They're out there...

It was the Dunkeld autumn training camp this week. To kick it off I took myself and mrs mac to Bo’ness, the centre of Scottish UFO sightings, if reports are to be believed, but which they never are.

Why Bo’ness I hear you ask? Had I been drawn there by a secret force? Have I been mysteriously stressed and been found modelling a small mountain of mashed potato on our kitchen table in the wee small hours? No; instead it was another of those very terrestrial cyclo-cross events. 

We got parked up some way down the hill at Kinneil House, quite a grand setting for the event. I picked my number up and nodded to a few riders I’ve begun to recognise over the course of the season. At 10.30am we got on the course for a warm up and it seemed flattish, with no stretches where running would be required. Worse luck. The course tape wound its way around a section of woodland which was interesting. Elsewhere, the surface was very divetted (if that’s a word). With my mild improvement continuing at these events, I have begun to pick up league points, but not enough seemingly to feature in the gridding at the front, so its left to us losers to battle our way from the ‘very back’ to ‘nearly the very back’ of the peleton. 

It was a moderately muddy 40 minutes of intense cardio and I was well pleased to have remained upright throughout the whole affair. Mrs mac provided some solid support and took any number of photos in the low morning light. After loading a clagged up bike into the back of the car and chatting to a guy from Prestwick, we sat and discussed the aerial light show we had witnessed and the odd oval eyed  and almond skulled locals who were gathered around the street corners. Later, we repaired to a café in Kinross for a steak sandwich and pot of tea before heading north. Among other highlights so far this week, we’ve jogged 15 miles to Pitlochry along part of the Atholl Path and clocked up 10 miles around Tentsmuir; that is before ruining all the good work with ingesting a huge tray of chips from the Salt and Pine crepe hut. Its 2 steps forward and 2 steps back. With the cross country at Kilmarnock on Saturday and then more cyclo-cross on Sunday back home, It’ll be a busy weekend. In the meantime, I'll have a go at trying to extricate the strange metal probe I've found inserted into my privates.