Alpkit Squalline Jacket - first test/review.

Here's one I did earlier. 

It was my first look at the competitively priced Squalline Jacket from Alpkit.

It's been designed as stash-in-your pocket go-to waterproof/windshell for fast paced activities like trail running and mountainbiking. I like it, it's ideal for those days were the weather can be a bit mixed but there's no need for full-fat waterproof like the Gravitas Jacket.

At £49.00 it's well worth a look.

A day out cycling and packrafting.

Neil's latest "badly edited video" Blockbuster.

Follow him around as he cycles from home to the River Trent, then paddles around for a while, before cycling home again.
It's gripping stuff 😝

The Long Way Home.

Recently I headed over to The Isle of Man to take part in the, very brutal, Manx100 mountainbike race. It had been an eleventh-hour decision to go. At the same time I made another rather rash decision - I was going to cycle home too. The Manx100 didn't quite go to plan (that's another long story: see here) so when the sun shone on the morning of my departure back to the mainland I was emboldened and was looking forward to a few days of very pleasant cycling through England’s finest green and pleasant lands.

I planned to cut across country from Morecambe to Settle on The Way of the Roses and then pick up The Pennine Bridleway (PBW) from there all the way back home to Derbyshire. It was a basic plan with some wiggle room for any potential disasters along the way - which turned out to be a fortuitous plan, as it happened, because I didn't have a map or actually know the way.

Not the Manx 100 - again.

Last year a group of us set out to take on The Manx 100 on The Isle of Man. Unfortunately our ferry crossing was cancelled and we never made it.
This year we did actually get to the island, which was at least a step further, but our progress beyond that wasn't exactly a shining success.
At the eleventh-hour, barely a week before the race, I decided to join the lads - Mitch Bryan, Paul Moore, Johnny Smith, and Pascal "Fluffy" Lally -  for a go at this years edition.
The Manx 100 is probably the hardest 1-day race in the UK.
Sensibly I decided to enter the 100km version rather than the 100 miler; I wasn't suitably trained to tackle the long course. Sensible is not something that I do very often, it was very out of character.

Packrafting - How to add extra tie downs.

Here's the latest video from the YouTube channel, where Neil goes through the process of adding additional tie-downs to his Aqua Xtreme Commando Packraft.

You can see more from Aqua Xtreme here:

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Ronde van Vegas

A few weeks ago my mate Mitch called me about a local event called The Ronde van Vegas.

It's organised by local bike shop Velotastic and is classified as a Reliability Trial to "challenge and test your skill and stamina"

In a nutshell it was a 100km unsupported, unmarshalled adventure on the quiet roads, byways, and bridleways that surround Velotastic's home town of Chesterfield.

Entants were supplied with a GPX file of the route and details of the start/finish point at Holmesfield Village Hall. 

Look out Nepal - Here's Nellie!

So far so good. My excellent friend Mitch Bryan dropped me off at Derby Railway Station, and with only a minor delay to the trains in Birmingham I boarded my flight to Doha seamlessly with the super efficient Qatar Airways. I scraped in on the 30kg luggage allowance with only 2.5 pouches of Aldi cat treats over the limit. The nice lady at check-in let it go, and the shop cat at Himalayan Singletrack in Thamel, Kathmandu was, later, very pleased.

The flight to Doha had barely anyone aboard and I had a row of three seats all to myself, that’s a rare luxury indeed for the frequent traveller; all I had to do was try not to fall asleep. Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh kept me royally entertained for quite a while. The inflight meal was a delicious Chicken Biryani, followed by an even more delicious blackcurrant cheesecake. I’m very happy about the improvement of inflight meals; I thought about the first one I ever had, on a Balkan Airlines flight to Bulgaria in 1984, it was so bad that on my return flight home I pretended to be asleep so that I didn’t have to eat it.

2018. A shit-happens kind of a year.

2018 was a bit of a strange old year for me.
I was still firmly in the recovery stages from my shoulder operation by the time The Puffer (Strathpuffer 24 hour race) came around in late January. I was entered to race in the solo category along with a bunch of other mates with the same idea. It turned out that the trail conditions, fairly heavy with snow, were a bit too sketchy for me; I was still under strict guidelines from the Consultant Surgeon not to take any risks. So instead of racing I elected to man the pits and support the guys instead.
It was a nice way to experience the event, and I got a tremendous buzz from helping and encouraging my mates to finish, even though I would have much preferred to be racing. Hey-ho. This year I will be racing in a quad team for Alpkit. I'm really looking forward to this even though I am a bit short on fitness.

The Sonder Signal Ti - Building a Dream Machine.

The Motel du Mugling is an oasis of calm on the bustling Kathmandu-Pokhara Highway. I called in and ate an unplanned lunch with my friend Sagar, the manager. It was unplanned because I had already eaten breakfast there a few hours previously; inbetween times I had made a minor navigational error and cycled 26 or so kilometres in the wrong direction before retracing my steps to begin all over again. My initial 90km trundle to Pokhara was now to be a slightly more hectic race against daylight.

I'd arrived in Kathmandu a few days prior to this and spent my time pleasantly hanging out in the - now traffic-free - tourist hub of Thamel, catching up with old friends, drinking coffee, and riding familiar trails around the valley rim.

Familiar trails with familiar friends on an unfamiliar bike.
I'd been given a great opportunity to ride the final prototype of the new Sonder Bikes Signal Ti 29" Hardtail with the explicit purpose of capturing some high mountain images of the bike in its natural environment (see my initial review here).

Yak Attack - The Essentials (2018 onwards)

As a seasoned Yak Attacker I get asked a lot of questions throughout the year; what kit? what bike? what to expect?

I wrote a piece about this in 2013 (See here), most of which is still relevant, some of it is not.

After being involved in six consecutive editions I've accumulated a fair bit of experience. I've now pretty much got my own kit dialled. This is my attempt to bring everything up to date for the benefit of anyone planning to take it on. 

Not The Manx 100.

The Manx 100 is a 100 mile single day ultra-endurance mountain bike race around the mountainous terrain of The Isle of Man.

It had been on my radar since it inception in, I think, 2012. This year was the first time that I had found a window to enter.

Mitch, Paul, Pascal (Fluffy), Alan, and I set off from Belper with great expectations - not of winning, I might add, but of an adventure and a great challenge.

Unfortunately, as we were driving up the M6 on our way to Liverpool, Mitch received a text message announcing the cancellation of the ferry crossings due to bad weather in the Irish Sea. Sod's Law dictated that during one of the hottest and driest summers on record we were heading to The Isle of Man on the only shitty weekend for months, you couldn't make it up. We sat in limbo at the dreary Knutsford Services whilst trying to figure something out. A phone call to the ferry provider - The Steam Packet Company - confirmed our worst fears, no places were available on subsequent ferries until the following day which meant we wouldn't be toeing the start line for the race. A phone call to Nigel Morris, the race organiser, didn't bring any further hope even though he bent over backwards to help us out, thank you Nigel. It also turned out that Nigel had never known of a ferry ever being cancelled in July.

A Signal of Intent. The Sonder Signal Ti.

The Signal Ti is soon to be the latest addition to the Sonder(Alpkit) range of highly regarded, and highly capable, bikes.

I was in the very fortunate position to ride the final pre-production model during my recent trip to Nepal.

It is an astonishing machine.
Anyone who visited last September's Big Shakeout Festival or the recent London Bike Show may have spotted this bike already. I spotted it nestled innocuously at Big Shakeout and immediately interrogated Neil Sutton about it - in my mind it had Nepal written all over it.

New Year... Same Me. Now, Next, Later.

Puffertime.

Nothing much changes in my world from one year to the next.
I'm not one for making resolutions, if I need changes in my life I just get on and make them. One year just rolls into the next without much fanfare, in much the same way that one day rolls into the next.

I've got a lot going on at the moment. Work is currently dominating most of my time, however The Strathpuffer is looming large on my immediate horizon - January 20th-21st -and I'll be following that with a nifty three week jaunt to Nepal.

2017 review. All or nothing.

It hardly seems possible that exactly a year ago today, shortly after returning from a 3 month trip to Nepal, I took ownership of my very own 6.4 acre parcel of ancient woodland. 

For the most part it has been a labour of love and an absolute joy... for the most part. (See here amongst other posts).

I do seem to have spent an awful lot of time at work in between trips away, and an awful lot of time working in the wood too (but that's a good thing). You can't enjoy the kind of travel that I do without working very hard to pay for it.

Rumble in the Jungle 2017.

“Do you fancy going out to Sri Lanka for The Rumble?” was a bolt out of the blue from my friend, the Race Director at Yak Attack(MTB Worldwide), Phil Evans. “In fact we’re going out three weeks early to recce the trails if you fancy that too?” was his second question.

“Erm… not sure. I’d like to… err… fuck it, yeah” My initial hesitation was due to the fact that I had an impending shoulder operation (which I’ve been putting off for four years) and really I needed to get it done. However, the “fuck it” principle came into effect and bypassed any modicum of common sense.

The timing was also perfect, I was working away in London and we would be flying out exactly a week after my contract finished.

The sound of silence. Yak Attack 2017,

For the first time in a while I was riding alone and I was enjoying the solitude and the simple pleasure of spinning the pedals at a natural pace. I rolled to a halt, mesmerised by the same view that had stopped me in my tracks exactly a year earlier. The low sun cast shadows across layers of barren mountain summits. Nothing stirred. Nary a parched leaf rustling on a twisted shrub, nor the bellow of livestock could be heard on this windless day.
Silence.
There are few places in the modern world where it's possible to hear nothing, nothing at all, the sound of silence. Nepal's sparsely populated Forbidden Kingdom - The Upper Mustang - a high altitude desert, is one of them, and it is intoxicating. I wanted to stand there forever and bathe in its glory. The electrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating sound of absolute silence.

Alas I couldn't, I had work to do. I pushed on the pedals, the gentle crunch of rubber on dirt seemed almost deafening.

Who's afraid of the Big Bad Yak?

The Yak Attack - the worlds highest mountain bike race - has something of a fearsome reputation; I'm about to shatter a few myths... well, kind of.
It seems that a lot of people are discouraged from entering because they think it is too hard for them. I'm going to tell you that it's not.
If you are reading this then you are probably considering entering so you've come to the right place. If you are a mountain biker and you're not considering it then maybe you should, it is one of those great, but ultimately achievable, life goals that will change the way you think about yourself and the world forever. Plus you will become one of only a tiny group of people that can say that they have, and you'll walk away with some lifelong memories (and friends) and a bunch of pictures that will make everyone you know green with envy.
Like this one for example: 

Wouldn't it be nice to have this hanging on the wall at home?

Less is more. Finding Nemo.

The Final Frontier.

Last year I awakened a whole new passion: singlespeed mountainbiking. I hadn't ridden a singlespeed bike for well over 20 years.

I brought a cheap, but good value, Vitus Dee 29er from Chain Reaction Cycles for commuting. it proved to be something of a personal revelation. I had been a bit of a sceptic when it came to singlespeed mountainbikes, partially dismissing them as ridiculous, and a hipster fashion accessory. I was wrong (well partially wrong, they're still a hipster fashion accessory).

After 15 months of regular use I decided to build myself something a bit more suitable to my all round needs, a bit more trail friendly if you like. Fortunately I have a shed full of components stuffed in boxes or just laying around so the actual build hasn't cost me an awful lot of money (well it cost me money once upon a time but not on this occasion).
Also considering the support I have had from Alpkit over the last few years I thought it was about time I stepped across one of their very highly regarded Sonder machines.

So my starting point was their new entry level hardtail frame & fork bundle - The Frontier - a bike they have designed as an all-rounder for everything from "campsite and crag" to "trail centre and bikepacking". It's sound like just the bike for me, plus I was particularly enamoured with the "Nemo" blue colour scheme, and the ability to run plus sized tyres should I wish to. 

The Peaks 200 - by Mitch Bryan & Pascal Lally

Rainbow Chasers Mitch Bryan, Martin Tansley, and Pascal Lally recently took on The Peak 200, an Individual Time Trial (ITT) that circumnavigates most of The Peak District National Park. This is their account of an epic days mountain biking. I really enjoyed reading it; I hope you enjoy it too.

Mitch takes up the first half of the story:

"What time do you reckon it is?"

"Erm... 22:30?"

"You what! Try 01:30"

"Oh"

Where had the time gone? As I lent against the fence trying to force down one more gel into my grumbling stomach I pondered how time had run away from me. It only seemed like an hour at the most since Pascal and Martin had switched on their lights as we began our final technical descent into Roych Clough. And yet now here we were taking a moment to refuel after pushing our not so laden bikes up the steep sided valley out of Chee Dale.

I could hardly believe that over twenty hours earlier the three of us had set off from the pub car park at Rowsley full of apprehension for what the rest of the day had in store for us as we attempted to complete the Peak 200 ITT in under twenty four hours, although I hadn't told Martin and Pascal this as it thought it might have put them off. 

Alpkit announce their #ContinuumProject

Perfectly in line with their "Go Nice Places, Do Good Things" tagline the good folk at Alpkit have announced their latest social & environmental initiative through their Alpkit Foundation.

The Continuum Project is a partnership with several other organisations to donate, recycle, and redistribute, your old and unwanted outdoor gear to those people in society who are less fortunate.

Here at Chase The Rainbow we love things like this and we'll be digging out as much of our old kit as possible. If you have some stuff kicking around then why not donate it to a good cause; you'll feel good about it and so will the people who benefit from your generosity :)

You can read all about the project here:

The Alpkit Continuum Project

You can follow Alpkit here:

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Thank you for looking, see you soon.

Please don't forget to Like, Share, and Comment, if you enjoyed it :)

Consume less, live more. Plant more trees.