Woody’s Round Up…

birdinthewyre

Time seems to have suddenly flown by with lots of things happening - some good and some not so good - so here follows an entirely random collection of, well, the fun stuff.

Looking back it seems that most of March was actually spent lurking around in various woods either on two feet or two wheels.

Here is one of Mr M’s lovely shots of my Soda and me heading down the local leaf chute. Nothing like hurtling downhill in hub deep leaves not having a clue what might be underneath to add a bit of excitement – well at least you know there will be a nice soft landing!

Midland Counties 6 Stage Road Relays at Sutton Park

roadrelayshq

I had a bit of a panic a couple of weeks ago when I realised that I hadn’t really done any running since the Wyre Forest 8 in February AND I was committed to running a leg of the Midland Road Relays for our local club in early April. Eek. Now you might think that running three miles can’t possibly hurt that much but even more acutely so than in biking, running at speed can inflict pain on so many new levels and getting dragged along with a bunch of uber-fast track fit runners at a pace that is way out of your league has the potential to hurt quite a lot actually.

This might explain the look of slight terror whilst getting ready in the back of the van although I was rather pleased to have fourth leg so that the potential to self-destruct wasn’t quite so great!

Luckily I managed to miss the heavy hail showers and paced myself well enough that it didn’t feel like my arms were sprouting out of my ears during the final long uphill. Result!!

2008 Spring Lamb Award
ride em cowboy

I don’t really want to admit just how many photos of sheep I actually possess (those that have found our Flickr might have an inkling about this) but this is the time of year when I am frantically scouring the fields on my rides to spot qualifiers for Spring Lamb of the Year Award.

Competition was quite fierce and although I won with sheer quantity, Mr M pipped me to the win on sheer quality with this amazing Ride ‘em Cowboy shot.

Bring me the horizon

April is where it normally starts to hot up a bit - not in a weather sense as I can actually see it snowing again out the window as I type – but with events coming up thick and fast.

Apart from another solo outing at Giant Mountain Mayhem, my overall objective for 2008 is to go for different events and formats from years before in an effort to improve my overall speed on the bike in the hope that I can get fast enough to do justice to the events still on my wish list. On the immediate radar are the Merida Spring Marathon at Builth Wells followed a few weeks later by a multisport weekend at the always brilliant Wiggle Enduro Six Hour (this year featuring a 10km off road run on the Saturday) and then nicely capped off a week later by the so-popular-it-sold-out-in-a-few-days Howies Dyfi Enduro. Stay tuned to hear the lowdown on how they went and if you are going along of any to these then please come and say hello.

Oh yes and finally, don’t forget that Jo will also be bringing lots of cool girlsruntoo stuff to the Enduro 6 at Catton Park and run-shop-bike sounds like a pretty good event format to me….