Ride Earth

Today we drove to the National Bike Show at the NEC after generously being giving some tickets by the organisers. I was up early and went over to pick Tom up at 8.30am to drive down. We collected our previously prepared (at midnight last night) press packs and printed a couple of cheap t-shirts with the Ride Earth logo and website on them. Eventually after the usual faffing about we headed off with some circa 2000 Pete Tong tape playing in the car.

We cruised on down the A14 and M6 then missed the turn off for the NEC by just the 5 junctions. To make things worse when we turned off in order to turn round, the southbound direction was closed and the traffic was diverted so we had to drive another junction up the M6 just to come back again. After an intense session of cursing about the lack of clear signage, we managed to find our way to the NEC by using the sun and the art of tracking.

On arrival we milled about for a bit, before being walked in by the organiser and left to do our thing. We spoke to a few different companies who had stands including Chain Reaction, Extreme.com, Pace/DT Swiss, Merlin, and dropped press packs off with Singletrack, DIRT, MBR and a few others with a view to getting some regular coverage on our trip. (more…)

On Sunday I experienced a creative explosion of some kind, which resulted in much scribbling and a large amount of grafting in Illustrator, and the eventual result was this new website design. Less blue and more brown is the general theme.

It’s now just over two months until we depart, and it’s now becoming apparent that there aren’t enough hours in a day to a) go to work, b) put in the training time, c) research the world, d) apply for sponsorship and e) publicise our project, all at the same time. The ‘paperwork’ is becoming a drag. I just want to leave now, and the impatience is starting to show a little bit. It’s difficult to focus in my free time because I spend all day doing a highly focused job, and my brain generally experiences complete meltdown by the end of the day. It can’t be healthy. Maybe I should start drinking Actimel. Mmm, Danone.

I’m also starting to catch myself thinking ‘what if’. I firmly believe that under most circumstances, asking this question is likely to be bad for you. ‘What if’ syndrome stops you being spontaneous, stops you carrying things through, and provides a common barrier between an idea and a happening. I will attempt to suppress any doubts that may be forming by crushing them under the combined weight of Philosophy: Key Themes, A.D. 500 - A Journey Through the Dark Ages of Britain and Ireland, The Beach, and Ray Mears’ Bushcraft, which are currently keeping me sane in a world where library-borrowed Lonely Planet guides block out the light in my bedroom, and I dream at night of random things like my secondary school English teachers randomly turning up in dilapidated South-East Asian villages.