Tim Corrigan blogs on cycling, trips and programming…

Take one 4 year old on a trailer bike and mount a camera on his head… then play with recently updated iMovie ’11…

These new iMovie trailers are going to get old pretty quickly but in the couple of days before every one and his dog has made one.. here’s mine! Had fun making it.

Update: though they don’t involve biking I’ve got the bug of making iMovie 11 trailers – here are some more:
Mini Vampire (a 4 year old vampire terrorises the house)
Bedtime Battle (a sword fight with a 4 year old at bedtime)
Trip to Transylvania (a family of vampires are bored of Hayling Island and decide to take a trip to Transylvania)

Well here is my attempt at capturing the flavour of my recent Atlas mountains mountain biking trip in a 3 minute video…

Devices used in recording the video/stills were a Tachyon XC Micro helmet camera, Cannon Digital Ixus 70 and an Apple iPhone.

Day 6 had just a single 4km climb – on which by attempting to keep up with Steve I think I found some totally new higher heart rate and (later) exhaustion zones. Finally – to finish out the trip, a 35km descent, dropping 1500m all the way down to the sea – fantastic!

The gallery below is the best of my photos from the whole Atlas Mountains trip – unashamedly featuring lots of me!

Day 5 was a good combination of up and down with 3 main climbs and lots of down hill – all of it fairly technical offroad stuff – the kind we mountain bikers like!

Some tricky downhill - just after a fall!

John arriving in a remote Berber Village

This mornings bike maintenance time entertainment… “I went shopping and I bought: an axle, a brake, a chain, a derailer (front), an elastic band, a front wheel, a gear cable, a handlebar, an indexing system (Shimano), a joly nice front fork, a Kona frame, lube, a Mavic rear wheel, a nut (large)”….. Etc… And some people here call me a geek!

In other news I split my small chain ring today, I am now competent at pouring mint tea from height and the riding was great.

Split and bent small chain ring

Mint tea - yum!

Typical morning greeting on this trip: “Morning – how are your thorns?”
Most people have at least one still in their tyre from the night before…

Anyway day 3 included some barely rideable single track, some ‘good’ climbs and an awesome fast offroad descent. Also a broken shoe, some James Blunt on a misty hilltop and some ‘falls’ on the singletrack – see photos and video…

Our trusty support vehicles

Tim with helmet camera at the ready

Juliette's bike after her crash

Emergency shoe repair

Well no-one did the extra bit today because again it was dark by the time we got back. It was a full on day – including a long long offroad descent, an 11km road climb and a 12km road descent. That’s it for now. I’m off to see some carpets!

Start of day 2

My (hired) bike for the week

In a gorge contemplating the 11km climb

Im mountain biking in north Africa – the scenery is dramatic, the riding technical and fun and the hotel has wireless so I’m able to blog from my iPhone – can it get any better?

After a very late arrival Sunday night (3am uk time) in Agadir we started with a 3 hour transfer by 4 wheel drive to start the first days riding. Then proceeded the setup/checking over of the bikes – 15 hired Specialized hard tails and 1 non hired Specialized hard tail. This took a long time as all the bikes needed to be adjusted after they’d been in transit and a number of people (including myself) had brought their own saddles and pedals. There were also several stripped threads to deal with.

Once we got under way the riding was excellent. A rocky, fairly technical descent becoming smooth and quick towards the end. We did suffer from punctures though and after riding through a village almost every bike had at least one thorn induced puncture so we arrived at our hotel in the dark. I loaded up on pasta and meatball tagine which was excellent. 1 beer and 1 glass of wine later I headed for a fairly early night as I was still recovering from that late flight into Agadir.

Day 2 is to be a 70km ride with a mix of road and off road. 80km if we add on the section we missed on day 1 due to the fading light. If you’ve cycled with me before you’ll know I’m unlikely to turn down the chance to do a bit extra!

The following are two photos of the scenery during the day and the last is the view out of my window in the hotel!

First Descent of the trip

Evening sunlight on the hills

View from my window

I leave tomorrow for my first bike trip where I’m not the organiser! It’s a week mountain biking in Morocco with Exodus – check out the trip details.

Here’s the route:

Internet connection allowing, I will be attempting to post/tweet from the trip so check back here or follow the RSS feed to keep up to date. If I’m without internet access for the whole trip, then expect some bumper posts after the 10th October!

The  following table shows  details of  my training throughout September 2010 for my Atlas Mountains trip, both planned and actual. On the whole I did well – normally doing more each session than I’d set in my (fairly conservative) plan, only tailing off in the last week when the weather was bad and I was concentrating on final preparations. I found that actually writing down a schedule did work well – as it gave me a nice target to try and beat.