Fanylion Mountain Bike Team
Official site of the Fanylion Mountain Bike Team. Includes mountain bike ride guides, gear reviews, bike maintenance, team reports and rider profiles of the Fanylion Racing Team.
Black Mountains & Afan Argoed
October 29, 2005, South Wales
It was a dark and stormy night… ahh its been done.
The last ride of the year was to be in Wales and I had decided that it was time Team Bergerac, the most southerly based and most handsome Team member, should make the effort and attend. So I was well pleased when I heard 16 other Lions and one Fany were going to be there too. What a marvellous show it is, yes readers; Team Fanylion may be entering its fifth year but judging by the willingness of us noble men to cycle up a bloody great big muddy hill, then back down it again (more later) time has only served to harden our steely resolve. We do not bake cakes, nor do we knit jumpers, we do not wear pink, No, we are Team Fanylion and we ride mountainbikes. Enough jingoism for now, besides I think Daniel (Cliff Diver) may be knitting himself some nice warm pink winter socks.
17 riders is the biggest turn-out for a Fanylion ride. So how ironic then that it was such a piss poor ride! Still, we can’t have the beauty of Bubion and the madness of Morzine every time we go out can we? so Wales it was. Ahh Wales, a land of singing, rugby, miners and sheep. Wales really is the benchmark by which everything is measured, quite literally in fact. Yes, Wales is the International Unit of Geographical Measurement, how many times have you heard Dicky Attenborough (et al) conveying to viewers the size of the ice shelf or some rainforest? "...yes indeed this area is 117 times the size of Wales, yet sadly shrinking by half the size of Wales each week". So clarifying the magnitude of the situation to Cleatus watching it on TV in his trailer in Alabama.
For me though Wales is much more than a metric that the BBC believes everyone in the world can relate to. It’s a beautiful country except for Wrexham and I for one was looking forward to it: I like the place, I really do.
The plan was to meet in a little village in the Black Mountains called Crickhowell. A village straight out of little Britain. I didn't see anyone in PVC hotpants but I guess it was probably a bit early in the morning for that. To reach this meeting point I had been instructed to be awake at 6am, with medium Potts and big Potts picking my bike up at 6.45am. Disappointingly they turned up at 6.30am, collected my bike and were off before I could say "What time do you call this medium Potts? Morning big Potts". The day started for my body at 6.00am my brain followed along at about 7.00ish. I was told I would be driven down to the RV point with my good friend Daniel 'Cliff Diver' Kershaw who was picking me up at 7.00am. Which, if you know the man well, translates as 7.30am but more likely to be nearer 8am. To my horror, and the second big disappointment of the day, he turned up at 7.00am. "Hell, what’s going on Dan, what time do you call this? I’m a member of the Oldham Massive me, have you forgotten our strict code of FaffTM? It is expected of us! What is all this 'on-time/early' business all about?" This was a bit of a shock; in Fanylion history the Oldham Massive are rarely on time and never early. But this appeared to be the case and we got to the little village pretty much before any other bugger. Amazing!
Do not fear though, Faff was to be the all encompassing theme of the day.
In Crickhowell 10.30 passed by, then 11.00. Riders began to trickle in to the car park: myself, Dan, the brothers Potts, Ross (Team Twin Pin), all ready to go. The London boys, Sam, Alistair, Dean and Steve appeared. Ben (Shorts in winter) was present skidding about the car park and generally terrifying the locals. I have to say we looked the business. Steve turned up, with the first bit of bad news; Shack had popped his tyre and was hurtling our way at an eye-watering 50mph on a space-saver tyre, thus putting him out of the ride...lucky bastard. Sheldon was here, as were many familiar faces, in fact such was the impressive attendance it was easier to say who wasn't there. New riders included big Potts (Downhill Maniac's older brother) and Alex (Team Pizza), a friend of Steve's who would be riding Steve's Stiffee all weekend.
We finally got under way, much the same as this report has finally got under way talking about riding instead of faffing (I warned you earlier about the Oldham Massive). We climbed immediately from the car park out of the bright lights and the hustle and bustle of the village city centre, pausing briefly to get a team photo outside a nice church. Take a moment to look at this photo, the hopeful eager faces, all beaming smiles all round. It wouldn’t last. We should have taken a post-ride photo in exactly the same spot, sending them both to the Sun newspaper so they could run the worlds easiest spot the (17) differences competition. Oh yes those smiles got well and truly wiped off our coupons.
We continued to climb, and Sheldon continued back to the car park, the road turned into a track, the track turned into a stream, it was at about this point when I first heard it. I was up at the front with Shortbread and White-Sox but I could still hear it. Yes, there it was again, back down the stream, it sounded like "punch her". Surely 10 Ton Kona and Techno weren’t arguing so soon in the ride? Had handbags been drawn already? "Puncture!" Ahh, that makes more sense. So it came to pass this was to be the first of many, many punctures, chain snaps, punctures, broken cassettes, punctures, snapped saddles, failing front brakes, punctures, failing rear brakes...no brakes, and did I mention there were one or two punctures? My personal favourite was Cliff Diver's first puncture, which happened whilst waiting for Team Ewok to fix his puncture, he wasn’t actually on his bike nor moving when his tyre decided out of nowhere to start hissing at his ankle. I fully expected my bike to snap in twain in order to top that one!
After riding for 2 hours (with an actual ride time 20 minutes) we broke out of the trees and up, past a farm with some nervous looking sheep, we will be back for them later. The track we were on was difficult to ride. Very rutted, very muddy, small oceans parading as puddles, it was a grind in more sense than one. The noises coming from my bike had pound signs attached, each turn of the crank devaluing the bike by a few quid. I felt like I was hurting someone I loved; if it was a horse it would be shot. Up front again with Shortbread, Techno and White Sox (note - Hodgson was nowhere to be seen) the trick was to plot your own course, sticking on someone’s back wheel was not advised as you really had to see what was in front. This was in order to properly judge the terrain, pulling the front wheel up and over mud and puddles and putting down the power to get through the really deep stuff. It was often a gamble when deciding whether or not to take the puddle head on or go round it into the mud and peat. Shortbread tried his luck once too often with the former, and in role reversal to last month's Lake District 'puddle incident', he committed himself to a medium sized puddle which looked innocuous enough, his front end promptly disappearing leading to an unscheduled sideways dismount.I awarded it a 7 out of 10. It was tough going and the team got fairly strung out, the stiff tail-wind was the one saving grace, oh and strangely it wasn’t raining?
At 7.2 miles of climbing the map readers got to work and got it all wrong, we climbed to a tree-line and pushed on. We actually missed a right turn at this point and from then on it was all downhill, metaphorically, not literally, oh no we still had a lot more uphill to go.
The fireroad to nowhere
Ever since randomly asking a confused grandma of mine when I was six were do fireroads go, to which she clipped my ear and told me to shut up, I have wondered where fireroads lead? I now know where fireroads lead. They lead to nowhere. Having gotten ourselves completely and utterly off track, to which our fearless leader blames the Welsh for moving their forests about; indeed how dare they do such a thing, don’t they know stockbrokers and structural engineers and graphic designers and construction managers and IT consultants and fancy land buyers want to come here occasionally to spend money they don’t need on expensive bikes and tart about on their hills? Leave your bloody forests alone please, we get lost otherwise. So we found a gate, the Gate of Knowledge I believe Team Jesus christened it.
We passed through the Gate of Knowledge and on to a descent of some considerable treacherousness, it was rocky and very slippy going, if you got off line here you were in trouble. All safely down we joined a fireroad. Taking a left up the hill climbing all the way to the dead-end at the top and then turning round and going all the way back down it again. Brilliant! This is what it's all about, this is why I flew from Jersey........the happy mantra I was chirping earlier had now completely changed to a muttering "What the Fuck?". One look at 10 Ton Kona told me he wasn’t quite having the time of his life. Medium Potts looked buggered, having not put any riding in for a while. A stirling performance from Twin Pin who was extremely happy with his choice of bike, his hefty 7.5" travel Yeti, perfect for the day! Mastiles was quiet, too quiet. Alex, riding Steve’s Stiffee all weekend looked positively aggrieved, like a man who had been conned. Sorry Alex, I apologise for being part of the thing that robbed you of a day of your life. We looked at each other for inspiration. There was none.
Having given up any hope of completing our planned 40 miles it was decided to cut our losses and head back the way we had come. So with our Lions tails between our legs and our underpants caked in mud we turned and headed back. Initially this meant yet more climbing. We found our old trail with little fuss, and paid note to how close we had been to the right turn we had missed earlier. It didn’t take long for us to bomb down, back to the sheep, and to the jump, constituting the only sliver of anything remotely resembling fun. Downhill Maniac was awarded best execution thereof, attaining the giddy height of about 6 inches of air. Sleep easy Steve Peat. A final steep technical climb impressively nailed solely by Techno and mercifully we were done.
Back in the little village of Crickhowell I spotted a fat blonde guy in a rubber bodysuit.
Mumbles
We raced back to our hotel in Mumbles. Nice place, Catherine Zeta Jones comes from there. We had a few beers and went for a Chinese. The poor guy didn't stand a chance. Team Goodnight aka Steve Hogson said goodnight and went back to the hotel early, I guess he needed the sleep as we had not seen sight nor sound of him that day up in the leading pack so I assumed this was him already planning his comeback on day two's ride, the good nights' sleep a pre-requisite. The rest of us drank quite a bit more in various establishments and drinking houses. My favourite was the Pier club, placed on a pier and designed to attract zero passers-by, this place couldn’t be entertaining if it was run by Hugh Heffner. Don’t get me wrong, the bunny girls turned up alright, I just wished myximatosis had turned up too.
I inwardly called time on this place, having tired of throwing bunny rabbit tails about the place hoping I might clock Jesus in the kisser with a well aimed shot. I didn’t, so I went back to the hotel.
Day 2
The plan was simple, get up, have breakfast, ride Afan. The plan went according to plan, with much reduced faff. It went so well in fact that myself and Cliff-Diver thought we ought to faff some. So driving out of Mumbles we passed a girl jogging along the front who looked nothing like Catherine Zeta Jones. With reasons that re-define the word tenuous we decided this was indeed Wales’ darling bud and proceeded to turn round back toward the hotel and in the same direction the girl who wasn't Catherine Zeta Jones was running so we could get another gander. We intended to 'head her off at the pass' so to speak, but she must have anticipated this and decided to disappear, a skill which comes with years of not avoiding Paparazzi because you’re not Catherine Zeta Jones. Still, we’d managed to piss twenty minutes of time-wasting up the wall, so it wasn’t for nowt. Much impressed with our latest Faffing, (nobody does it better) we proceeded up the road to Afan.
With new brake pads fitted all round, the smiles were back, and there they would stay. Afan proved to be as expected, a quality man-made trail, with sufficient thrills to keep us all happy. There is nothing really outstanding to report regarding this trail, again it was very wet and muddy yet the surface underneath was hard and we bobbled along quite nicely. The wooded sections had the wet roots to avoid and the dim light made this tricky but again usual fare and nothing unexpected. I believe all riders got through the ride with minimum fuss, bar Jesus who broke the saddle on a bike that wasn’t his and I had a few moans about chain-suck.
All the skills were on display, uphills, downhills, singletrack overtaking, Mark aka Big Potts or Team Foghorn Leghorn on his inaugural Fanylion weekend showed us his impressive passing skills by cutting out the switchbacks thus overhauling the rider in front of him...which was me...and he did it twice. Medium Potts (Downhill Maniac) looked tired on the downhills, and never really sparked into life, I blame his rapid weight loss for this and would like to offer a new team name, Team Ghandi. Back in the car park everyone looked as though the weekend finally had justification. Even Alex who was enjoying riding Steve's Stiffee all weekend looked to be having a much better day, it was then it dawned on me that he wasn't from Leeds, not much gets past me you know, good ol’ Team Bergerac, except that is...if you are Team Foghorn Leghorn.
We reconvene for the Fanylion Xmas do in December. See you there. rspKt!
Team Bergerac
Riders present
Hodgson
Shack
Mastiles
Shortbread
Ewok
White Sox
Cliff Diver
Twin Pin
Downhill Maniac
Techno
Bergerac
Starkey
Shorts in Winter
10 Ton Kona
Jesus
Pizza
Foghorn Leghorn
Enjoyment level
Low to middling