You'll Go Blind

posted by Jaitu at 22:19

While browsing a site that has some cool movies of local mountain bike trails around the Surrey Hills I noticed some snowy thumbnails. So I've linked to the two below for the benefit of ElDiablo whom I know is still feeling the need.

No Snow? You Should've Gone To Tignes


Tignes 2004-2005-2006


For anyone wishing to watch the MTB movies you can find them here.

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines.

posted by Jaitu at 21:31

Last weekend marked the start of this year's NASCAR season at Daytona and true to my word I made the effort to watch the races. I watched the two mid-week qualifying Duel races, the Busch 300 mile race on Saturday and Sunday's 500 Mile Nextel Cup event. So far I have to say I'm enjoying it more than I expected. I'm starting to get to know some of the car and driver combinations and even understand some of the rules.

--- SPOILER ALERT ---

I put that spoiler alert there despite the fact that it's now Friday so there can't be too many people who don't already know the outcome of the race and are keen to keep it that way. The finish to the Daytona 500 was a fairly spectacular affair. After the best part of 500 miles a caution was called with around 6 laps left to run. The race was red flagged after a few more laps and the cars stopped on the circuit behind the pace car while debris was cleared. This meant the race would finish under what's referred to as a 'Green, White, Chequered' scenario. This basically means that the cars would run again, be shown the Green flag to restart racing, the next lap the White flag signifying the final lap and finally the Chequered flag and the end of the race. Normally if another caution is thrown during this time the race is immediately over and the order of the cars on track at the time of the Yellow (caution) flag being shown becomes the final placing.
On the final lap a handful of cars began an assault from the high lane. Kyle Busch moved up to try and halt their run but had fall back into the lower groove. It appears this unsettled the car on entry into the final corner and he put his left front wheel onto the apron of the track causing him to lose the car and trigger a large amount of carnage. Only the two cars ahead of him really escaped and NASCAR kept the race under Green flag conditions until they had completed their drag race to the line before throwing the caution. In amongst the chaos behind them Clint Bowyer in the O7 Jack Daniels car got flipped and crossed the line in 18th place on his roof and on fire. It was quite a finish to a very long race.

The clip below gives a quick recap followed by the Green, White, Chequered and ultimate melee.


On a not entirely unrelated note I also happened upon this clip while looking for the one above. I thought we didn't know how to deal with icy roads. You'd expect people in Portland to have a better idea of what to do.

As Though Describing A Circle

posted by Jaitu at 18:06

Naomi and I went out riding together this weekend for the first time since Christmas. We went out both Saturday and Sunday on one of the easier routes we use. All on the road which keeps things simple but with a fair bit of elevation change thrown in to make you work a little.


The weather on Saturday was gorgeous and the ride was good fun. We came home and made our traditional post ride meal, two huge yorkshire puddings filled with assorted vegetables and gravy.

The Sunday ride was less fun. The weather was colder and the sky overcast. Naomi was feeling the fact she hadn't ridden for six weeks and consequently everything was a bit slower. Sunday was also the day for the Spandex Supermen to be out on the road and it was frustrating to be constantly passed by folks on seven ounce roadie bikes with their legs spinning wildly as they completely failed to make use of the almost three hundred gears at their disposal. The range of my gear work on the road doesn't usually extend much beyond big ring to middle for a junction and back again.

Still, Sunday afternoon we went over to my Best Man's place and his girlfriend served us up a fantastic roast dinner followed by the best home made cheesecake you are ever likely to find.

I'd like for us to get back on the off road riding but the next few weekends don't offer us much time what with Naomi having her Hen Night this weekend and me my Stag Do the following. It's only a couple of weeks after that that we fly out to Aus.

In the meantime I'll make do with watching stuff like these clips from the excellent ROAM.

Tim Chuk, J'Accuse!

posted by Jaitu at 09:28

I received today the sixth or seventh letter from my credit card provider regarding transactions made on my last card to be ripped off. The last five (or six) were lists of one or more transactions showing payee and amount and with an attached statement for me to complete and return. All I had to do was 'delete as appropriate' to show whether or not they were made by me and whether the card was in my possession at the time.

I had a problem with these apparently simple letters. Firstly the way they were worded made no provision for the possibility that some of the listed items were genuine while others were fraudulent, it was an option of *all* the listed transactions were genuine or *all* the listed transactions were fraudulent. As most of the letters dealt with single transactions this was fine but one of them had a list of four, two of which were mine and the other two fraudulent. The second and more fundamental problem with the letter was that it didn't actually make sense.

The statement was worded "I can confirm that I, nor anyone with my authority, has authorised the following transactions." Now, if you remove the bit in commas you get "I can confirm that I has authorised the following transactions." Surely there should be a 'neither' in there? As it stands the statement is largely useless.

So to today. This morning I have received another letter, this time a little different. This time there were photocopies of sales vouchers for me to check and then a statement (with a 'neither') to fill in and return. The thing I find interesting about the sales vouchers is that they contain the delivery name and address in full. It might be that these are also falsified to a degree but if they are genuine then Tim Chuk of Wellington Drive, Dagenham, Essex should be thankful that I am not a vindictive chap. He will also have to use someone else's credit card if he still wants more Roberto Cavalli sunglasses. The italian, for it was a foreign vendor, tracking note shows that UPS delivered the goods on the 26th January. If you ask me they'd make him look like a twat anyway.

Snow Day

posted by Jaitu at 07:55

As correctly predicted by the Met Office we've had three or four inches of snow overnight. Surrey looks more like ElDiablo's photos of Tignes.

Needless to say I left the bike at home today.

In truth, although there is more snow on the ground than a fortnight ago there doesn't appear to be ice beneath it and clearing the car was a matter of brushing off the thick powder with no scraping required. The roads seem to be a lot slushier than last time and the stretch where I became closely acquainted with the tarmac a lot less treacherous. That said, the precise spot where I got my asphalt is still hidden below a cake of packed snow with no bitumen evident.

Traffic will no doubt be in chaos again. It always amazes me, and most people I know, how badly England reacts to a little snowfall. Back when I was a child, [cue: sentimental music as the flames rise higher in the fireplace] snow in winter was not an unexpected or an uncommon phenomenon. I'm sure it still caused problems with transport but we're supposedly far more sophisticated now.

Currently there are only two of us in the office so far. I wonder how many others we'll see today and when.

Tignes

posted by ElDiablo at 23:30

I returned on Sunday from a week-long ski holiday in the French Alps. I had a fantastic time and I'm still struggling to readjust to normal life, my mind constantly going back to last week and how good it all was so I thought maybe posting about it here could help to draw a line under the whole thing and (sigh) get on with every day's boring routine.

Before this trip I had only been to the snow in three different occasions, just for the day, and couldn't ski at all. But I had always meant to take a proper ski holiday where I could have lessons and learn. I have some friends that are keen skiers and they had always asked me to go with them in one of their trips but for one reason or other I hadn't been able to make it until now. The original idea was to go somewhere in Spain but the lack of snow this winter forced us to change plans and look higher and further North. In the end we settled for Tignes because being one of the highest resorts in Europe we reckoned we should almost certainly find snow there. We ended up being eight people: three lovely girls, Cristina, ski-mad Sandra and spunky Angeles; and five boys, Antonio, Fernando, Ricardo, Fernando's nephew Jose and myself. The whole party except me set off in two cars from Madrid, they had to go via Grenoble so I flew there to join them and we continued by road to Tignes.

The Tignes resort is split in five small villages at different altitudes: Val Claret, Le Lac, Le Lavachet, Les Boisses and Les Brevieres. The place where we stayed is the UCPA auberge in Val Claret which at 2300m is the highest of the five. The UCPA is a government-sponsored non-profit French organisation whose aim is to facilitate the practice of outdoor sporting activities. We had booked a week-long ski program with them which included full-boarded accommodation, ski-pass for the entire Espace Killy (Tignes and Val d'Isere resorts) for the whole week, third-party civil insurance, ski equipment and five hours of ski instruction per day, all that for less than 600euro. The program starts on a Sunday and finishes the following Saturday after lunch. You check in before 5:30pm and can collect your equipment from their ski shop until 6:30pm. You can ski then from that very first day although by the time we arrived to the auberge on Sunday afternoon and finished all the formalities at the reception the ski shop was already closed so we got our bags up to the rooms and went straight down to check out the place.

The UCPA auberge is a hostel-like establishment where all bedrooms are modules comprising two connected 4-person cabins: each cabin has independent heating, four bunks and a sink and each lodger has its own individual closet; the module has a shared shower and a toilet. You have to bring your own towels but bedding is provided (pillow cases, sheets and a duvet). The common area in the ground floor near the reception comprises the restaurant and kitchens; the bar and adjacent rest area with tables, chairs and beanie bags; a recreation zone with two pool tables, satellite TV and PlayStation and table games; a small stage/dance-floor area; and the common toilets. There are also additional rooms for after-ski activities such as stretching and aerobic. WiFi internet access is available in all areas. The place is not a hotel so they don't offer anything like bedroom or cleaning services: you are expected to keep the premises tidy and before you leave the cleaning lady checks your room and stamps your personal card to give the OK. On arrival you are given a key to your cabin, the ski pass and you personal lodger and equipment cards (which you have to present to collect you ski gear). You also have to leave a deposit (I think it was 50euro each) which is returned to you at check out time and covers any damage to the equipment or premises. Personal insurance is not included though: if you haven't got any the UCPA offers basic accident coverage for an extra 15euro, this includes first aid and airlift service from the slopes but not any further medical treatment. We all signed for this and as it turned out we were glad we did. You are also assigned to one of the instruction groups depending on your skiing ability. Our bunch was spread out across pretty much the whole spectrum: Sandra and Jose are top-level, extremely good skiers; Angeles and Antonio while not as good are fully competent and experienced ones; Cristina and Fernando fall more into an intermediate level; which left Ricardo and myself together in the same group of absolutely wet-behind-the-ears beginners.

The usual day went by as follows: you wake up early, between 7:30 and 8:00am, freshen up and go down to the restaurant for breakfast. You then go back up to your cabin, dress up in your ski clothes and get down to the storage room where your ski gear is kept (you are assigned one of the storage rooms in the basement when you pick your equipment, access is code-restricted) put on your boots and carry your skis out to your group's meeting point where you join your ski instructor and the rest of your group mates. Morning instruction starts at 9:00am and lasts for two and a half hours. Then is back to the auberge for lunch, which is served at 12:00pm. At 13:30pm is back to the slopes for the afternoon session, another two and a half hours of instruction until 5:00pm; then back to the auberge for a shower and free time for the rest of the day. Tea and pastries are served at 5:30pm, dinner at 7:30pm. The bar is open throughout and there are organised 'après-ski' events every day, like stretching sessions, 'Gym Tonic' work outs, French stand up comedy (funnier than it sounds) or themed night disco-parties. The atmosphere at the auberge is pretty much a collegiate one, most of the lodgers are young people in their twenties but there were also groups of thirtysomethings and even older. Of course you don't have to participate of any of this if you don't feel like it, most of the evenings we just sat down to chill-out with a couple of bottles of wine or headed off to Val Claret centre for a drink and check out the shops.

As a beginner the two first days of ski instruction are hard. At least I found them hard. To the physical exhaustion add the difficulty to understand and execute what the instructor is telling you which generally involves completely different groups of muscles to the ones you normally use while balance-wise going against everything your instinct tells you to do when standing on a steep slope. Then there is the fear factor, when you lack control you pick up speed pretty quickly and if panic sets in you'll almost certain to loose it completely making the fall inevitable. It didn't help that on Tuesday morning, barely ten minutes into the first descent (and in what would be the only negative incident of the whole trip) my group mate Ricardo had to pull out. We had descended a quite steep green (cat.: easy) piste up to the 'arret-net' (safety net) placed before a busy intersection. Ricardo, who was lagging behind, started loosing control and realising he was never going to make the turn made a dumb decision: instead of dropping to the ground he continued at speed and let the chest-high safety net stop him. Which it did, but also sent him over in a somersault, his right ski getting caught under the net and not releasing the bonding. He landed violently on the other side but by then the damage had been done. He lay on the snow writhing in agony, clutching his right knee. I took off my skis and hurried towards him. Nicolas, the ski instructor, was already there calming him down, making him check if he could move his toes inside the boot and trying to get an idea of the extent of the injury. Ricardo couldn't stand up on his right leg so Nicolas called the piste emergency service on his mobile. About four minutes later a nurse with the Red-Cross logo on his yellow ski jacket came skiing down the slope dragging a sledge-mounted stretcher. The first thing she did is ask if Ricardo had personal insurance; he did have it (we had all signed for it) but had forgotten to take with him the small ID card that certified it. I explained that to her and showed my own card, that seemed to convince her and she started examining his knee but it wasn't until Nicolas called the UCPA centre and confirmed that Ricardo was effectively covered that she agreed to take him down to the medical centre. In five minutes she had immobilised his knee and loaded and secured him (and his skis) on the stretcher. I offered to go down with them in case I could be of any help but she said there was no need since as soon as he had been examined by the doctor he would be transferred by ambulance to the UCPA. And so we wished Ricardo good luck and there she disappeared down the slope at incredible speed pulling the stretcher with my struck down mate on it behind her. After that the mood of the group remained sombre the whole morning, everyone was worried for Ricardo but also scared to realise that something like that could very well happen to any of us. Fortunately when we returned to the auberge for lunch Ricardo was already there and in relatively good shape: the doctor had ruled out any serious injury and what looked initially like something nasty ended up being just a sprained knee. Ski was over for him for at least a couple of weeks though. He also had to pay the doctor for the treatment, about 100euro; and again not having his insurance ID card on him resulted in the ambulance crew temporarily taking his skis as deposit.

The fun begins when what you're being taught starts making a difference. It's like something clicks somewhere and suddenly things fall into place: you manage to keep your body and the skis at the right angle, you finally shift your weight effectively and to the correct foot in the turns, your timing improves and you start getting into something resembling a rhythm. That moment of epiphany occurred to me on Wednesday. It was rest morning and we didn't have instruction but instead of sleeping in we took advantage to go and ski all the friends together for the first time. The plan was to take the chairlift up to the Col de Fresse and do some blue (cat.: medium) pistes on the way down. At last it had been snowing heavily on Tuesday which guaranteed some great snow the following morning. I was nervous at the prospect of going down my first blue and didn't sleep well that night. The day started grey and overcast but once we got on the chairlift it opened up and a glorious sun rose over the top of La Grande Motte showing the beauty of the immaculate white valley in all its magnificence. We got off the lift at the top and headed down Prariond. There were very few people at that time so we had the ample, almost untouched piste for ourselves. I started tentatively, trying to familiarise myself with a slope more steep that anything I had done before, to remember every advice Nicolas had given me so far. Suddenly I realised I was trailing Angeles comfortably; admittedly she was minding me and therefore wasn't going as fast as she normally would in those conditions, but she kept a reasonable speed and I was following on her tracks, matching her on every turn; I could notice I was still leaning backwards a bit too much, keeping my arms to my sides and my upper body wasn't as loose at it should but I was aware of it and trying to correct it. I grew confident and started to really enjoy the descent. The high lasted almost the whole morning, until the moment when due to overconfidence and (if I was to be unfair) the advice information overload well-meaning Sandra was showering on me at the time I had a lapse in concentration and fell hard in a fast section, slamming my left shoulder into the ground. I was OK (although my shoulder is still a bit sore today) but it had the effect of sapping all the energy I had left; so from then on I just concentrated on trying to make it back to the auberge in one piece.

For the rest of the week we explored as much as we could of the awesome Espace Killy: on Wednesday afternoon Nicolas gave us our first taste of 'off-piste' skiing; on Thursday we skied through snow covered trees all the way down to Les Brevieres (1550m) where we had lunch at a restaurant, then took the lift up to L'Aiguille Percee and skied back down to Val Claret; on Friday morning we took the funicular up to La Grande Motte glacier and descended Genepy, and in the afternoon went up to the Col de Fresse and crossed to Val d'Isere; Nicolas even taught us the basics of carving that same afternoon. And every day after the ski we all got together for a drink, some games and some banter well into the evening. I enjoyed it immensely.

Saturday morning was the last chance to put on the skis since we had to check out of the UCPA that same day at 2:00pm. Friday had been the last day of instruction so we had the morning free to do as we pleased; it was again a gorgeous day so we all took the funicular and then the cable car to the very top of the Col de La Grande Motte and skied down the bed of the glacier in the morning sun (well not all of us, Ricardo, accompanied by Cris, took the funicular back down for obvious reasons). After that we rode the chairlift to the Col de Ves where the girls convinced us to follow them down a not-groomed black (cat.: very difficult) slope. I couldn't believe it but there I was, less than a week after all started going down the most difficult kind of piste there is! (In all honesty I have to thank Antonio who minded me all the way down for being still alive). After that there was just time to go back to the auberge, have a last lunch, pack our stuff, clean our cabins, check out and reluctantly, leave.

It has been said that skiing and the mountains are addictive: once the bug bites you, you are in for life. I for one couldn't agree more. I'm already looking for my next fix.