The hub for marathon mountain biking
As last year, my team-mate for the ABSA Cape Epic, Mike Blewitt, lives in Sydney and I live in London. This results in a couple of challenges: we won’t have seen each other for eight months by the time we arrive in Cape Town three days before the race, let alone ridden together. We seemed to […]
Night-riding is fun. And at the end of a day at work, it can be particularly satisfying, because it feels as if you’re winning extra riding time. Yes it can be a bit of a mission, especially if like me you work in central London and it’s a half-hour ride home then an hour’s drive to […]
Sean Conway – racing round the world For many of the non-cyclists in my life – family, friends, work colleagues – some of the stuff I do on a bicycle seems a bit daft. Indeed probably to some cyclists as well. To take a couple of examples: riding the queen stage of the 2010 Transalp, […]
I’m a big believer in music as a training tool. Obviously it isn’t useful when you’re riding in a group; although I have seen people attempting to contradict this by keeping their iPod on while in a chaingang. That’s not the chaingang for me. Also there are times when I’m out on a mountain bike […]
Each Christmas or shortly before is when I usually think of training as really starting. Before that, having had a break after the racing season, I normally just ride without much in the way of an objective other than turning the legs over and having some fun on the mountain bike. So Christmas is the […]
Two weeks ago, in mid-October, I competed in an enduro MTB race – the Ritchey Oktoberfest, in Bristol in south-west England. At the end the race, I got off my bike and put it straight in the car, still as clean as when I got onto it eight hours earlier. In some countries, that might […]
25 March to 1 April 2012 sees the ninth running of the Absa Cape Epic. This race has quickly moved up to be at or near the top of most marathon / stage-racers’ wish-lists. Much of that is due to a combination of the toughness of the route and the amazing places it passes through. […]
This year, I’ve been lucky enough to have sufficient time off from work to ride my bike in an unusually large number (for me) of different parts of the world: Spain, South Africa, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and the US, in that order. Enjoyable as it all was, one thing it has reinforced in […]
While my Antipodean team-mates are tearing it up in the Croc Trophy and heading towards summer, the nights in London are drawing in. It is definitely time to stop racing, unless you are one of those strange people who likes racing a barely modified road bike around a muddy field all winter. More of that […]
Stage racing has highs and lows – and Will Hayter, Lionel Richardson, Hans Dielacher and Craig McKeown experienced the whole range at this years Craft Bike TransAlp powered by Nissan.
