Matts Tamar Valley Bike Route & Pics

I went for a mellow ride this evening and decided whilst riding to take some pics on the way. Youll be able to realise pretty quickly why i decided this. I went out prepared and knowing the heavens was going to open. But to my surprise, the rain held off. It turned into a pretty cool evening and made my ride pretty fun.  I left my house rocking some cross tyres, the same set-up from the last cross race, and intended to mix up my ride and try and find some off road trails to burn along.

I have lived nearby the river Tamar all my life and is probably one of my favourite places i have ever been to and holds many memories spent with my friends getting crazy drunk out camping.

This area is fairly familiar and i knew there are some tracks out there that i have never rode and have always wanted to. I doubt many people would have taken the route i took as i don't think you are allowed to go through points '4-5'.  i have a feeling it is private property, but i didn't see any signs saying otherwise, so im going to claim my right to roam!

Heres the pics of each number dotted on the map. I did a bit of the old 'Instagram' photography for these ones, but i tried to capture the mood and feeling off each place. Some felt warmer and inviting, others where quite hard and cold. All of these were taken on my trusty iphone. Let me know what you think. Cheers and enjoy something easy on the eyes.....
no, not pictures of me.. :)


1.

This is on the first bit of off road on the route. Lots of logs on the track that kept taking me by surprise.

2.

Thought it was very necessary to put my bike on this fort style wall. I think this looks sweet!

3.

Halfway up the hill there was a gap in the hedgerows directly in front of me and this was the view!

4.

The Train Bridge '17 arches' on the Plymouth - Gunnislake line

5.

Top view of the same bridge. 

6.

Tamar Bridge

7.

Stopped here because i thought it looked pretty cool at high tide, then just my luck...

....the train came along 10secs later. I couldn't have timed it better as this train comes along every couple of hours.

8.

It started to get a bit dark and made this shot kind of dark and ominous.

9.

and lastly, i past the water treatment plant. This looked even more ominous than the last pic.

All sorts of Training

Training over the past couple weeks has bee going pretty good for me.

I think i have been hitting my 100 miles a week possibly more but i havent actually counted yet.

Im not going to go into much detail at all about any of my routes, but i will post the links to my garmin recorder rides just so you can see what sort of distances i have done and if you live in the area, what sort of routes you can take if you want to try some new routes. or try and beat my times..

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/203506410

Just a simple, easy ride, mainly downhill.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/205025700

Smashed out a big 82 mile ride. Was pretty difficult but kept a 15.5mph avg. Also a high top speed that was very scary!

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/205025685

fairly fast shortish blast.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/205713978

went out with the yogi cycling club to spin my legs in prep for the time trial.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/206012045 

Warm up ride to get to the time trial event. was further away than i was remembered which was a bit annoying. Felt like it was too long.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/206012037

and again my TT race.

I have missed some rides out here as they were before i got the Garmin edge200 gps. so not much i can do as i cant remember.

I have tried to make sure that i keep things intersting by mixing things up. On the days that i havent done any rode cycling, i have been riding my cyclocross course ( will put up images and map of that soon), practicing cyclocross riding technique i.e bunnyhoping logs, doing turns on grass as fast as i can untill i fall off to find the limits, running with the bike, mounting and dismounts and steep decents. This again i  might post some videos of me doing it or something if i can find someone bored enough to come with me and film/photo it. Just so it gives you guys a better feel of this bike handleing training.  
Talking of finding my limits, i definitely found it last Friday night. I was practising my cyclocross course, hit a concrete wet corner at a good speed, forgetting it gets slippery when wet and greasy. Went to sprint out and the rear wheel-span, lost the front wheel at hit the floor whilst spanking the floor with my hand and slid across on my front into the muddy bank on the side. I thought it was quite funny at the time because it came out of nowhere. Only realised it wasn't so funny when i saw that my new bar tape had ripped...dam it. I then decided that this could be a fun corner so I went back did it a couple times getting a big DH style drift through the corner. didn't fall this time. : )

I have also been doing some circuit training with my friends. This is a good bit of fun and is a good test for fitness. We did it a couple of time on the beach which has proved to be the hardest for sure. doing Shuttles/ sprints on sand is just straight up ridiculous. This is the circuit:
- 1mile high intensity cycling   or  10 sprint shuttles
- 8 chin ups
- 30 crunches
- 15 burpees
- 15 press ups
- 30 squats
- 1 mile ride   or  10 sprint shuttles
- 10 chest press'
- 20 sit-ups
- 10 feet elevated press ups
- 15 lunges each leg
- 15 tricep dips
- 1 mile ride or  10 sprints
we try to have about at least a 20 sec rest in-between each thing and do the circuit 2-3 times with a minute or two rest between each circuit.
Cant remember how long this takes all together. But, i think im allergic to it as i get really warm, sweaty, short of breath and have aches and pains over my body... Sometimes i question why anyone works out..

So this has pretty much what i have been upto since i last blogged.
Ill get my course map and images up soon.
catch you peoples then..

also, Sorry for the lack of images, i know they make it more interesting, but i have none. The next post will be full of them which will keep you all happy!

Time Trialling on my Cross Bike

Soo i havent blogged anything in what feels like ages, and i have done quite a bit of cycling and fitness stuff over the past couple weeks to report on. I just havent found the time to write anything, what with trying to make the most of the british summer consisting of 10 days of brilliant sunshine.
  I wasnt too sure with what i shall start with as most of it seems like old news. Im going to put it up anyway but i will start with the latest news.

Last Thursday 2nd Aug i decided to take part in the local 13mile time trial held by Plymouth Triathlon Club. The course is a fairly challenging 13 mile loop with a fair bit of uphill followed by a hopefully nice run downhill to the finish (i say hopefully for a reason ill explain in a bit)
The reason why i wanted to do this, is to see where my fitness is after a couple weeks of training, to see if iv achieved anything and what i need to focus on in the next few coming weeks.

Here is how the course looks from an elevation view.

This shows just how hilly it is  and shows the long downhill to finish. You would think this downhill was easy but there is apparently always a headwind and this time around it was a very strong headwind. I found this quite difficult and just felt like i couldnt get in a decent aero position to make the most of it... probably because im on a cross bike with no TT extension bars.
Heres the map of the course.

Erminton s3/13s TT course

The info that i have here is all from my garmin Edge bike GPS that i got from koo-bikes

Im pretty happy with how the ride went, i wanted to be under 40mins and i did that fairly easily. Also i didnt quite know how to pace my self as i didnt know the course so i think i can still get a fair bit out of that time today as i know where i can push it that little bit more.
The next one is the first thursday of september so im going to do that one. With a bit of luck, ill drop my time by a minute.

Training week 1

So the past week has been a bit of a introduction to training. I went out 3 times on my bike and did about 90 miles. The first ride was a bit rubbish and made me realise I'm going to have to put in a lot of effort in the coming weeks. But it was ok as it was my first road ride or first long period of aerobic excersize for well over a year. And when I put it like that, I could be doing a lot worse.

Here is what my routes have been so far. On my 2nd and 3rd ride I tried to use the 'map my ride' app for the I phone but unfortunately I have been a complete noob! My phone ran out of battery on ride 2. And ride 3, I thought I had pressed record to only find out when I got home that I had only pressed the settings option.... :/
I mapped the routes out the best I could on google maps.

Pretty Simple 20 mile route, not many hard climbs.,but the wind was pretty strong. this took me about 1h 15mins

This is one of the hardest rides of done in recent memory. Its very hilly and about 35-40 miles and i really tried to push up the hills. im not sure how long this took because im not 100% on the time i left but was about 2h 30mins.

This 17ish mile route is just easy. all slightly up hill on the way out and downhill on the way back. This took
an hour as i was just doing an easy recovery ride as the route the day before kinda hurt.

On days When I haven't been on my bike I have been at the gym working on the guns.
Up until now I have been going to the gym 5 times a week but with a totally different goal. I wanted to get bigger muscles, gain some weight and lose the belly that I had accumulated from being in a desk job. The problem that i had got into, as im sure many do with a desk job, is you get so caught up burning your eyes and brain out looking at a screen all day that once you finish work, all you want to do is get home switch off and watch a film or play on the ps3. Well thats how it was for me anyway.

But gone are those days of being a lazy slob.... And so have the days of wanting to become muscle bound and look like Arnie! Well that was never the plan but I did gain 4kg and my body fat percentage dropped quite a bit and i was very happy with my progress. And now i feel like i am better prepared as i have a good base strength..but what do i know.

So now my new goal is to become fit enough to actually race throughout a cyclo cross series, hopefully peaking around the time of the Champs. Rather than just being fit enough to participate. I'm not really about the participation of things, I like to win. Little to no point in doing things unless you want to win I think. The bad thing about that, is that I feel I am going to have to get used to being thrashed for a while... Safe in the knowledge that I'm letting them win untill champs time :)

Ok iv gone on a fair bit now. But i guess it is my first training post so i have to give a bit of an intoduction. I have also probably given away my race plan but only time will tell if it is my plan or not.??

Welcome to my bike blog

So this is my very first post. First things first. A welcome is in order. And thank you for taking your time reading what I have to say.

Let me introduce and tell you a bit about myself.

My name is Matthew noble and I am currently 22years old. I live in Plymouth , UK and have been cycling since I was about 2. Over that time I have raced xc, dh, bmx, cyclo cross and road. I have managed to become southwest champ in dh, cyclo cross and was close with bmx. I have never orientated myself as a type of rider ie rodie, downhiller. I like to think of myself as a cyclist who respects and enjoys every aspect of the sport. I find it very funny how people can have such a hatred or disregard for another type of cyclist. For instance a downhiller calling a roadie a fag because he wears Lycra....it does make a good laugh though! Despite me being a Lycra loving roadie at times.

I also work for an upcoming online bike company Koo-bikes.com. Worth a look if you've never heard of it. They are the only bike shop that weighs every single bike product, in house, on very accurate scales, to give riders more knowledge about the product. And if your anything like me, I want to ride the lightest stuff. Especially if Im trying to shed some bike weight.
I guess me working for the shop will make it easier to get hold of new products and review them and stuff. So it benefits the readers also. That's you by the way!

Ok why am I doing this when I could be out there riding. Well it's simple really. Firstly, There is only so much riding one man can do and what better than spending your spare time writing about bikes.
Secondly, I have started to weight train a lot recently and I have decided to put my fitness to the test and race the upcoming southwest cyclocross series and thought why not blog my progress.

Not many people know much about cyclo cross and there doesn't seem to be that many sites out there that gives it that much attention. Unless I'm missing something and haven't found one yet.

So I want to show what it takes to prepare for a season. What sort of bike you need, how much training I do (I have a full time job, so there will be levels of commitment and a limit to how much I can do) what I do to prepare for a race. What I think about before, during a race and after. And of course what I eat.

Over time I will blog about almost every single bike related thought I have, from dh riding right through the spectrum of cycling to fixies! Cus they are kool!
This is a list of what to expect:
- Southwest cyclo cross
- Training: hours- miles -diet
- Bike build: my bikes. Pic of new stuff and why I choose it over other kit.
- Race day bike pics ~ other peoples bikes
- Relevant info: news, races, websites.

Feel free to subscribe to my blog. It would also be very cool if people wanted to send me pics of there cx bikes for me to post them on here. And feel free to share my blog on fb or whatever.
The pic is a little giveaway of what is my number 1 cross bike. Guess if you can.

I'm off for a ride!