Despite the weather being more or less a total wash out for your typical August, I did manage to spend an inordinate amount of bike time swathed in my pink Nalini.

Last year’s Lavarone is still my all time favourite jersey so far and this Peonia is certainly shaping up to be a contender.

Sensible things like great fabric, perfect girl-shaped fit and having three different sized pockets for all those sundry things that you just MIGHT need merged with the almost wet-look pinkiness of it all makes me sooooo wish that it also came in that Nalini blue of last year so that then I could have had two!

“THE (LONGER THAN IT SHOULD BE) TALE OF THE NEW CHAIN FOR TRIXIE”

This month Mr M tackled the rebuild of my trusty training bike which having been raided for parts for my sexy Soda, had been enjoying a bit of a breather whilst the race season was in full swing. Everything was superbly built back up in a lovely retro V-brake stylee and Trixie was back in action!
Recently it was time for a new chain and as you know this is normally a simple five-minute job. Well, job done and as it was shifting perfectly in the work-stand off I zoomed for a ride only to discover that once in action my chain and rings were just sooooo not vibing and after five stops for fettling (which achieved zilch) I resorted to limping home in a rather embarrassingly loud crunching fashion :-o On arrival I was fully expecting to be told by Mr M that it was user error but off he went up the road and to my relief he had exactly the same problem - well at least it wasn't a blond/senior/whatever moment then.

So the rest of the afternoon went something along the lines of:

Swapped out rear derailleur. Nope. Swapped out rear cassette. Nope. Swapped out XTR crank for spare XTR crank. Nope. Swapped out rear mech hanger. Nope. Swapped out chain. Nope. Aaaaaaaargh!!!!! Whilst it was a welcome educational experience seeing almost every Park tool in the box in action we were temporarily stumped until as a last resort we tried a spare set of RaceFace turbine cranks that used to live on my Pisgah (good job I'm really crap at ever parting with anything) and after seeing yet more tools in action, would you believe it, everything was meshing perfect again and Trixie was back in the groove :-D

So there you have it, what turned out to be a five minute chain fit gave me lots of unexpected practice with assorted drive train reconstruction which I suppose can only bode well for my forthcoming support monkey role for another imminent frame build..........

“HOPPITY RIDES AGAIN”

I expect you’ve noticed how the MTB crowd just love to post up pictures of their latest gory injuries so here - as a flashback - is my (OK, in hindsight rather pathetic) one from Kirroughtree that it seems is still managing to cause me a few problems.

Mr M remains (probably quite rightfully) bored to saturation point with hearing me go on about it but although it doesn’t really trouble me on the bike I still can’t actually kneel down on it. I also suspect it’s the culprit in my current saga of ongoing Achilles pain that’s holding up my running so it’s back to the physio for me soon just to check that everything is lined up where it should be. I certainly don’t want it to be misbehaving with a couple of (hopefully awesome) weeks in the Pyrenees coming up real soon!!!!

Stay tuned for part two coming shortly including Mr M’s 22-mile team marathon (foot not bike) in Snowdonia on probably the wettest weekend in August and also how I managed to fit in sooooo much TV Olympic viewing……