Kev's Extreme Pow-Wow!

Just got back from a spectacular weekend in Paris. The purpose of the trip was to see the final stage of this year’s Tour De France. I don’t think I could have chosen a better year to do this with Lance Armstrong winning a record sixth victory.

I was fortunate enough to be able to go and see all the main tourist attractions, spending time at the Arc De Triomphe, the Louvre (for the Mona Lisa, Venus De Milo etc.), Notre Dame, the Tuilerie gardens and finally the Eiffel Tower. Having not been to Paris before, this was all stunning but played second fiddle (is the formal version of this ‘second violin’?) to seeing the Tour.

The Tour De France is a big event. We arrived 5 hours before the stage to get a good spot on the barriers but others arrived there a couple of hours earlier still. The first interesting event of the day was the arrival of the Tour caravan; an endless line of support vehicles for the race. We were treated to some pretty wacky vehicles typically advertising their companies as ‘Offical Du Tour’; i.e. official sponsors of the Tour. These ranged from official cheese of the Tour to official natural gas of the Tour. I don’t know if these were associated but it provided amusement and light relief for those of us who had been holding our position for the last four hours.

The bike race itself was great to see in person. The peloton arrived on the Champs Elysee at full pelt and we were close enough to see the sprint which all but decided this year’s green jersey. This is the award for the most consistent sprinter of the Tour and went this year to Robbie McEwan. A number of attacks later and multiple Tour runner up Jan Ullrich took it on himself to bring the peloton together for a sprint finish. This was won by Tom Boonen.

The real attraction was of course Lance himself. Riding with a special golden bike and helmet made him very easy to spot and initially I didn’t recognise his team mates until I spotted that they too were wearing special yellow streaked kit! Armstrong is one of my heroes; his recovery from cancer providing everyone with a role model of living your life to the full. Seeing him break the record for Tour victories was truly a privilege and who knows, maybe I might return next year to see him add a seventh victory to his honours list. BBC’s international sports personality of the year should be another trophy to add to his cabinet this year; I know who I will be voting for.

As usual, copious photos from the sight seeing and bike race are on my photo site.

Just to update those who’ve been aware of my eyesight concerns… I had a check up today in London and was told that my bike crash the other week did shake up the eye but has caused no damage. In fact, apparently the eye is so strong structurally that even a minor impact directly to the eye would not pose a serious threat. This isn’t something I’ll be aiming to prove but it is reassuring nonetheless.

The cataract has progressed slightly though so that explains some of the increased glare that I’ve been experiencing recently. The advice is still to leave this for a while until it becomes a problem, at which point I’ll have to have another operation to replace the lens with a prosthetic one. I really am going to be the bionic man by the end of all of this treatment.

In the meantime, it’s back to activities as usual so I’ll be back on the bike as soon as possible…

Just got back from a superb weekend of mountain biking with Neil + Lou, Nick and Liz, Neil and Gerry in Chatel in the French Alps. We all had a fantastic time, mainly as a result of Lloyd and Louise’s chalet hospitality and Lloyd’s Guru-like mountain bike guiding and coaching.

I’ve just posted all the piccies on my photo site if you’re interested.

Day One (videos here) involved a gentle introduction for all but Gerry and I to alpine mountain biking. This didn’t last long as we got more and more extreme, ending in the Crucifix ride down from Morgins. Lloyd also paid for his early mickey taking of my puncture by having repeated punctures for the rest of the day. Poor guy!

Day Two (videos here) was rather more eventful involving a ride over to Morzine. On the way over we met this loony american who had all the gear but no idea! (Even worse than me!!!) He came down the mountain describing trails as ‘red hot’. The funniest bit was when he asked how bad our brake fade had been and we all replied “What brake fade?”.

The downhill at Morzine was pretty challenging in the damp and Neil D lost it big time resulting in stripping a tyre and tube of his rim and a brake lever off his handlebars! Fortunately he got up and was ok (at the fifth time of asking!), as was Nick who later had a nasty faceplant moment on one of the tricky trails back to Pre La Joux (which he later suggested was his favourite trail of the day!). We didn’t quite get back to Chatel in time to miss one monster of a storm. Fortunately, we only got a bit damp whilst half of the village seemed to get washed away. Oblivious to this we continued to drink beer!

Day Three (videos here) was chilled but had a couple of interesting moments. Firstly Neil thought his brakes had exploded but it turned out to be his forks. The moment of realisation that the bolt he’d removed from his forks might be an integral part to his bike was truly a picture. Whilst dealing with this, our leader, Lloyd was contending with a front tyre blow out at 35+ mph. It turned out that he spent the rest of the day riding with a holed tyre and bulging inner tube! Yikes.

All in all this was a mental trip. Incredibly good fun. Challenging and relaxing at the same time. Looking forward to returning next year.

Yesterday I spent the day at Afan forest park for yet more preparations for next weekend’s Alpine biking jaunt. I was delighted to be riding my new bike but disappointed by the weather. Since May, I’ve been to Afan on 4 occasions and it has poured down with rain every time; plus it wasn’t exactly sunny at Coed Y Brenin last weekend!

Had varied experiences on the trails yesterday. Went on “The Wall” trail, which was a bit of a hike on the heavier bike but the singletrack was much better. The problem was when the rain started it became pretty exposed and miserable. Most of the descent was spent with me sulking about the weather. Went then on the Penhydd trail which is always a classic and got slightly less wet (my measure of wetness is how often I have to clean my Oakleys; this weekend it was a once every singletrack clean; rather than twice the other weekend!). Managed to find my groove on the Dead Sheep Gully section and this resulted in me feeling pretty happy about things leading into my trip to Chatel.

Anyway, the bike is now in a state; it’s even got it’s first set of scratches and chips out of the frame. And for some reason I’m still concerned about getting new patches to protect the frame where the cables are rubbing up against it. Need to relax and treat it like something that is meant to live outside.

Anyway, last minute preparations are going well. I’m sitting here typing this post in order to avoid mowing the lawn (which now looks like a medium scale rain forest) or washing the car (which used to be silver but is now a light shade of brown). Later I face the exciting task of assessing the fit of the new bike into my bike bag and then working out just how much extra padding it will take to prevent the baggage handlers completely destroying my £2600 pride and joy!

Slightly less paranoid about my eye this weekend after for some reason getting really stressed about it all week. I think that the more you look for a problem, the more likely it is that you’ll find one and I’ve been flickering between being calm about my lack of vision and being convinced that there has been a deterioration. I am fairly settled that the vision is fine (in Kev terms) and thus will not be having any last minute eye checkups before throwing myself down some world cup downhill courses in the alps next weekend!!!

Erm is it normal to have two meals in one evening? My first issue with this is that I’ve left my beautiful automobile parked at work, my second is that I’ve endured 6 pints of Guinness. Anyway I had an 8oz sirloin steak at about 7pm and I’ve just go home after a Jalfrezi curry. Does that make me a bad person?

Yesterday saw one of those can’t-miss events; Formula One racing cars parading up and down Regents Street in the centre of London. I had spotted this publicised a few months ago and had the foresight to book the day off work to go and see the action for myself.

Now I’ve been to a bunch of grands prix (5 to date!) and the Goodwood festival of speed, but I can’t remember the noise of the F1 cars being that intense before. However, being packed in with 300,000 other attendees wasn’t my idea of fun and in the end I was actually one of the lucky ones who saw a flash of car as the drivers raced past.


Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed seeing the cars and getting a glimpse of the drivers but (a) the drivers parade didn’t need to be done at 60mph – the whole point of this was surely to actually see the drivers’ faces, and (b) I’m glad that it normally costs money to see F1 cars, because at least that keeps out some of the ignorant shoving Londoners that I had to contend with!


Anyway, the highlight of my day off was to spend time with Steve and Lia, and see how much my 5 week old niece, Grace, has grown. My conclusion to the latter was “not that much”, but she’s certainly heavier to hold now!

You can see one dull video of the F1 (I was too crampt to take any more than that!) along with a really cute one of Grace making cool noises in her sleep in this folder.

I’ve just bought myself a fantastic new mountain bike from my local bike shop in Swindon. It’s a Tomac Eli and is the Ferrari of mountain bikes. It has got 5.5 inches of travel at the front and at the rear and so can ride down just about anything even if I can’t! Better still is that it climbs like a hardtail bike.

See the official site at www.tomac.com. Photos of the new bike can be found at my photo site.

I picked up the new bike last Friday at 7pm (Ivor in the bike shop was working on it until then), and took it up to Mum and Dads’ in Chester. Saturday morning I took the bike to Coed Y Brenin in North Wales where there’s a stunning biking centre (See www.mtbwales.com for more information).

After a while spent getting used to the bike, I was getting faster and faster on the descents until… yes you’ve guessed it, I pushed a bit too hard and found myself lying next to my pride and joy. First things first, was the bike ok? Yes! Secondly, was Kev ok? Yes… but I did get a nasty set of bruises and banged my head pretty hard.

As you may know, I had fairly serious eye surgery last year and have been lucky to get back on the bike at all; banging my head always worries me but my consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital told me a while ago that the only real risk is from a direct blow to the eye. Bearing that in mind I’m going to carry on biking and, as usual, try hard not to fall off.

This doesn’t stop me from being a bit paranoid (I know I’ve tested my vision numerous times today as a result of thinking too much about it) but I have to keep accepting that yes my vision really is that bad! The best advice my consultant gave me was not to worry too much about the bad eye, but instead do everything in my powers to protect my good eye; thus the unnecessary quantity of expensive Oakley sunglasses!!!

Anyway, I’m off to the alps next week with a bunch of mates to give the bike a proper test. Will give an update on the bike/bruise/eye situation soon.

So here it is, thanks to Steve’s help I have web space and I’m not afraid to use it!

First news is that I’ve got some videos from last weekend’s mudfest excuse for a biking weekend in Afan Argoed. Anything that could go wrong went wrong for poor Liz who ended up using Nick’s bike on Sunday. Videos of what happened when her rear mech (can’t spell the ‘d’ word!) can be found here and here.