Early mornings, late nights organising, long days, long descents & most importantly long lasting smiles! "Stage 4 Secure!" Marshals- Jonas, Phil & Martin securing a stage I've not long returned from 10 days of helping out with the inaugural Trans Savoie as a course marshal.  I'm exhausted, but happy, just like all the other helpers and athletes.  The trails we rode were world class and the climbs were true alpine bruts.  The breakfasts and dinners were also bottomless, just like the smiles and fun atmosphere.  There may have been issues each day for marshals and riders alike, but for an event in its first year that is bound to happen.  Hopefully next year will be even better. The speed of the top riders down 20min descents was unreal.  A highlight for me was being the start marshal for the final stage on day 3, or was it 4? Anyway, after a slog of fire road climb in the heat, Rene Wildhaber and his mate Armin arrived having not broken i...

Massive Thanks to Russ for lending me his bike! I'm off to help as a course marshall at the Trans Savoie for 10 days.  Epic trails to ride.

Two days of short but sweet Cham valley singletrack Oli style One of the great things about living in an area with ski lifts is that you can get easy access to some quality descending very easily, even if you only have a few hours to spare.  This is ideal if like me you have your girlfriends birthday to be back for, or perhaps children or work commitments.  Or like today with my trip up Brevent, all your riding buddies are either away riding elsewhere (chamonet crew), working or in Andy's case, on his best behaviour the day before his wedding! Friday, Lap 1: Frontside switchbacks off Grands Montets.  Lap 2: Down to Les Bois off G.M The big storms had past, but the typical summer weather had not quite returned.  Tom H wanted to shred before having a weekend of riding with his proffessional camera bag setup (see lesarc-net soon). So with warm clothing on we hit up a couple of G.M laps.  The frontside trail is great fun with little wall rides, tight and wide...

The ups and downs of mountainbiking Whilst waiting for Tom H to get his bike ready for some Suisse action I checked Graham's blog  and it looked like he'd beaten us by a day to riding down to Trient, and written a good in depth blog post about it.  This is one of the best "all mountain" descents around, up there with Bennevy & Loriaz.  And in a way not having the train run from Chatelard-Vallorcine makes it even more special, we used to lap this trail 2 years ago!   Me and Tom headed up to Argentiere on the train late in the morning, the sun was already out and beating hard as we span our legs up to the Le Tour lifts.  Up, and up again, {short new red section looks quite good actually} and then across to Col de Balme, and up one last time to Col de Croix de Fer. Tom H posing with the Verte behind Tom's Mega looking 'good to go' with some new parts The ol' girl still going strong... After taking in the amazing 360 de...