Jase Fried Chicken

Crikey, it's been a while. Two months in fact. It's been reasonably busy, hence not posting here, in that time I've gotten married and spent nearly a month in New Zealand and Australia on honeymoon. Photos coming soon once I've had a chance to go through them all.

So now we're back to reality, the weather's rubbish and I'm skint. This weekend was particularly unpleasant outdoors, so I decided not to go riding and did a spot of cooking instead. Inspired by a colleague at work, I decided to fry some chicken as a late evening snack, dead simple. I covered the chicken in Jack Daniels BBQ Sauce, covered it and left it in the fridge to marinate. A few hours later it gets taken out of the fridge, rolled in rice flour and fried in a few cm of oil until golden (probably around 15 minutes). It's the first time I've tried this and they taste excellent. The rice flour is a neat trick and goes really crispy when fried, without the need for complicated or messy liquid batter. Continuing the cooking theme, Helen also made some cup cakes this weekend. Edible glitter is great and these easily tasted as good as they looked.

As the weekends get colder and wetter over the winter, you can expect a little less bike talk and a bit more food photography on here. Having said that, there may be some Yorkshire based bike news coming soon which I can neither confirm nor deny at this stage...

Thetford Forest

Seeing as I was over Cambridge way at the weekend I thought I'd drive the extra 40 minutes or so to Thetford Forest to check out some of the marked out mountain bike trails over there. As well as some basic routes for all the family there are a couple of purpose built MTB trails, they're marked up as 'black' and 'red' routes according to their difficulty although it turns out this was a bit of a red herring. I set off firstly on the black route, expecting some difficult and technical trails but sadly that wasn't the case. The route is currently quite badly eroded (from the rain?) and is basically about 12 miles of flat and very bumpy singletrack. With a bit of speed you can stand up and pump through the pot holes, bumps and roots but this soon becomes tiring. Sitting down isn't much better and was pretty uncomfortable and tedious even with 120mm of rear suspension. The route almost redeemed itself towards the end with a short technical descent labelled 'The Beast' which had a few reasonably steep drops and a few nice swoopy bends.

After returning to the car park and with a little bit of time on my hands I decided to give the red route a try. This was instantly more interesting and enjoyable than the black route. It's maintained by a bunch of guys called TIMBER and flows much smoother, with plenty of nice little banked turns, raised sections and small jumps. There is always a limit though to what can be done with a totally flat environment. Thetford Forest is completely flat so there are pretty much no descents or ascents, although it goes some way to making up for this with literally miles and miles of nice singletrack (on the red route, at least). Time only allowed for the short version of the red trail unfortunately, so I was back at the car within about 45 minutes. I'd like to have tried the longer version of the red route but I'm not sure it's worth the 1:40 drive out there again from Milton Keynes. If I'm ever over that way again...

Overall an enjoyable couple of hours and it made a nice change from my usual local trails but not the most interesting mountain biking I've ever done. The trail difficulty ratings are also a tad ambitious to say the least.

Coast 2 Coast - update

Slightly delayed post, but the C2C bike ride was a success. We were amazing lucky with the weather (torrential rain stopped the minute we got on the bikes and then started again three days later as soon as we'd finished) and didn't really suffer any mechanical problems other than a single puncture on the first day. Day one was long, leaving Milton Keynes at 3am. Due to some irritating public transport problems we didn't actually start riding until 1 o'clock and finally arrived at our camp site, 65 miles later at about 8. Day two was across the Pennines and included three or four huge climbs, although we only had about 40 miles to cover so were done riding by the afternoon. Day three was a piece of cake, one short climb first thing in the morning for a few miles and then it's a gradual descent for about 20 miles all the way into Newcastle and then onto Tynemouth. I didn't take the GPS this time round so didn't measure exactly how far we rode but I'm guessing it was somewhere in the region of 140 miles.

It wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but some lessons learnt from the last attempt made life a lot easier. Firstly, a decent saddle! There's no avoiding a certain amount of discomfort but a well fitting saddle is a godsend. Note, well fitting doesn't necessarily mean well padded - my current saddle is pretty hard but much more comfortable than some super spongy seats I've had in the past. I also went for semi slick tyres this time round as opposed to off road knobblies. There are enough sections of light off road terrain on the route to make proper road slicks a bad idea, but semis are perfectly adequate and roll much more efficiently on the road sections. Finally, I used some proper panniers this time instead of carrying everything in my rucksack. After three days a rucksack starts to give you backache, neck pains and makes the saddle more uncomfortable due to the increased upper bodyweight. Despite the bike weighing a ton with the panniers attached, handling isn't massively affected if you stay seated and sensible.

That's pretty much it for 2009 as far as major sportiness is concerned. I ran the Milton Keynes half marathon a couple of weeks ago (new PB, 1:56!), so now I can just relax and settle back into gentle weekend runs and rides over the autumn/winter. I didn't manage as many adventure races as I'd have liked, but with the wedding coming up in 6 weeks money and time are a little short.

Coast 2 Coast

This weekend I'm off up north to ride the C2C cycle route - Whitehaven on the west coast to Tynemouth on the east coast. It's about 150 miles and should take three days. This is my second time doing the route, although unlike last time we're camping along the way and carrying all our gear on the bikes - tent, sleeping bags, stove, food, the lot. Fingers crossed for dry weather.

Updates along the way on Twitter (if I get mobile signal and the iPhone stays awake for that long) and more info and pictures on here next week I'd imagine.

Singlespeed

More bike news. I've had an old '98 Specialized S-Works frame hanging in the garage for a while, along with a massive box of random bits and pieces, some old Rockshox, pedals, odd cranks and so on. On closer inspection, it turns out I pretty much had enough old parts to build the S-Works into a complete bike.

Minus the gears.

I can't read a mountain bike magazine or website these days without coming across someone banging on about how great singlespeed bikes are and how it's liberated them from the bloat of the modern mountain bike. Lightweight, low maintenance, cheap to run and fun to ride. Sounds good to me - Colin Chapman would be proud. So a couple of evenings later spent spannering in the garage and I have my first singlespeed bike. The only thing I had to buy was a cheap chain tensioner to take up some slack in the chain which cost about a tenner, otherwise it cost me pretty much nothing.

And the verdict? Brilliant! I went for a group ride at the weekend and had no problems whatsoever keeping up on the climbs. In fact if anything the 32/16 ratio forces you keep up a quicker pace than you might otherwise be riding with 27 gears. The bike is surprisingly light and solid - no chain slap or other rattles - and can be hooned about like a complete hooligan, especially with wide bars. Jumping over roots and other small trail obstacles is effortless and the lack of shifters gives the bars a nice uncluttered feel.

I shouldn't imagine it'll see as much action as the FSR or Inbred, but it's a nice addition to the collection for when you fancy something a bit different.

On One - Inbred

I've been quite busy since the last entry here, mainly messing around with bikes in the garage. My trusty GT Zaskar LE of 14 years has now been dismantled and I've given the frame to my brother as his S-Works was a bit on the small side. To replace it, I picked up another frame - On One Inbred - to be built up as my commuting bike and hardtail MTB for when I fancy a change from the FSR.

It's been a while (14 years in fact) since I've ridden a steel framed MTB and have gotten used to either the super stiff aluminium Zaskar which climbs well but shakes you to bits over fast rough stuff or the plush FSR which is fast and smooth but a bit of a slog uphill. The Inbred is a revelation! I'm not sure if it's just my imagination but it seems to climb even quicker than the Zaskar and definitely way smoother over fast rough singletrack. The steeper head angle and low flat bars make for lightning, if not slighty twitchy, steering which is a nice alternative to the relatively slack and bouncy FSR with huge riser bars.

All in all I'm dead chuffed. It's going to make a no nonsense commuter and an awesome little hardtail MTB for short blasts up the woods. If I can convince myself to do any more XC racing this year after last month's DNF, it'll make a great race bike too. And to top it off, I stuck some slicks on it on Sunday and entered my first triathlon, passing several lycra-clad guys on expensive looking road bikes.

Lisbon Half Marathon

Well, the first big event of the year is out of the way now. Last weekend was the Lisbon Half Marathon and it went surprisingly well. Managed to come in inside my two hour target (1hr59:03) which I was pleased with, but what was more pleasing was the fact that it was the first of the four half marathons I've run now where I've kept a consistent pace from start to finish. Apart from a slow start due to traffic (30,000 people), pretty much every km was within about 10 seconds of the target pace.

April is looking empty now, events-wise, then in May it's back into it with the first of the adventure races and my first triathlon. Just ordered myself some road tyres for the MTB which should help me get a bit nearer to that target pace on the bike.

Here's the Lisbon route...

New trainers

I braved the snow today and decided to go out for a run at lunchtime.The Lisbon half marathon is less than six weeks away and I'm massively behind with amount of running and mileage I wanted to be doing by this point.

Bought a couple of new pairs of trainers in the January sales, one of which were these Salomon XA Pro 3D Ultras. It makes me cringe running in less than perfect conditions with pristine white road running shoes, so these should come in handy this year with all the adventure races and off road running. First impressions are good. They fit very snugly with their interesting lacing system - instead of regular laces they've got a drawstring arrangement which tucks away neatly into into the tongue. Not only does it look really neat but you can put the shoes on and have them tightened perfectly in seconds. Getting them off is a breeze too, especially compared to untying tight lace knots on regular trainers with post-run frozen fingers. Size-wise they're a touch on the narrow side, not too much of a problem for me really but worth considering if you have wider feet. The main thing that surprised me (other than being really bright red) was how light and comfortable they are to run in. I've put off getting specific trail running shoes for a while, worrying about all the extra weather protection making them heavy and cumbersome. Not so, these feel great, even on the road. Big thumbs up.

First ever blog post

Hmmm, let's see. First ever blog post. I've set this up, mostly, to test out available blogging facilities with a view to setting up something similar as part of my role at work. There was a time when www.jasoncarvalho.com was the sole source of everything I might want to upload onto the web - blogs, diaries, photos, personal info. There's little point in maintining that these days. Instead, my entire online presence can be managed with various Web 2.0 apps:

• Jase_MK on Facebook
• Jase_MK on Flickr
• Jase_MK on Twitter
• Jase_MK on Blogger
• Jase_MK on YouTube

Expect to to find all sorts of drivel on here over the coming year, ranging from training notes for two half marathons, a triathlon and four adventure races, wedding plans, possible notes from our killer honeymoon round Oz and NZ and various bits and pieces testing blogging functionality for work.