"I think Joey's ok"

Got a link to this on Faceyb today, couldn't have you's missing out on it! You could honestly watch this 50 times and still laugh every time. Oh Joey you've made my day. Enjoy!

UK School Games Day 1

You know the way you need the right kind of music to do certain things, well I began writing this about 2 hours ago, and then decided it would be good to stick some tooones on. That resulted on sticking Spotify on, realising that most of the songs I want to listen to 'have already been played 5 times' so can't play them again. Ever. Ah maybe someday I'll be able to afford a Premium account. Finally I think I've found something that'll do for now, got Nero's new album - Welcome Reality, so here goes naathin!

Sainsbury's UK School Games was probably the biggest event of the season for me.. so obviously with my luck everything began to go wrong just before-hand!

Left knee is still pretty goosed from January this year. Trying to get a physio who knows what's going on is like finding a haystack in a coal mine, only about 20 times as expensive. If anybody's reading this and rates themselves as a physio or sells legs, gimme an email at davidmmonteeATaolDOTcom (if you're selling viagra or offering me a saudi arabian bank account please don't). Right knee was grand, was getting through the season pretty decently with a leg and a half, but then I fell off in Dromore park of all places, a month and a bit ago, so it's now screwed too. Mad pain in behind the kneecap. I'm meant to be going to Plymouth for the final British NPS next Friday, so if you could get those legs to me ASAP that'd be great. Cheers.

Got the overnight boat on Wednesday evening, arriving in Sheffield in the party bus (Shelbourne Motors kindly donated a van to our cause) at about 9am Thursday morning. Just in time for a full fry! Knocked that back, then back to the van and down to Sheffield University, or the Athlete Village. Stood about there for roughly a lifetime, and then finally got some Lipsyl(the first freebee we got like, was wondering if we were at the right place at all..) and our passes and then headed to the rooms. Ohh baby. I'd love to tell you the rooms were amazing, lovely place etc etc. But I think I was too tired to really take in the surroundings by the time we got to our rooms on the FIFTH floor!! Looking back I really should have counted the stairs to make this seem legit. But there were 2 flights for each floor and there must have been a good 10 steps on each flight. First competition of the weekend was getting up them with food, clothes and water!

So yeh, coming into the UKSG with a cold and no knees. Brilliant. Had to lower my expectations of getting at least the 1 win and top 5ing everything else to settling for top 15 in everything, but mostly just making it through every race alive. This worked for all of about 10 minutes, before I was knocked off on the only fireroad part of the course, and subsequently ripped my whole left side to pieces. But more about that later. Back to the 2nd morning..

Left the Village and got on the bus to take us down to Wharncliffe and Wheata Woods. Feeling a bit sick, just the old dose of the nerves I thought. Well, nerves and the fact that I'd had some scrambled eggs and tomatoes thismorning, then some cereal, then some fruit, then a load of water, then some lockets to get my throat working again, then tried to take some painkillers. Lockets and scrambled eggs on their own I'm sure don't mix so good in retrospect, and with everything else packed in there too it didn't look promising. Knowing it wasn't gonna be a good start to the day, I just tried to get on with it, normally feel awful before a race anyway. But then I tried taking the painkillers without any water (for whatever reason like..). This resulted in a nice big gag as the first one didn't go down quite right. Sprinted to the other side of the field for a bit of privacy and I'll save you the detail on the rest. Chundering. Not good.

Sitting top 3 or top 5 in the first event, feeling confident, boom, 13th. Bad just got worse. On the positive at least I could wrap some bandages around it and people would know I'm injured and cut me some slack. Muscular pains are so selfish in that way, nobody else can see them. Haha. Got it sprayed with something and a couple of plasters over it and got back down to the pits to recover for the next heat. Don't even know how I did in it to be honest! Not so good anyway. Managed to end up in the C finals in which I took third. Dirt Crits were basically track racing on mountain-bikes on singletrack. We started at the back of the grid in almost every heat, and getting past 15 other boys on a track wide enough for 1 bike wasn't quite impossible, but pretty darn close. Lesson 1 of the weekend learnt: Starts are everything.

Next up that day was the Team Relay event. By now my good old pisspot had been noticed getting sideways by a couple of guys, mainly the commentator, so the weekend was looking like it wasn't gonna be terribly successful, but tremendously fun styling it up for the crowd. Think we were sitting 2nd last in the Team Relay by the time it came to me as last man, top teams must have been finishing very shortly after I left. Took off in the standard power-wheelie and drifted her round the first corner, commentator going wild. Hell yeh, buzzing. Luckily a lap was sub-10mins so I could just smash it out and not really worry about tiring. Gave it my best, sent the jumps for all they were worth and got my lines sorted for the rest of the races in the weekend.

Passed 2 or 3 people on my way round so we must have ended up at the top end of the bottom 5. Lol. After racing we weren't allowed to take our own transport back, we had to get the bus with all of the other teams. Fair enough for the teams that had 10 or whatever amount in them, but it was a bit of a nightmare for the 4 of us having to pack up super quick, take all the bags we wanted with us and then run up to the bus when the van was sitting about 2 metres outside the tent! On the way out to the Woods it was the same. Packed into the bus like sardines isn't at all desirable when you're feeling like Britney Spears after a night out (luckily I still had my hair though).Day 1 finished up with dinner back at the University, and bed. Only I couldn't get to sleep because I was stuck to the bed with my cuts. By 1.30am, knowing I had to be up in the morning by 5.45am, I was beginning to get slightly worried. Only thing I could think of was wrapping myself in toilet roll, so that's what I did. Seemed to do the trick, managed to get to sleep.

Unfortunately I overslept a little. Hadn't set the alarm as lads said they'd shout and knock for me. Clearly I was sleeping deep when they knocked and shouted, so I woke up and it was 6.15am and everybody was going down to breakfast. Que leaping out of bed shatting myself, realising I've toilet paper stuck to almost every bit of my body and it's on with insulating tape. Classic. Was like trying to pull a snake off myself, wrestled with it for a good 5mins before finally getting it off. Needless to say the floor was white, luckily there was no room service or they'd be wondering where on earth Santa's Grotto had come from.Day 2 shall be in the next post.

XC NPS 5 - Lady Dixon

I wrote this a good while back, for Richie Byrne's 'test pilot' thing, but as I've currently nothing better to do I thought I may as well stick it up here as well to give you's something to look at. It's a bit shorter than the rest you'll be glad! -

Race prep started the day before, with a ‘leisurely spin’ round the track with one of Dromara’s top pro XC racers and nice guys: Phil O’neill. I say ‘leisurely spin’ as after taking a mad brainwave to go for an hours run the day before, my legs were a bit dead and screaming out for some elevation and sleep but yet I found myself sideways in the wet around the track at the top end of my wee heart’s capacity! At this stage the track wasn’t marked out so a bit of local knowledge was invaluable (realised this as I tried to do a couple of laps on my own after Phil left and ended up lost for 40mins) cheers Phil.

Getting my laps in the day before meant I didn’t have to get all dirty on Sunday morning which was a fab job. Just chilled with super pros Rob Deegan and Aaron McCann for an hour, before my inner wee girl came out and I sat in the heat of the car for half an hour to stay out of the savage wind. Scoffed some Haribo, paid a few visits to the porta-loos and worked a bit of charm for some free red-bull and before I knew it everybody else was at the line (never quite got round to warming up, bit windy..)!

Race started as usual with Holeshot King Dan Runciman gunning it from the start while I rolled along attempting the seemingly impossible task of clipping my foot into my new fancy pedals. By the time most people had got to the first corner I had just about got the feet in and realised how high a gear I’d left the bike in. Sent her on anyway trying to spin up through the gears and after a bit of dodgy passing round the first few corners was sitting tight on Rob’s rear end. Before long we got out onto the grass and Rob so kindly let me past so he could get a bit of shelter, while Aaron brought up the rear. Unfortunately for Rob as we came off the grass into the singletrack his chain slipped off the front. I waited for as long as my trackstanding skills would let me but that wasn’t very long so I headed on at a steady enough pace hoping he’d catch up and we could have a race.

In the end my steady pace ended up being a bit harder than I thought and he didn’t catch up, so I pushed on so that he wouldn’t be able to see me on the open grassy bits as I knew if he’d something to lock his sights onto he’d soon be up with me again.

2nd lap was a bit wild as all the S4s had skidded their way through what were sort of grippy corners in the first lap. This resulted in me lamping her into them and having 2 fairly huge crashes, but luckily the ground was nice soft stuff and I missed the trees.. just slid about 10m down the track each time and had to sprint back for my bike!
Other than that there wasn’t really much excitement in the rest of it. The jumpy thing as you entered the singletrack bit at the very end almost killed me in every one of me laps, but thankfully my foxy forks are lethal and I was in good hands as I nosedived through the air about 5 foot past any sort of downslope.

All in all, had a super time, great organisation, great craic, great track. Free water tablet things at sign-on were a fine job, medals were nice(although money is cool for U16s and Juniors that are too young to work/still at school but have bikes to break every weekend) and the wind, although it was trying, didn’t manage to blow any of the porta-loos over. Cheers XMTB and all involved.