love about cycling isn't the science it's the art. I love riding up a hill for as long as it takes and being exhausted at the top. the cyclist who approaches a hill as a chance to do a 20 minute interval rather than a 20 minute interval as a chance to climb a hill is missing the joy of cycling. He may as well stay at home and ride the trainer reading his books and articles about bike racing. I'll be out riding my bike.

these sunglasses are not out of the book either 

I've always tried to be a Kasparov and not a deep blue in my bike racing, I've always tried to make unorthodox moves. Most of the time the book turns out right, we fall back into the script with my efforts little more than those of a heckler in a crowded theater or a pawn, slowly crossing the black and white squares, one by one,  between his starting point and the other side of the board.  Sometimes, rarely, the pawn can make it to the other side of the board and then that pawn can turn into a queen and change the game completely. This will never be a chapter in the book, never a tactic for those book learners to read about because the science, the numbers and the logic say it's not worth it. Rather it'll be an anachronous footnote. That's fine with me, i'd rather be a pawn who sometimes gets to be a queen than a queen moving in well worn tracks.

empowerment, exercise and "devastating diseases"

Today i rode my bike for 210k, i rode with guys who've won world championships, worn leaders jersies of grand tours (this year). I got up pretty early to make the ride, i had to leave mine at 6am to make it to the start by 8:15 so I didn't have time to open my e mails. I didn't touch any work stuff until after i was done riding a very long way and consuming my bodyweight in pannakin muffins.

Had i opened my emails before i set off pedaling i would have found out that i wasn't capable of doing so. you see the ADA informed me that I have a "devastating disease".  That i will carry a lifelong burden of "suffering and danger and fear."  That without a cure for diabetes my life would be limited by my condition and that those close to me would live their lives in "that terrifying, gut-wrenching place." 

Fortunately i didn't read this, i checked my blood glucose and went about a normal day, without being arrogant i did things that most people, diabetic or not, couldn't do. I was told when I was diagnosed that I couldn't race my bike any more, I didn't take no for an answer and i educated myself, i used myself as an n=1 experiment, i taught myself how to manage my diabetes, what to eat and when and how to use my insulin to make myself the best version of myself i can be. 

In my work with AYUDA and with the Pascua Yaqui I have tried to share my message that my diabetes doesn't hold me back. A lack of supplies or medications would hold me back, a lack of available education would hold me back but I have the great misfortune to have been born in a country where the state takes care of my medication needs and where i have access to education which has empowered me to take the best possible steps towards controlling my diabetes. I'm immensely LUCKY to be in this situation, diabetes has made me friends and taken me around the world, without it my life wouldn't have the meaning and the direction it does. 

Our goal at AYUDA is to empower people, to give them the tools they need to make the best of their situation with regard to their access to supplies and their diabetes. Whatever their situation we give them the invaluable tool of education which allows them to make the best of their resources and to live happy, healthy and productive lives with diabetes. Most of all we give them a community to belong to, a network to rely on, and a positive attitude for them to go on and empower themselves and others and serve as agents of change in their own communities.
 
In sharp contrast the ADA has told me i'm disabled (i'm not) that i am a burden on those that love me (i hope i'm not) and that my life is worthless without a cure for Diabetes (i couldn't care less). Their language is neither empowering nor educative, it's upsetting and offensive. Perhaps,a s they have no people with diabetes amongst their officers they don't understand this. Perhaps they do but they don't care. I'll likely never raise as much as this one email will but I would question the real value of what is being done here. My goal is to help people to live healthy , happy lives with diabetes, i need to raise funds in order to do this but the goal is what's important. What the ADA has done is put the cart before the horse, the money before the people and the cash before the cause. 

 My diabetes doesn't hold me back. What i do want is access to insulin for those who need it. I have said and will keep saying that i am fortunate to have the insulin and education that I need, what I want for diabetes is for my brothers and sisters not to die from a treatable condition for want of cheap supplies. I won't go into the why's and wherefore's but please investigate the 100 campaign who aim to achieve 100% access to insulin within 100 years of the creation of syntheic insulin. People in Mali can expect to live just 12 months post diagnosis, this IS something worth crying about, living with diabetes in the USA, with access to medication, is not. 

please take the time to contact the ADA and let them know how this makes you feel, even if you do not live with diabetes. Please think carefully and give generously, especially at this time of year. 

here's that link again: http://main.diabetes.org/goh/12-10-13/lndr.html?s_src=EOY2013_RED_Email03&s_subsrc=LNDR&utm_source=email&utm_medium=EOY_Email03_121013&utm_term=LNDR&utm_campaign=EOY2013_RED http://main.diabetes.org/goh/12-10-13/lndr.html?s_src=EOY2013_RED_Email03&s_subsrc=LNDR&utm_source=email&utm_medium=EOY_Email03_121013&utm_term=LNDR&utm_campaign=EOY2013_RED http://main.diabetes.org/goh/12-10-13/lndr.html?s_src=EOY2013_RED_Email03&s_subsrc=LNDR&utm_source=email&utm_medium=EOY_Email03_121013&utm_term=LNDR&utm_campaign=EOY2013_RED



here are some pictures of the last two weeks with my devastating disease and my life burdened by suffering and fear.

ride a lot, eat a lot, smile a lot

It may not have escaped your attention that i quite like bikes, I'm also not averse to pastry and, on occasion turn my hand to the culinary arts as a way to fill an empty stomach from an empty wallet. It has been a fair while since I've written a blog about food, not even about nutrition but just about food. Sometimes we confuse the two and we lose sight of both things in the process. Food is beautiful, delicious and something we are designed to enjoy. Over time our relationship with food has become somewhat unhealthy. We fear it and we overindulge in it. Food should be a pleasure, especially good food, real food, food which takes time and effort to prepare should be given time and attention when we eat it.

I love this time of year, big miles, a bit less stressful racing/ travel, beer and bakeries, coffee and cookies and of course the turkey dinners. I see a lot of riders who seem incapable of enjoying a good cookie or croissant only to consume innumerable quantities of semi solid goop as soon as they don lycra. at this time of year the lower intensities and longer rides allow for digestion of slightly more "real" foods and I personally enjoy the break from foil wrapped rectangular calories. oh and did i mention that cookies and coffee are also warm which makes cold days that much more  enjoyable (remember the old "central heating for kids" advert?

I've been experimenting with some new pocket nosh recently. First off thanks to the opening of a new Korean market near my house I've been introduced to the joys of ho-tteok whicha re delicious cold and MEGA DELICIOUS warm. I've been munching on mochi balls as well, those are some FAST acting but yummy sources of carbs.

Whilst recently cat sitting a friend's house i was overcome by my genetic predisposition to enjoy meat wrapped in pastry and made myself some pasties (i don't have an oven so I took full advantage of theirs. Having made my pasties it occurred to me that these were the original pocket food  (the crust allowed miners to carry them with hem down the mine) and, in a  flash of brilliance the POCKET PASTY was born. using a basic dough (there are a few good ones in Allen Lim's book) and everything in the fridge i came up with the following combos:
apple, raisin, cinnamon
mashed potato and cheese
stuffing
mincemeat (which isn't really meat at all ) anyone know where i can get this in the US?
couscous, curry spice and raisin
mozzarella, basil and tomato

but really you could go a million directions and not go wrong. The important thing is to take ingredients you like and cook yourself something special, and if your riding buddies are putting the hammer down, there's no better way to ingratiate yourself with them than via pastry wrapped goodness. Not only are they not 1 cent a calorie like some of the more heavily marketed sugar water out there they're also better for you and more delicious and you don't have to eat sixteen of them to feel full. Oh and you don't get to see your blood glucose climb like Pantani either.

Pro tip, warm these bad boys in the microwave and foil wrap them, put them in your innermost layer and they stay warm for a fair while AND they help keep the old lumbar spine nice and toasty. double win!

oh and when even these go wrong, there's always the Taco shop stop

red eyes, rain and (no) reservations

Last Saturday i cycled 115 miles, before i started i was shivering, once i started i was wet and shivering, after 10 mile si decided to give up, 100 miles later i somehow still hadn't. I burned 3500 calories and ate 350, i couldn't change gear, or use the brakes and when i went on the front nobody wanted to let me get off again. Oh and i rode my bike through a river. Then i got off my bike, got a $250 parking ticket and spent 8 hours shivering at the finish line. I'd slept five hours at the longest stretch all week and not eaten anything like enough.  It was also the best day I can remember.

 Thousand yard stare Jesus anyone? thanks to Conrad for snapping me as I babbled inanely 

The only time i can remember being as cold this year was in Flanders in March,  the odd thing was not that in Tucson i thought of Belgium but that in Belgium, i'd thought of Tucson. I can remember each and every lap that i passed the warm cafe with the smell of cigars and coffee i wanted to give up. my fingers hurt so much that i wanted to cry and my jaw was cramping from cold. I remember looking back through my legs, so low in the drops as the wind whipped straight from the Siberia (or so it seemed) and seeing the Yaqui charm dangling off my saddle and thinking that nothing i would ever endure on a bike would ever be anything like as tough as what the guys on the rez had to deal with just to get on a bike. If i gave up just because i was cold how on earth could i ask people to overcome the barriers that society, economy and culture put between them and the health of their community.

I'd spent the week before The El tour in the Casino Del Sol with my friends, fundraisers and volunteers from AYUDA preparing for The El tour de Tucson with our Pascua Yaqui participants, we put the finishing touches to bikes and introduced Mexican hot dogs to Canadian kids, we sat at the expo for hours trying to find someone who wanted to make a difference, not take a sticker. It was a pleasure to introduce the higher ups from AYUDA to the higher ups from the tribe, to see worlds coming together for the wellbeing of people who wnt to make themselves better. We attended stuffy, formal dinners where wine flowed and small talk came awkwardly and we had our own dinners where tears flowed and big ideas were raised easily.

It's hard for me to express how proud it made me to see my participants dressed up and being honoured in front of hundreds of people, what means more to me is that they were honouring themselves, that they had ridden themselves to a place where they could stand up, smile and be proud of themselves. What made me even prouder was seeing some of my participants stand up in front of just a couple of dozen people and talk about what this year has meant to them, about how through divorce, through the death of loved ones, through abuse from the roadside and miles and miles of self doubt, through (deserts as hot as) hell and high water they'd kept on with their cycling because it had come to mean something to them, it had stopped being about a medicinal benefit, about "taking" exercise and it had become a spiritual benefit and had become about loving exercise.

I stood at the finish line, shivering in my woefully inadequate jacket and welcomed all of our riders. From grandmothers to grade schoolers via tribal padres and boxers each one of them finished in the freezing rain with a huge smile. Some sang their ancestor songs along the way to stay motivated in the freezing rain, others thought of their children hoping that through their example they'd be able to grow up and look forward to long, happy, healthy lives. The power of a hero can't be underestimated but we all need heroes we can relate to. Overcoming the adversities placed in front of these guys makes them heroes, standing up and being proud of being native American makes them heroes, getting back up when a million and one things knock them down makes them heroes. These aren't heroes who you read about in magazines, these are the heroes who can really change the world, because people can really relate to them. They're ordinary people who have overcome their situation to prove that they CAN make their lives better, an din doing so they have made the world that they come from better, brighter and more welcoming. They really have changed the future of their community and that really is a victory more meaningful than crossing the line first.

In so many ways the start line was the finish line, months of training, hugely improved blood sugars, weight loss and as many finger pricks as pedal strokes. Just by getting to the start, by overcoming a distaste for wearing lycra and a fear of being out on the road. For keeping riding when people around them were reinforcing what society already told them: you can't. For all these reasons they'd already won. Yet for so many reasons they started as they crossed the finish line and made a commitment to share what they had learned with their colleagues, their community, their children. They committed to riding further and eating better to being more visible as positive role models and to teaching others what they'd shown through their example, that their health was their own and that they had the power to improve it.

What i saw people do on a bike this weekend is truly more impressive than anything i've seen before.I don't want to name all the individual who helped, i couldn't but It's only fair to extend my gratitude to Focus, Primal Wear, Camelbak, Kryptonite, The World We Want Foundation and the Diabetes hands foundation.  And to my partner in health Apryl Krause.  I want to extend my thanks to everyone who gave us money, product, support, letters, emails, good wishes, thoughts, prayers or even just a smile. Without so many people riding in front of us on our proverbial ride to health this wouldn't have been possible.

The Journey doesn't stop here! please join us at www.facebook.com/pascuayaquibike and donate at http://theworldwewantfoundation.org/projects/diabeat

i quite like Mondays,

I have my music on shuffle, Bob Geldof and the Boomtown rats just came on, "i don't like Mondays", apart from the fact that the song was written about a remorseless high school shooter. I can't hear that song and not thing of a train conductor in Belgium singing it full on karaoke style when i asked him to help me translate a letter into Flemish, the first word was "next Monday", he read that and went for it.  Nobody in the train really seemed to mind ( I imagine they didn't know he was singing about a girl who walked into school and shot her classmates to "brighten up the day"). 

Listening to the song took me down a terrible live aid rabbit hole, haircuts rapidly deteriorated and i ended up in a David Bowie place pretty quickly. It also made me think that lots of people really don't like Mondays (incidentally it also made me think it might be time for a haircut) we've been over this before but if you live for  the weekend you should really think about if you're living right. I like Mondays, I don't teach and often the museums are open for free. I do my long rides, I sometimes take my pupils to museums, I hear from my participants in Arizona about all that they've achieved over the weekend and the coffee shops are a lot less busy. 

Monday 

If you're doing something you love you will never do a day's work in your life. You'll never retire because you never began working in the first place, you keep doing the same thing, just slower. If you're doing what you love, you also do it better (case in point possibly the greatest live music performance in history http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3WcZGN2pTA ) and if you exude passion for what you're doing, i firmly believe you'll meet with success.

On Friday i was sat in a car body shop, my car seems to be bleeding most of its essential oils at the moment and in order to ascertain exactly what is haemorraging from where I had to get the underside steam cleaned. As my car was getting cleaner than I am, is at with the most surly tradesman I've come across in a while, i didn't help myself by reading a book, weighing as much as a teenage girl or wearing pink sunglasses but it was pretty clear that on my entrance I'd been judged and I wasn't scoring 10/10. efforts at conversation were met with grunts so I went back to Clifford Geertz. After about 20 minutes one of my type 2 participants called me and we talked about some issues she was having, we talked for maybe 20 minutes and then i put the phone down.

The chap running the car shop waited until I was finished, i was waiting to have him tell me off for talking loudly in his office but to my surprise he told me he's been listening, he said he'd never been checked for diabetes but worried about it a lot, he said hearing me talking had made him think it wasn't that bad and that he was going to get himself checked out. He said it was really nice to hear someone taking the time to care about someone and that doctors never did that. he said lots of nice things, frankly he said lots of things i thought i 'd never hear from a shaven headed 250lb who fixed cars for a living, he showed me pictures of his kids and asked lots of questions.

I told him about what I did, about bike racing, about the Pascua Yaqui project i run, about AYUDA and about diabetes. He listened, he didn't grunt once. After I was finished he said he wanted to help, that he didn't have money to donate but that he wanted to help me put on a concert, he promotes his son's band and other musical groups and wanted to help me put on a concert to raise money.

my ride today took me into the military graveyard, there was a big field of white graves reminiscent of those I've found myself sleeping in more than once in Flanders. The difference was that this one didn't have grass, it had holes, waiting to be filled. That upset me a lot, that could so easily have been me, i was a hair's breadth from the army at 18 (literally, I decided to cut out when they decided I needed to get my hair cut) I wanted to be outside and i couldn't work out how to make it pay. I'm glad i decided to do what made me happya nd think later about how to put a roof over my head. Who knows if I wouldn't be filling a hole in the gorund otherwise.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

I've often wondered how I seem to bump into people who are extraordinarily predisposed to help me, be it with a beer in Belgium, a sofa in Spain or a coffee in Catalonia  I've been pretty lucky the last few years to have a few minor moments of ill fortune more than offset by all the wonderful things people have done to help me. I'm not a big believer in religion, and i don't think i have any guardian angels. the only thing i can come up with is that i'm pretty genuine in what i do, I LOVE doing what i do and i care about it so deeply that i can't help but be passionate about it. I remember telling a young volunteer that my one tip for fundraising was to exude a passion for what you do, in her 16 year old wisdom she told me i was naive and idealistic (isn't that supposed to go the other way around?) and then she met someone in a cafe who ended up hosting her biggest fundraiser. I don't know if it's serendipity, karma, yin and yang or what but life and people deeply reward and appreciate passion. If there isn't passion in what you do then look to what you're passionate about and worry about making it pay later, I've always followed that approach and i might be underweight and living in a garage but i'm very happy!

seriously though watch this
greatest showman ever born.

train less, ride more

It's the time of year for adventures, for trying something new and finding new ways to do what you've already done. Children start new school years, Trees get rid of their outdated wardrobe and go minimalist,Farmers pull up crops,  Russia has revolutions (or it had one once), girls in Southern California consider leaving the house with more than 10% of their flesh covered, shops sell off their shorts and fill up on sweaters, Germans drink beer and eat sausage (actually they always do that). There's a change of season in the air and it's a time for reflection on the summer gone by, planning for the winter to come, making the most of the last of the good weather and preparing for the first real cold.   It's also the time of year to eat pie.

Realistically the first paragraph of this post was mostly specious bull**it apart from the pie, that's REALLY why i've been doing all these long east county cyclocross adventures, well the pie and the views and the being outside and the unique opportunity to be totally alone in the wilderness with my facial hair. I'm embracing my inner mountain man and, in the absence of a mountain bike i've been using my CX rig for some fantastic adventures.

Boy, bike and beard alone together

I've raced cyclocross before but this is the first time i can remeber fully taking advantage of the CX bike to really have some great adventures. The cross bike covers ground more quickly than a mountainbike and is more familiar than it's flat barred, hydraulic brethren to my dyed in wool roadie constitution. Unlike a road bike i don't have to go where other people want to be (i.e. where there's tarmac) and i'm free to explore. 

Dirt ride #1 went off largely without incident, not only did it occur without flat, fall or failed navigation it also included an exemplary slice of pie. So exemplary in fact that my friends at crank cycling have decided to convene an event over the same course with mandatory pie next month, i may have found my ideal sporting challenge. Having completed a 4 hour dirt adventure Shaun was kind enough to drive the cross bike home while i logged a couple more hours on the road bike. Any potential Manorexic benefits of the above were then offset by the attempt i made at a California burrito speed consumption record. as the photo below shows, i didn't even take off my helmet, you can never be too safe. 

Before, during and after 

With exploring in mind we recently took a trip to Julian where we set about getting entirely lost. We didn't think we were lost, we maintained an incredibly macho stance about our exact location, we looked at maps and nodded at each other, we orientated things and at least once we looked at the sun to determine North. We felt extremely satisfied with finally having used all the useless knowledge we gained with the scouts years ago ( i can still do the stupid three  finger thing as well). We remained entirely sure we knew exactly where we were, and, as it turns out we did have a pretty good handle on where we were (thanks akela, you taught me well). What we didn't know was that where we were was NOT somewhere we wanted to be. 

We lazily breezed along fireroads past rusted illegible signs and old broken down fences of the type you see in national parks. We stopped and i tried to sneak up on a deer (i'm not quite sure what i planned to do, ride it?). We cruised some more and bombed a fire road descent, coming to what looked like the end of the trail we looked around for a sign, i rode about 50 yards ahead and looked at the painted side (facing away from us) of a small post, what i saw is below: 

Right about that time was when the bloke in the Orange jumpsuit appeared, took a  look at us and began gesticulating and making noises. I'm normally a chatter and not one to judge people for wearing brightly coloured clothes but this time i made an excption, i shouted something along the lines of "we're in a ducking prison and there's a ducker in an orange suit running towards us" (in the interest of SEO i have switched two letters in the previous sentence, guess which ones and you can go duck yourself). My buddy looked confused but he managed to absorb and comprehend the situation pretty rapidly, either that or he was overcome by a desire to ride really hard across some rocks, onto a singletrack trail, down a gravel slope and onto a road without turning around, braking or consulting a map. 

Having escaped the incarcerated we briefly intruded on a school summer camp in a way that only two sweaty men in spandex can. having stolen water from kids in the desert we headed off towards the car.

It's been a pleasure to be getting outside again ad rediscovering the pure joy that it is to go fast and be slightly out of control, to skid around a corner with your foot out and to bunny hop onto a dead log jsut to watch it shatter on the bloke behind you. I've done far too many road races without the chance to stop and climb trees and this is the time of year to do that, and eat pie too. Get out, play bikes, turn off your powermeter and eat some pie! Failing that just do the pie bit.