Crawley

See, I've had this whole passive-aggressive kind of relationship with My Opera. It's very nice, sure, but it isn't really enough for me. It was nice when it was a small (< 1,000,000) member site because people were friendly. Now I get messages from people who mostly seem to want to collect friends - except for the guy from Nigeria I got talking to the other day, who wanted me to "get some money from a bank for him" - they don't really want to collect ideas and share things, they just want to stick stupid pictures and lame jokes. I swear, not one of the 20 odd people who I am ignoring as 'friends' has ever read here, this blog: I could be just anyone. Frak that.

This place just isn't doing it for me, but I have to blog!! So now I'm here:

The Crawley Sports and Social Club blog

I'm not going to be there for very long, because csas will close when I move out of Crawley in August, and be replaced with a blog for wherever I move to.



Go! Now! Watch that space!!!

I was racing up the steep hill in the forest, behind two girls in green tops from the Hayward Harriers. They had just overtaken me at the bottom of the last hill. Now we were five meters into the up slope of the next hill and the girls were starting to feel it. This hill is steep!

They say that it isn't the night before a race which is the most important night for resting, but the night before that. Two nights before I'd been out in Soho, London, with my good friend Toni. We'd started at Trash Palace, which is a gay bar in London. We had a bit to drink there before heading onto the Popstarz nightclub up by Centre Point, where we had still more to drink and danced A LOT. We finally stopped dancing at 3am. I had to go then anyway to get the last train back to home, finally getting home at about 5.30. I think I made about 4 hours of broken sleep before a friend called me up and called me out for lunch downtown. I was feeling a bit fragile, to say the least, but a nice hot bath and along leisurely lunch sorted that out.


I used to work with this cheeky chap, but he left the company so that he could travel. He's been round most of Eastern Europe already, now he wants to go to Africa.

I had a quieter night on Saturday. I stayed in and drank wine, watched DVDs and generally chilled out until about 1 in the morning. I was flipping through this month's copy of Runner's World when I saw that there was another race in Crawley on Sunday morning, billed as the Crawley Saints and Sinners 5+ Mile run, through Tilgate Forest. I had to go. It was not negotiable.

Tilgate Forest is my forest. I've spent enough time in it this year to know the major paths and the major hills, so looking at the route map beforehand I could see what the best strategy for getting round the course would be. I'm also the kind of runner who enjoys running up hills: I love the mental discipline you need to get up then, and I love the careful technical approach that you need as well. To get hills right you need to know when to push yourself, when you are going to recover, what pace to take the hill at, and you really need to be able to force yourself to keep going until you get to the top. It helps a lot if you know how many hills there are and how long they are though.

When I got to the track I was one of only a very few runners not in team uniform, so I was expecting to get my butt kicked by all these team guys. Annoying, but what the heck, I didn't have to worry about siblings, colleagues or friends seeing me coming in right at the end so I figured I could just relax and enjoy the run without worrying about time or position. I started fairly far back in the pack.

Races from the K2 stadium in Crawley quickly get into the forest and you spend the first mile or two mostly trooping uphill. Right from the off I was overtaking other runners who were having trouble getting up the hills or cutting across muddy areas – just like last week, nearly everyone else was running in regular road shoes, which gave me another small advantage.

Of course, it's a bit of fun really, and does nothing more than satisfy my competitive instincts. I got back in 40m 56s. That's 8m 7s per mile. Only three months ago I was finishing 5km races through town at 8m 31s per mile. Longer and harder races at a faster rate – that's not just a bit of fun, that's a genuine improvement in personal fitness**.

That afternoon saw Lewis Hamilton having a similarly good race at Hockenheim in the German GP. The start of the race was uneventful with Lewis way ahead, but a bad call by the team while the safety car was out saw the boy wonder drop to fifth place. Hamilton put in some good, solid laps and made a couple of neat overtakes to get his first place back and win the race – outstanding.

A friend* had sent me a link to s site which had a clever but simple instructions to make a camera mount for a bike, and I just had enough time after the race to rush out to the forest and shoot a couple of clips on it. The films aren't that watchable at the moment – the bike bounces around and swings from side to side so much that it is pretty hard to make out much of what is going on. But I did see four Red Deer in the forest, which was nice. I'll try and make something watchable out of the clips over the next few days, in the meantime here's one I made earlier:



It's a pretty short clip, taken from about 15 minutes worth of clips I'd done that day from around town. I'm wondering if for road biking I could make the films look even faster by mounting the camera lower down.

Anyway, have to rest now. I have work tomorrow


**I weigh myself every day, and in the last week have put on about 1.5 kilos. I think that's because I've gotten myself some extra muscle in my legs from all of the hills in the Adventure Racing the week before.

*A friend from MyOpera, no less!!

A quiet weekend this week – I stayed in on Saturday and made a point of not having anything to drink. It was a genuinely satisfying venture: I managed to tidy my room, finish the second draft of this short-story I've been trying to work on since February, and finish the b3ta version of a running website:
Our running website
The website needs more feedback and input from the adrgnr team, but at least it doesn't look as crappy as it did last week. It's php based and written using the Eclipse PDT tool, not that anyone is fussed about these nörtti details.

I spent the whole of Saturday night being creative, and was up until 6am.

I got this completely awesome hat from the shop on Saturday. You can do that when you aren't doing anything else. This is what freedom is about.

I was out in the forest on Sunday afternoon. I'm in an Adventure Race in two weeks time with my brother, and these are practice runs. I think that my practice has paid off – I can control the bike over the rougher terrain a lot smoother than I could, and I have a better feel for the bike as well. I came back with about 45 pictures from the forest, 5 of which are worth sharing with people. I don't want to post loads of pictures in one entry, so I'll post the rest of them next week or something.

The Ants were out in force in the forest today, and there were some parts where the path was like a little moving carpet. Usually I didn't see them until the bike was just about to go over them. I don't know how many I took out today, I suspect that having a tyre roll across them doesn't hurt that much, they certainly didn't seem to mind.

It's been one of those weekends where I didn't really get the chance to stop and do very little.

I stayed in on Friday night and worked on this website for this run which my brother and I are doing in October. If you've never hand-coded a website before, you might not realise how long it can take – it's at about 4 hours work so far. I could just use a website editor, but I'd rather not. I used to make websites for a living, and I find working with code pretty therapeutic. It's like clay to me.

So Saturday night was a trip to Brighton with a friend from work. There isn't much to report from it: we went to one nice venue, and the rest were all straight ones. That's mostly because one of the guys who turned up wasn't so keen on gay venues. I'm getting slightly vexed with Brighton: every time I go to Brighton I go with straight people to straight places, and while there is nothing wrong with that, why go to Brighton at all??

So that was disappointing, but at least nobody died.

Deep in Tilgate Forest. Tilgate Forest is the forest just to the south of Crawley. It used to be part of a massive estate, but now it's just a small area outside of Crawley. I spent maybe an hour cruising round the forest – there are some nice, and some pretty tricky trails in the forest. There are still a few puddles, and the mud in them is deadly: because the soil round here is fine and a bit sandy it turns into quicksand when it gets wet. The puddles trap you, it's almost impossible to bounce straight through them, like I would do when I lived in Bedfordshire. Bedfordshire is mostly clay, so puddles are easier up there!

My problem with puddles is exacerbated by the tyres on the bike. I still have the shop fitted tyres, and of course, most people who buy MTBs use them for a few weeks in the summer and never go off-road, so shops fit budget rate road-tyres.

Looking back across Crawley. I like that in this picture you can't really see the town, although you are looking that way.

I have a problem with my brakes as well. For the same reason that that tyres are a bit weak, the brake blocks didn't last that well either. I've had the bike about 5 months, and the brake blocks are pretty dead. They gave up on me while I was in the forest trying to get down a really thin, quite steep trail – not the best time for brakes to get a bit flaky. So there are a couple of things which I need to fix before July 12th.

The Ant. There are lots on ants in Tilgate Forest.