Well, finally managed to get round to posting a blog!! It's hard to find time to do it when every minute of the day seems to be taken up with either work, family of training.

Very jealous reading about everyone's tales of biking up endless passes with the sun beating down. Although the weather has been very cold here, I've actually been enjoying getting out over the past couple of weeks. It's been nice not to have to battle against a head wind and torential rain. As a result training is going pretty well - getting a reasonable number of miles in and it's actually structured for once rather than just pushing mysef every time I go out!

In terms of competing over the winter, I'm not going to do any Cyclocross as my dodgy ankle (a fell running injury) wouldn't take the stick. I've been doing the local West Coast Trailquest league which is as ever good crack and a hard 2.5 hour blast on a Sunday each month. I've been competing as a pair with Paul Cornforth and so far we've won both events. The night series has brought mixed fortunes. The first event started in Cleator Moor and after half an hour I found myself completely lost on Flat Fell (turns out it's not that flat!) - another couple of mistakes and a couple of over the bars resulted in a fairly dismal result. The second event last wednesday from Cockermouth was more succesful despite having an intermittently frozen free hub. The event was a 1 hour trailquest around town followed by a time trial (strictly a trailquest round a set course for legal reasons). I was 3rd after the TQ but managed to get the fastest time on the time trial which based on the way the point scoring worked meant I won!

The next TQ is on the 6th of January so if anyone fancies giving it a go let me know.

The first real event of the year which Andy and myself are aiming for is on the 19th of January which is the Strathpuffer - a 24hr MTB race near Inverness. Potential for 24hrs of pure suffering depending on weather. Even if the weather is good there'll probably still be at least 20 hours of suffering. We're competing as a team of four with Ben Bardsley and Paul Cornforth being the other members of the team. Should be a good team and I'm sure there'll be some good banter even if it is dark for 17 hours and likely to be several degrees below freezing.

We're currently struggling to get an entry for the Transalp which was our main focus for the year. We weren't fast enough to get one of the 300 online entries so fingers crossed for the next chance where names are drawn out of a hat on 7th of Jan for the last 200 places.

Hopefully Alistair will get a ride sorted over Christmas so that we can all meet up.

Happy Christmas