THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF....... Ouch!

After 8 weeks of no Cardio work due to a lingering chest infection, I thought it was time to stop being a wimp and get away from the weights in the Gym and go and train outside in the fresh air where the real athletes strut their stuff.

On Saturday Roxy and I ran round a quiet Country Park in the sunshine on the crackling sparkling ice where the squirrels and the birds were foraging for survival. The future stars of the Springwell Running Club were being trained by Bill Deehan, Kenny Bacon and Columb Knowles and there were a few desultory walkers braving the cold. If I am to achieve my aim of completing Ironman X sometime in 2009, the base miles had to be done and I had to start somewhere – what better place than in the mouth of Christmas!

The next morning I decided to check out the course for the inaugural Hill Climb on January the 10th. I have advertised it as a 1K challenge where riders and runners start off together every 30 seconds because I want to see who is quicker – two wheels or two feet. The proposed course is really steep and the heart rate will be at max right from the word go. Not having a quantity surveyors measuring wheel with me, I thought I would pace it out. 1,000 steps later I was at the top of the vertiginous hill panting from the effort – and that was just after walking it! There is plenty of space up the hill for spectators to come and cheer, Tour de France style as the athletes suffer on the Challenge. The Tour de France always attract the biggest crowds on the Alpine slopes because the spectators see their favourite riders struggle and suffer only centimetres away from them – and because the riders are doing about 10 miles an hour, not 25 or 30. As I surveyed the white view from the top of the forest I ruminated on some daft events I have helped to organise in the past.....

About twenty years ago we had a very unusual mile race on the Castlerock Road, in Coleraine. We had over 100 runners, all of whom were guaranteed a personal best for a mile – as it was all down-hill! I remember being in the driver’s seat of my trusty Vauxhall Cavalier when we said “Ready, Steady, Go!” and a hoard of athletes started to rapidly approach the back windscreen. There was only one problem, I had left the hand brake on and we weren’t going anywhere!

I managed to release it in the nick of time otherwise some of Northern Ireland’s best milers would have ended up in my back seat... Three minutes and 35 seconds later Davy Wilson of Annadale Striders crossed the line, one of several to beat the coveted 4 minute mark that day. Several years later I helped to organise a very strange event on the Bishops Road, with the Triangle Triathlon Club. This is the same climb that the Roe Valley Cycling Club use to host their season ending hill climb. The athletes looked a bit puzzled when I explained the format – they would run up 2.4 miles of Bishops Road, then run down with their quads being hammered by the steep descent, then bike up to the top – it certainly was a duathlon with a difference! Funnily enough no one was too keen to repeat the experience 12 months later.

Anyway I hope that the runners of Springwell, Pegasus and City of Derry etc. and the bikers of RVCC and Derry Wheelers will enjoy the novel event on January 10th. There is a £25.00 prize for quickest male and female runner and male and female biker. It takes me back to infamous hill in the Ironman in Roth in Southern Germany which I tackled a few years ago. Many people had told me about it, but nothing could prepare you for the blast that was to come. After the 3.8K canal swim and at about 70K on the bike the 2,500 athletes were confronted with this mother of a hill – it just went up – and then kept going up. There were 30,000 spectators on both sides of the hill alone and everyone of them seemed to have a bugle or a klaxon or a cow horn, (we were close to Switzerland after all) or a whistle or a drum and they wanted you to know that whilst they couldn’t necessarily play any of the instruments in tune by god they could make a racket with it! You felt really inspired and despite being knackered there was no way you were going to get off an walk, no siree, you were going to show them that Marco Pantani and Lance Armstrong were mere amateurs when it came to the particulars of hill climbing. It was out of the saddle with the heart rate going through the roof, clicking down through the gears until you made it to the top by which stage you are absolutely shattered and you have two thirds of the race still to go! I was already looking forward to the next lap to face it all again but when I eventually made it several hours later, the leaders had long gone, the 30,000 crowd had evaporated like the Chelsea crowd at Stamford Bridge when the Blues lose and I was faced with a few desultory cheers and bugle blows....

On January 10 at the Hill Climb in the Springwell Forest (three miles up the Ringsend Road, coming out of Limavady and it’s the trail that links you to the main Limavady Coleraine Road) we want lots of spectators to join in the fun. Bring a musical instrument even if you can’t play it and make the athletes feel special. All proceeds are for the Rotary Foundation Charity and my fellow Rotarians will be there making hot soup and rolls for all contestants concerned. Will I be doing it? Hey, somebody has to hold the stop watch!!

The day after my first tentative foray back into the joys of forest running I thought I would go out on the bike. The road bike didn’t seem too attractive – too much spray being thrown up by passing cars - so I plumped for my trusty Giant Terrago. Mountain biking is so much fun I am surprised that the government hasn’t taxed it yet. You get stuck into a forest (and we are blessed with at least five on our own doorstep) away from the traffic and it’s just you and nature head to head. The Cam Forest (just 2 miles from Ringsend) has long been a favourite of mine. We host the Wo/Man –v- Bike –v- Horse spectacular in it two weeks before Christmas every year (this Sunday at 12.00 noon if you are interested) and I have done a serious amount of long slow distance Ironman training in there on its rough but navigable paths and tracks. The beauty of it is you just don’t see other human beings in it. It looks so bleak from the road yet it reveals its splendours like a luminous diamond inside a lump of black coal once you make the effort. There is circuit of about 6 miles long, stay on the main path and it will bring you back to where you started. There are also lots of other interesting cul-de-sacs –there are also some suicidal descents (including one where I crashed big time just after 17 year old Hannah Jack was born. I learnt from that experience brakes don’t necessarily work if you are in mid air at the time)

There is always the sound of trickling water nearby. There are quiet nymph like glades for the wood sprites; I remember seeing a fox there years ago. I don’t know who was more startled, me, the fox or my dog. There are windmills at the top of Rigged Hill. If you stand underneath it’s as close as most of us are going to get to the - whump noise of a ceiling fan in a red lit sultry Saigon night in the 70’s Vietnam movies; there are technical passages where one is advised to take care but it doesn’t include any of the real kamikaze stuff beloved by the downhill fraternity in Ballycarton. There is one cute little stream to charge through at speed. There is a mini lake which is used as a fire break; all of these magnificent features cared for by the Department of Forestry – and all of them under utilised by a population not yet aware of the myriad of delights contained therein.

It helps when you are preparing for a mountain bike ride in an Irish winter to not be in a hurry. I put on the necessary gear – a thermal shirt, a thermal jacket, a pair of Coolmax shorts and Ironman bib tights, a pair of cycling shoes and overshoes; a helmet; a skull cap; a bandana for the throat and neck; and of course a pair of thick gloves and also I slipped into my back pocket the modern pre requisite without which no solo self respecting biking afficianado could possibly be seen without – the IPod. Young Patrick had recently de-junked my old stuff off it and he had loaded it up with his ‘old man’s’ favourites i.e. three albums from Snow Patrol; and one from Ray Lamontagne and he had stuck on his own Killers for me (too bland to be considered the world’s coolest band I fear). The bike was transported to the playground (known as the Cam Forest) on the bike rack and it was taken off with tremulous hands as I contemplated the fun that lay ahead. Once I had safely negotiated the horse steps into the Cam, Gary Lightbody was in full flow as “Run” was cascading through my skullcandies into my aural lobes and I was underway. I hadn’t ridden in about 8 weeks and I was like a kid in a sweet shop. I powered up through the gears and was up out of the saddle, hey I might as well look good for the first few hundred yards anyway! The white bright snowy stuff of the morning was still there but I had listened to the weather forecasters and had been assured that it had turned to slush. Run segued into “I love the city tonight” when something strange started to happen.

I looked down and saw my bike at a 45 degree angle, strange I thought, what’s it that shape for? The world, which I had been looking at a perfectly normal angle, seemed to be going upside down. I looked down searching for clues and found nice shiny hard ice.... Something was about to happen and it looked as if it was going to involve a World of Pain.... I felt like a surfer who had just lost his board and he was facing a wipe out. I felt like a parachutist who had forgotten to take his parachute. I felt like an equestrian expert whose horse had decided he didn’t particularly like the look of the fence in front of him..... Crash! Bang! Wallop!

I was staring at a tree, not the top of a tree, not the middle of a tree but the bottom of a tree. I felt my heart rate shoot up about an extra 70 beats a minute and I heard someone gasping for breath in staccato fashion and then realised it was me. I waited for the pain to come in waves and wasn’t disappointed. I also waited for that familiar adrenaline to be pumped through the body to come to the rescue to mask the pain. I wondered if anything didn’t hurt, knowing that would be a bad sign, I wriggled my tomb encased feet and hands to see if they moved. If I was incapable of movement, at least I hoped I would be a fit looking – if frozen corpse the next day when eventually found in the middle of nowhere. I sat up to inspect the damage and survey the wreckage. My right elbow and hip hurt like buggary but that pain was a good pain, it meant nothing was numb or broken. I then did what I normally do when confronted with peril – I laughed. I laughed at my own idiocy in refusing to believe that the white stuff on the ground may have been alright to run on but not to bike over. I had laughed earlier in the year in different situations of hazard – in the heat of Malta, miles from nowhere on a far from perfect hire bike; in the furnace of the Czech Republic during the 180K bike section of the Ironman and then the white hot heat of Rhodes when I punctured two hot and sweaty hours from home. The time I was laughing not only in the heat but in the ice and the snow fields. I thought, as I lay in a heap, Tangled Up In Blue, underneath my grey Giant Teraggo that I had been stupid – but I had largely got away with it.

I thought how attractive Tanya Young’s Spinning Session was in Aghanloo (great music, great lights with Tanya exhorting you to go faster in an atmosphere reminiscent of a night club when even I couldn’t fall off from a static spinning bike) I thought of my own torture device namely the turbo trainer in my gym at home were you saw the fruits of your labour i.e. your sweat on the floor after a 1hr. session. I thought of all of the safe alternatives to mountain biking in the wild – and I laughed my head off. I gingerly got to my feet, checked the bike to see that it was ok and remount it (hey, you fall off your horse, you get back on the horse) and pedal somewhat slowly back to the entrance gates. I felt I had brought forward my replacement hip operation with S. Simpson FRCS (orthopaedic surgeon to the Celebs and Rock stars) a few years but didn’t really want to risk falling off again and wrecking the other hip (maybe not such a bad idea after all, I could get two for the price of one). More forest adventure was out of the question so it was back on to the main road for some boring but fairly safe black tarmac for an hour. Snow Patrol alternatively soothed and energised me as my right hip began to throb. It began to burn so hot I could have fried an egg on it; it felt as though I had put a whole tub of deep heat on it; it throbbed like the vein in Rafael Benitez’s temple when Liverpool failed to score; it ached like an Irish pig exporter’s headache.

When I made it home I inspected the damage – some blood, some welts and bruises and as Squeeze once famously sung, “A Nasty Little Rash”, but thankfully my Coolmax shorts were in one piece, hey, cuts and bruises heal but replacement shorts aren’t such a good idea in the credit crunch. It looks like my chances of catching Lance in next year’s tour of Ireland in August may have receded but I got in some vital training for the Wo/Man –v- Bike -v- Horse except I felt like borrowing a horse as I was convinced four legs might be safer on ice than two wheels.

The Von Trapp Family may have been singing as they crested the hills of Austria but I was merely listening to Europe’s finest when I was confounded by the hills in the Cam. At least there was a similar happy ending for both the Von Trapps and myself – we all made it home in one piece and we lived to fight another day – as long now as I don’t have to put the Sound of Music onto my IPod....