Getting back into it...

It's been a tough month if you're keen to be outside training. We've had just shy of a foot of settled snow in Berkshire, combined with a shortage of grit meant pretty much impassable roads. The snow has left (for now), but it seems to have left behind some fairly epic potholes, and vast amounts of crud on the road in the way of stones, grit etc, so cycling contineus to be a challenge... The trainig plan has gone out of the window, and right now it's very much catch-up and mileage building again. I have a training ride this weekend (Sunday), and overall I'm expecting to break 100 miles that day...

As the countdown cheerfully reminds me every time I head here or the RAB2010 website, we are now over halfway through the training, with about 135 days left to go...faintly terrifying. To aid me in my constant terror that I'm not doing enough I have a new toy (Christmas present from Gill ) that lets me keep very accurate track of how little I'm doing, and how badly I am doing it. The stuff it kicks out can be seen here. It's way more accurate than the old phone stuff, and includes other funky data points like cadence and heart rate, which has already proved very useful in working out how I react to fatigue (I now have it bleeping warnings at me if my cadence goes below 80)

Quite aside from the training, there is also the sorting out of the logistics of getting to and from John O'Groats and Lands End. The trains run as far as Wick, which is about 20 miles from JOG, and can deal with (wait for it) about 16 cyclists a day, which would be an issue when you consider that roughtly 650-700 will be turning up. instead our bikes are being shipped up separately, and we make our own way. I've decided to fly, as most other options involved a 6-7 hour coach ride from Edinburgh or Aberdeen (I don't travel well, and I can't think of anything worse than violent travel sickness the day before setting off on a 1,000 mile cycle). I'll be heading to Southampton, flying to Wick via Edinburgh, and then taking teh shuttle bus to JOG. It's all booked, and ready to go, and again makes it all sem just round the corner now...

While this year the focus is going to be on cycling, I'm also going for a fair number of triathlons. Currently booked up are the Merchant Taylor Olympic tri in May, the Fritton Lake Olympic Tri (also in May), the London tri (in August, doing the extended bike ride to 80km), and the Vitruvian Half Iron-Man (in September...season finale I guess). On top of that I'm doing the Reading Half Marathon (March...probably going to be rubbish again), and I'm looking at teh Human Race Evening Sprint Triathlon series at Dorney Lake as well. There has been some mention of giving bike Time Trialling a go as well, as Reading has a fairly active cycle club, and it would give me an excuse to give the TT bike a showing.

So all in all a fairly manic year. I estimate last year I cycled approximately 5,000 miles... I would be shocked if I didn't top that by some margin this year. I also need to keep the running up (I need to be at least half-marathon fit throughout the summer, and into autumn) and also comfortable doing 2km+ swims in open water...so I could really do with the weather sorting itself out!

What I did do in my holidays

I've spent the last three weeks fairly housebound, mainly as a result of the weather. The downside of having transport with 2 wheels is that if the roads turn icy you are pretty much fuxored. I can't actually get the motorbike out at the moment, as my road is (as Gill describes it)a bit like Narnia, and constantly frozen (it's on the wrong side of a hill, and gets very little direct sunlight, so the frost and ice stays for ages). Cycling is a risky business, and I've had one friend trash his bike in the last week after hitting ice, so it's just not worth the risk.

As a result I've had plenty of time to progress a project I thought would take a couple of months at least, but has in fact been almost completed in a little under 3 weeks. After the fun of painting Space Hulk up, I decided to return to my teen years, and paint up a Warhammer 40K army. I appreciate that at this point many people will turn off, and I'm going to start spouting bollocks if you don't know what 40K is, so you can probably turn off now...

...back before university I used to play a lot (member of wargame club etc) with Space Marines, which at that time were getting fairly screwed over by the evolving ruleset. When I went to uni I left all the models at home (and as a result I no longer have them...probably binned along with the rest of my stuff...no matter, they were painted in garish colours that only a teen boy could constitute as "cool"), and I've never really had the time or inclination to build up a new army until now.

There is a new, and uber lazy, way of painting called "dipping", which basically involves;
1) Spraying the models a base colour
2) painting on simple detail
3) coating the model in pigmented varnish
See an example here of the painting sequence.

Whch speeds the process up a lot. the results are not display-case amazing, however they are more than acceptable for use, and en masse, which is always the point of armies, the results are pretty good.

After browsing the Games Workshop website I decided on the Tau Empire as my new army... I wanted to try something new, and they came across as a fairly un-complex and (in some sense of the word) realistic force (as in they don't have half-naked women as their elite troops, opting instead for massive robot suits). Did I mention I hate elf-dar?

Rather than pay GW's massive prices, I hunted around on eBay and bought up a job lot of various troops, and for equipment used a combination of Army Painter and Formula P3 Paints. Finally, I actually looked into what makes up a Tau army, and then filled in some of the gaps I had in my selection of minis. The end result is a good mix of infantry, vehicles, heavy weapons and elite troops, though a bit light on fast stuff...

My plan was to paint units at a time, with the aim of getting 1-2 done a week, and thus take about 2-3 months to complete the force. Then came the snow, and I was basically stranded at home for a fortnight. I sprayed up my first batch of minatures (36 Fire Warriors, 12 Kroot, 9 Battlesuits and 8 Stealth Suits, constituting 8 units), and had them completed within a week. By concentrating on the theory that all I needed to do was add enough detail to make them look painted, while leaving the models mostly base-coat colour I could fly through them. For each model I came up with a basic colour scheme based on 3-4 colours (mainly a yellow/tan base colour, brown/red contrast, black/silver mechanics, and a white detail), and used the template for every model. Each unit then had a colour assigned to it, and the shoulder pads were tagged. Each unit was painted in a batch, so I was doing the same thing on each model before moving onto the next one, which is both very efficient and a little dull when you have units of 12.

Once that was done I gave each model a layer of pigmented varnish (which I will refer to as "dip", even though I'm not actually dipping them, but painting it on), and left to dry out of the reach of the cat for 48 hours. As I had nothing better to do I was getting through 1-2 units a day, so I ended up spraying up more models while there was still snow outside.

I'm quite lucky to have a games room in my house, and as it's effectively free space I've been able to take it over for this project, with boxes of minatures all over the table, a nice big painting area that can be left out, and the all-important laptop for BBC iPlayer and cricket commentary. Spending 6+ hours a day hunched up over the minatures did give me some back trouble, but nothing my sports therapy lass couldn't sort out (even though it felt like she was trying to rip my arm off!)

Just after christmas I realised that I was probably going to be finished by mid-January, and I thought I should probably find somwhere to play. I've got the kit to start building a battleboard in my games room (large squares of chipboard, to be painted green, and some chunks of thick wood to turn into hills at some point), however I also tried to see if there were any wargame clubs nearby. I knew that there was a 'con at Rivermead in December, and a bit more investigation led to a group called Spiky Club, basically a bunch of peeps who play GW games in a non-GW environment. sent them an email, and had a cheerful and friendly reply that I was more than welcome, would they like to sort me out a game? So on the 14th January I'll be heading down there to have my arse well and truely handed to me by someone who actually knows what they are doing. I'll be spending the next week and a half swotting up on the rules, finishing my army (1 unit to go, and a handful of support models...I reckon a good days painting, which is handy as apparently it's going to snow tomorrow, so I'll be back in the Wardrobe for a few days) and spending far more time than is appropriate trying to work out what a good army for Tau looks like for 1,500 points (I suspect nothing like the one I will go in there with...)

It's been really enjoyable watching the army take shape, and it's taken my mind off the lack of training I've been getting in. I can see myself tackling another force at some point, probably at a more sedate pace...

The last post (of the year)

Well, it probably will be...I doubt I'll be organised enough to do another one this close to the end of the year.

So what have I been upto? For a change we'll start with non-exercise related stuff. I finally finished painting my copy of Space Hulk (images here on BGG ). In the most part really enjoyed doing the painting again...the dipping method is really very effective, and you get very good results for comparatively little time investment. It's inspired me to take on a larger painting project, this time a Warhammer 40K army, and I've decided on the Tau. Many moons ago I used to play Space Marines, so I thought I should go for something a little different. Elves/Eldar are "the ghey", Necrons are just a bit silly, Imperial Guard, though thematically great, are a little shit (possibly my next project though) and Chaos never really appealed to me. Tau as an army have a nice strong theme, and their play style is nicely focused...good strong points and weak points. I also think that they will suit the dipping technique perfectly. I've spent the last few weeks on eBay hoovering up squads, and I'm now at the point of assembling the minis, with a target of commencing an industrial painting operation over Christmas and the New Year...

Speaking of 40K, last weekend was a Fishcon, where we make a pilgrimmage to Norfolk, invade Fish's country house with a selection of PC's, and spend 60 hours beating the crap out of each other virtually. This time we spent a long time playing Dawn of War, an RTS based on Warhammer 40K. It's probably the first RTS I've actually enjoyed, as it delivers on massive firefights, and proper squad-based shenanigans, rather than the normal RTS result I see of snakes of units coming out of a factory... The rather less cerebral Left 4 Dead 2 also got some heavy play-time, being perfectly suited to a 'con (apart from the glaring omission of a LAN-based interface...all set-up has to be done via archaic console commands...). Great weekend, I really enjoyed it...

...however it does bring us back to the ugly spectre of fitness. As I've probably bleated on about before, I'm still training for Ride Across Britain. Normally weekends are taken up with long cycle rides in the rolling hills of West Berkshire, so to appease the guilt of sitting down and having no sleep for 3 days for Fishcon I decided to Yin the Yang, and cycle there. On paper it seemed fairly realistic to accomplish. A fairly simple route around London clocked in at about 170-180 miles, so if I stopped halfway at a B&B that would mean about 80-90 miles a day, which seemed emininently achieveable... what follows is a lesson in planning, and the lack-of therewithin.

I mapped a fairly high-level route, which consisted almost entirely of a list of major towns I had to pass through. For day 1 this read "Reading - Henley - High Wycombe - Hemel Hempstead - Stevenage - Cambridge" I booked a B&B in Cambridge for my overnight stop... Simple! I would simply cycle to one, then using my phone GPS pick a rough trajectory, and repeating this technique pick my way around the north-western corner of London. this looked great in theory, and I set off bright and early on the Thursday morning, well wrapped up against the cold and rain, with a rucksac with spare clothes, a lock and a plentiful supply of Torq bars and gels, while cunningly leaving my water bottles on the windowsill. I knew the route from Reading to High Wycombe, so made good time, even on the outskirts of the Chiltern Hills. I had never cycled to High Wycombe itself before, and very quickly discovered that it is remarkably well-named, though it doesn't mention it's general steepness as well. My average speed nose-dived, and at this point the rain really kicked off, and didn't leave again all day. I struggled through the Chilterns, reached Hemel Hempstead, and then struggled for 20 minutes to re-attach my chain after an impressive double-loop squeezed through the front gear-mech...

...and then I hit the Bedfordshire Downs...more bloody hills, and due to the general weather conditions I couldn't even really enjoy the downhill sections, as they were too steep to free-wheel, and corners were accidents waiting to happen. I continued to plod across the country until reaching the M1/A1, at which point I planned to head northwards to avoid major trunk roads, before crossing over to Cambridge. It was about 2pm at this point, and I reckoned on at least another 2 hours in the saddle, bringing up a concern over remaining daylight hours (mental note...December "days" are only about 7 hours long...). By the time I reached Hitchen I was pretty low on morale. My legs were frozen from the incessant rain and cold, and I had real concerns about a final run into Cambridge in the dark. Then my GPS died... Of course being as well planned as I was there was no backup navigation system, and after a (pretty feeble) attempt to get it working again I turned back to Hitchen, and headed to the train station to grab the next ride to Cambridge. The phone came back to life (it was probably the cold that killed it, though it was running Google Latitude, Nokia Sports Tracker and Google Maps, which in retrospect was not that wise), and I made my way sheepishly to the B&B to recover. I'd covered about 120km (80'ish miles), and reckoned I had about 30 or so to go when I stopped.

A hot shower, some junk food and half an hour leaning on a radiator watching crap TV and I was able to re-assess the situation. Physically I was fine. No aches or pains, plenty of energy and no injuries. I had simply been beaten by the weather, lack of daylight, and a lack of planning. I spent most of the evening working out a turn-by-turn route for the next day across Suffolk and Norfolk, as well as turning off most of the toys on my phone to preserve battery life, before collapsing asleep.

The next day, in comaprison to the first, was a complete doddle. I left the B&B at first light, and headed out of Cambridge on it's wide and generous cycle paths towards Newmarket. Half of the route was on cycle paths, the other half on a quiet A-road. Once past Newmarket I had proper country lanes and National Cycle Network routes all the way to the Norfolk Broads. The weather, as if in apology for Thursday, was dry, calm and sunny (though not especially warm far better than the day before...). The hills were behind me, and while it wasn't flat they were rollers, not cliffs. Having the planned route meant I never hit another A-Road, and very rarely even saw cars. Instead I had really rather pleasant roads around farmland, and small villages with 3 houses... I ended up racking up 130km, arriving at the Mill about 2.30pm, feeling rather cheerful.

I'd decided Thursday night that the return journey was probably not achieveable...given I ran out of time the "easy" way (with a tailwind), heading back would be even slower, and there was a 10-mile section between Henley and High Wycombe which was a major trunk road...scary enough in daylight, but terminal in the dark, and during a rush hour. With the aid of Gill I worked out a route using trains that would be fairly pain-free, however Mr.Dr. (though it's not like he could actually help you if you were bleeding to death...) Rob Lang went above and beyond all calls of duty, and drove halfway across the country to pick me and my bike up, before taxi'ing me back to Reading. Sterling work, and much appreciated, especially in the torrential downpour that occured.

All in all it was a good experience, and I'm glad I gave it a go. Perhaps next time I won't try such idiocy in December in the UK, and perhaps I may plan my route a little more thoroughly. It makes me very glad that when I go down the country in June someone else is doing the navigation and logistics, and there will be dedicated bike engineers with us. I'm also glad I won't be alone, as if the roads are not with you there is nothing worse than having no-one to pull you along. Other people may not be able to help you, but at least they can suffer with you!

My next blog post will probably be the New Years Resolutions one...expect it to include a lot of cycling, swimming, running and triathlon-related hijinks...