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!
Wednesday 27 January 2010
Tuesday 5 January 2010
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...
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...
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