Thank You Nuclear Nigel

This weekend, today, was the Midwest Racing enduro. Martin was riding it on the Husaberg, Jago was riding it on a KTM, Simon Pavey and Patsy Quick were also in it. Me, I didn't do it - I was up in Scotland for my Ma and Da's ruby wedding anniversary.

The big difference between a Scottish weding and a Scottish funeral is that there is always one less person drunk at a funeral. Between the whole family - several hundred of us - we managed to take "skinful" to new dimensions.

The Wee Yin was absolutely mesmerised by the pipers and drummer, since she's never seen a real live bagpipe player before. It obviously appealed to the Scottish half of her.

The guys done a brilliant job of YMCA - complete with traffic cop and cowboy - and will be appearing on a YouTube near you soon. It's like a tradition at these family events - the Clan Cabaret - where foolish songs are sung and foolish dances done. Superb, a total hoot.

All the faces are the same, but we're all getting a little bit older and greyer. The cousins I used to play with as kids - seeing them with their own kids kind of makes you realise your own age. I mean, we all know that it's everybody else who ages - it's not us. We're the same age now we were 20 years ago. Policemen and Doctors? They just get younger. It's not actually us that gets older, oh no.

And time seems to pass quicker when you get older. I have a theory about this - quite a good one, one of my better ones.

If you think about it, time actually does speed up as you get older. When you are one year old, then one day is exactly 1/365th of the amount of time you've been alive. When you're ten years old, then one day is exactly 1/3650th of the time you've been alive. The older you get, each day is a smaller and smaller fraction of the amount of time you've been alive and that's why time seems to speed up. You have more years on you, and the amount of time in a day is not changing, so you're comparing something that's constant (a day) to something that is gtting bigger (the amount of years you have been alive).

If, every day somebody were to give you a pound, and you were to put them in a pile then - after 20 years - each additional pound would seem smaller and smaller compared to the huge pile of pounds you've got. Same thing with time.

Anyway, it turns out that one of my cousins - young lad by the name of Jamie - is living in Portsmouth for a while training to be an engineer. That's about 20 miles away from me. So we'll look out for him, and make sure that he has got family down here - that's what family is for.

He flew back on the same flight as us tonight and I was talking to him in the airport. He is staying at HMS Collingwood in Fareham and was having to get a train there - proper bitch of a journey.

I was sat next to a guy who was getting grief from his Missus on the phone whilst we were waiting for the doors to shut. She wouldn't believe he was on the plane. He handed me his phone and said "would you tell my Missus where I am?", which I did. He took the phone back and I could hear her saying "That's one of your mates, you're in the pub".

He saw me reading something, and working with bits of paper and stuff. It was my roadbook and my map and compass navigation - I take it everywhere with me and read it all the time. He asked me why I was learning navigation, and I told him it is because I am doing the Paris-Dakar.

Turns out that he is a Watch Officer on a nuclear submarine - navigation is his job. With a few scribbles and a bit of explanation, he taught me in a few minutes what it was taking days to learn. Lots of map navigation tips - especially about the different between true north and grid north. Told me where to find great stuff on Google for map problems and navigation exams (with answers) to practice on. But practice, practice practice - that is the key.

It turns out that he was going to HMS Collingwood, and that he was going in a prepaid taxi. There was only one thing to do. I asked him if he coule give Jamie a lift along with him and the answer was that he'd be delighted to. So that saved Jamie probably about an hour of mucking around on trains late on a Sunday night, thanks to Nigel the Nuclear Submarine Navigator.

Anything can happen. If you open your eyes, open your ears, and just trust that something - somehow - will work out. The Universe will answer.

I Know Kung Fu

Salisbury Plain was a total hoot today. The day started with the most almighty horrible nasty rainy weather, and I kind of hoped that we'd be fixing bikes all day. The Gods smiled on us, brought out the sunshine and it turned into a lovely day.

We wheeled out the bikes - an assortment of PR3 and PR4 - and did the various bits and pieces needing done. The brake pads on the PR4, the side stands on the PR3, the fork seals on Jane, tightening and oiling and generally just making things solid.

Then it was time to get suited and booted, which we duly did. The orangey brew in my Camelbak now has a great tangy taste to it - it is definitely starting to ferment. I have a theory about this - the bacteria in the orangey brew is cancelling out the equally nasty bacteria on the mouthpiece which gets all covered in mud, roost and cowshit during an enduro. Cleaning out the orangey brew will kill that status quo I reckon.

Since we were on our own, we knew we'd be going fairly quick. It was very very slippery with all the rain, so the weapons of choice were PR3s since they are so sure-footed in the mud.

We took off along the main roads, and it got a bit amusing. The PR3s are geared for offroad, which means they've got lots and lots of torque but not a massive amount of top speed - about 65 mph. Since both of the bikes are identical and rolled off the production line at the same time, there's not a lot of power difference between them - if there's any at all.

So here's me and Martin, booting along the road on full throttle, managing about 65 mph. Being lighter, I was getting about 65.004 mph versus Martin's 65.000 mph. This made for some quite interesting - and very l-o-n-g overtaking manouvres. Both of us were hunched into little balls, to keep the wind resistance down, trying to squeeze every ounce of speed we could get. Martin had a harder job of this than I did - I only need to breathe in to make myself completely invisible. Very amusing.

The job for today was to ride between the artillery ranges in order for me to figure out how all that fits together - we rarely get to go down there. This is so that I can take people out on my own and have a good idea of where we're going. We came to my ITM's puddle - the big one with the deep deep mud at the bottom - and we stopped to get the maps out. As soon as I fixed our position, something just went click. I now knew how it hung together, I now knew Kung Fu.

We rode down to Tilshead, Martin almost ending up in a fence when he swerved to avoid a fox which ran out in front of him. I almost ended up in the same fence trying to avoid Martin avoiding the fox. The fox wondered what all the fuss was about, then just avoided us.

There is a guaranteed recipe for accidents. What you do is take two guys, two motorcycles and a video camera - guaranteed there will be some mayhem. Luckily, we didn't have the video camera, but it didn't stop us having a laugh.

I flew over this jump and gave it 'andful as I cleared the top. Still giving said 'andful as my back wheel hit the deck, my front wheel flew into the air and nearly threw me off the back of the bike. This little bike can make you a bit cocky. Cockiness and slipperiness do not mix well.

The amount of water and mud in the tank traps was huge. A lot of the time, Martin and I took different lines through the mud - where we thought the going would be easiest. His experience almost always won out. Lesson to learn here - just because it looks less nasty, doesn't mean that it's less nasty. I ploughed my front wheel into a foot deep of horrible sticky mud. On a PR4, or on a KTM, I'd have been screwed. The PR3 just dragged out and we kept going.

When we got back, we went over the PR3 with a fine toothed comb. We were looking for where the bits would fit. The biggest problem is the fuel tanks. It turns out that there are two mounting bolts on either side of the frame - about halfway down - that are strong enough to take the weight of more than twenty litres of fuel - more than anough for a rally. But how to shape the fuel tanks? This is going to need some thought.

My Nautical friend has reach Hawaii on the round the world yacht race. There's a great photograph of him looking an awful lot like Jake from the Tweenies on his SailorV blog. He's now sailed more than halfway so, in a sense, he's on the way home. It's a funny thought that - you keep going in one direction long enough and, sooner or later, you start coming back again.

My ITM has settled back into work, inbetween waking up in the middle of the night draming of riding bikes and feeling like he's just ridden 500 miles of rough trail. Because of all the running repairs, his bike is effectively a bunch of cable ties, gaffa tape and a couple of wheels with an engine slapped in there somewhere. The toll that Heroes Legend took on bike and body was considerable, more so than he anticipated it would be. As you'd expect, he's very very glad to be home with the ITM-ettes and the ITM-ess. As you'd also expect, he's starting to think about "What Next?".

Piece of advice he gave me which stood out - "Don't do TransOrientale on your own!".

Hmmm. Good advice. I wonder if there's anybody who would be up for doing it with me, show me the ropes kind of thing. Possibly somebody with experience in long-distance rallies. Irish perhaps. With a KTM 525 Cable-tie special. An onwards and upwards kind of guy. Can't think of anybody off the top of my head ...

Sahara Scrumpy

In 2000, a very passionate and commited and somewhat talented young man wanted to do the Dakar. he was a privateer, and didn't have a lot of money to throw at it.

He came up with a rather novel idea. Since he was French, and had a mate lived in Bordeaux, there was only one thing to do. Make wine. Lots of wine. 6,000 bottles of wine. Stick a couple of labels on them, with pictures of dunes, and Chateau du Dakar is born. Then you sell them, and the proceeds go to funding your Dakar attempt.

Now, if you had one of those bottles of wine today - and it was still corked - then it would be worth a lot more than you paid for it. That's because the young man in question was Cyril Despres. He did so well in the 2000 Dakar that he caught the eye of BMW, and entered 2001 Dakar as a factory rider. Now he rides for Gauloises as a factory rider and he is one of the best riders in the world today.

So I spoke to Duff Diode today (my friend who looks a lot like Penfold out of Danger Mouse). Not only is he an expert cameraman - with all of his own equipment - he also has several apple trees in his back garden.

2008 was a bumper crop for him - tonnes and tonnes of apples. Now, there's only one thing to do with tonnes of apples - make cider. Which he duly did. Lovely cider made with real gloucestershire apples.

So, it is entirely possible that - with the help of some sticky labels - "Sahara Scrumpy" may be available in the near future.

Interesting search somebody did on Google, bringing them to 2009 Dakar. They searched for this:

"Using titanium plates to cure mental illness"
They got a match on both of them, but probably not in the way they expected. I wondered about this - is it true? Is such a thing possible? Is it some kind of implant thing, or do I just volunteer to be whacked on the head with a metal bar?

So, anyway, Duff Diode. Not only an expert cameraman, he is also a very passionate one. Wants to document the journey to Dakar. Whether this means that we'll get him in the 4x4 - or even on a bike - remains to be seen, but he can look forward to many hours of fun and games watching Martin and I play "so who can get down that hill quickest then?".

So, as you've probably gathered, there's a lot of ideas flying round about how we can fund Dakar next year, and do so in a way that makes money for Barnardos. The thing about ideas though, is that they have friends. Nurture them, encourage them. The crap ones will come first, but the good ones are not too far behind - they're just waiting to make sure that it's safe to come out.

Not A Gillette Advert Then

ITM made it back to Dublin today on the re-booked flight with his emergency travel documents. It's probably just as well that he didn't have his passport - the fairly massive beard he's wearing would have meant that he didn't match the photograph. Think of Tom Hanks in Castaway, and you're in the right ball park.

We got a lovely photograph from ITM-ess. It was the Stanley Twins - the flat Stanleys made by the Wee Yin and by ITM-ette. Only one of them has been to Dakar - the clue is the finishers medal right in the middle of the picture. Now, I'm willing to bet that that travelled back in a pocket, and was the first thing to be unpacked. I know mines would have been.




Email today from Patsy Quick, full of advice about events and objectives. Patsy's fairly solid advice was to stay away from La Maroc at the end of the year - it's in the South of Morocco and it is very very rocky down there. She suggested that Heroes Legend is worth serious consideration - and that she is running another Morocco trip in May with Zippy.

She's racing at Midwest on Sunday, along with Simon Pavey and also Jago and Martin. Apparently, and I'll leave you to guess who might have suggested this, I "would love it". It's set in a valley, so lots of steep downhills. Can we think of anybody who might have a sense of humour such as this?

I spoke to my gangly friend today, and he was telling me that my namehas been cropping up rather a lot at the global Bank where we were working. It's something to do with the plate in my shoulder unscrewing itself - the consensus there is that it is now official: I do actually have a screw loose.

I'm off with Martin on Friday for a bit of a play on Salisbury Plain. There's no trail riding, but we're going to do a bit of exploring - damage the bikes sufficiently that there's a good excuse to fix them when we get back. There's some brake pads to replace, and a couple of fork seals. Then, there's some hammering to be going on with to deal with the 260cc engine and the PR3.

One of the things that we'll be looking at is a roadbook. Making up a roadbook that covers the trails we ride. It is entirely possible that AJP will be the only people in the UK to offer roadbook navigation training. Being an ex-rally driver, and also a route scout for Land Rover, Martin knows roadbooks inside and out. Making them up will be a total hoot, arguing over whether a particular obstacle warrants one, two or three exclamation marks. The funniest part of all will be testing them.

The thing about roadbooks is that you cannot follow your own. You cannot follow a roadbook that you yourself have made - it would be a lot like trying to play chess with yourself. The whole point of the roadbook is that it guides you through terrain you've never seen before - by definition, you cannot follow your own.

So this basically means that Martin will need to test my roadbook writing, and I will need to test Martins. This sounds quite simple, but just thing about it for a second. I mean, I can forsee a Martin-prepared roadbook that indicates "turn right down shallow incline" - maybe even an exclamation mark. When I actually do turn right, it will be down that hill. The next image on the roadbook would be Martin rolling about pissing himself.

But what fantastic training that will be. By making up roadbooks, I will understand them far better than simply by following them. By following them, I will be proficient at it. We have a year, or more, to prepare and being able to navigate by roadbook is an absolute must. Being able to read the signs in the roadbook and instinctively know what they mean - the same was as you can look at your watch and know what time it is without having to think about it - will make a hell of a difference.

The Heroes Legend was not only tough in terms of riding and endurance, it was also tough in terms of navigation. A single missed fork in the road can take you the wrong side of a mountain range - as happened to my ITM - and cost you hours and hundreds of kilometres to get back on track.

Which, in a way, is another great metaphor for life. If you don't have a roadmap of where you want to go, how will you know if you've got there?

Bad, Fat Dirty Stretch

You really need to meet my gangly friend in order to believe him. he is a cross between Neil from the Young Ones and Jar-Jar binks. He has two very amusing and endearing traits:

He says things four times. He doesn't say "cool", he says "cool cool cool cool", or "yeah yeah yeah yeah"

He regularly takes words that have a specific meaning, and completely tortures them to mean something different. Things like "wicked", "bad" and "rude" tend to mean "brilliant", "superb" or just plain "cool cool cool cool".

He's also a fixer, a doer. He's never stuck for long - has a remarkable ability to think on his feet. And he's a thoroughly nice guy with a great sense of humour. The kind of guy you'd want supporting you on a long rally.

So we put this to him last week - "How would you fancy driving a 4x4 to support a couple of bikes?". After several bouts of "cool cool cool cool", he considered it and decided "yeah yeah yeah yeah". So far so good.

Then we pointed him at the websites - Heroes Legend and Transorientale. Whilst he conceded that both of them would be "wicked", he proclaimed that the China one would be the "baddest" - it goes through some "rude" countries and its just a "bad, fat dirty stretch".

Speaking of bad, fat and dirty, Chief decided that he'd have a weekend in Spain this weekend and flies back today. Spot of Sangria, sunshine and chorizo for the lad and the Chief-ess.

And speaking of stretch, at least in the context of finance, my ITM had to pick up his emeergency travel documents from the British Embassy in Dakar today, after ditching his passport in Morocco. Since it was a Bank holiday yesterday (even in Dakar?), the embassy wasn't open. He was booked on a flight at 6:30 this morning, but has had to rebook it for tomorrow to allow him to pick up his passport. ITM-ess rebooked the flight for tomorrow and, for what it cost, she might as well have chartered a private jet.

That said, let's look at it a slightly different way. Ignoring for a second what the event actually cost, what would you actually be willing to pay for an adventure the likes of which they've been through these past couple of weeks? A year from now, the memory of the details of what this flight cost or this chunk of money or that chunk of money will have faded. All that will remain, rightly, is the memory of the achievement and the adventure. The trauma of blagging your way over an international border without a passport - and how stressful it was at the time - will become a great tale to be told round a warm Irish fire in the winter evenings.

I could not put it any better than ITM-ess herself: Life is for living.

My gangly friend would probably have that one down as: Life's a bad, fat, dirty stretch.

Thinking The Unthinkable

Lots of discussions about next years events, groats to fund next years events, and the options around this.

As ever, we have a choice. We could, if we chose, take the Enron approach to raising money and kind of do it in a way that isn't immediately obvious as the most ethical way of doing it. We could also, if we chose, just continue to play a totally straight bat and trust that - somehow - magic will happen. A clear conscience is always the best pillow.

Speaking of Enron, I came across this article the other day in The Economist. Posted only last week.

In it, The Economist dares to think the unthinkable - that Jeff Skilling may be innocent. The grounds for this, they argue, is the testimony of Andy Fastow - the Chief Financial Officer at Enron.

Initially, in statements to the FBI, Fastow claimed that Skilling had known nothing about the fraud and theft that he (Fastow) had been committing. Later, when offered a plea-bargain deal that would guarantee him only 10 years in jail, he changed his story and claimed that he only ever operated with Skilling's full knowledge and approval. Ater Skilling's trial, Fastow's agreed sentence of 10 years was cut to only 6 years, since he was such a "co-operative witness".

There's a point to this, and I'm coming to it, please bear with me.

All of us right now are facing the brunt of this thing called the global "Credit Crunch". In a nutshell, this basically means that there is less money being made available for debt - both to individuals and to companies - as everybody tightens their belts. This is something that we have due regard to when considering how we fund Dakar next year.

Anyway, the credit crunch has its roots in something which is called the "sub-prime mortgage crisis" in the USA. This came about when Banks started lending to people who couldn't really afford it, then sold these risky debts on to other Banks. When the borrowers didn't keep up the repayments, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

A similar thing happened in the USA in the 1980's and early 1990's - this time it was called the Savings and Loan crisis. Basically, there was a lot of lending to people who could not afford to borrow, and then the risky debts were sold from one bank to another. When the borrowers didn't keep up the repayments, everything went pop.

The savings and loan crisis caused a lot of Banks to fail and go bankrupt. The largest of these Banks was called Continental Illinois.

A young executive at Continental Illinois had pioneered this brilliant idea in order for the Bank to make kazillions of dollars. What he proposed, crazy at the time, was that the Bank lend to people who could not afford it, then sell on the risky debts to other Banks. Continental Illinois would get the cash, somebody else would get the risk (and the default).

The seemingly magical technique for creating lots of money in a very short space of time - leaving somebody else to pick up the tab - very quickly spread through the Banking industry. When it finally went pop, so did a lot of the Banks.

Anyway, the young man who pioneered this brilliant scheme was a Continental Illinois executive by the name of Andy Fastow. Yes, the same Andy Fastow who went on to do something very very similar at Enron - build up a huge mountain of risky debt and get somebody else to buy it.

Enron went so spectacularly belly-up that somebody had to be seen to pay for it. Fastow done a deal with the FBI and - despite originally claiming that Skilling knew nothing - laid all the blame at Skilling's door. Skilling got 24 years, Fastow got 6. Yet Andy Fastow was the guy who set up all the deals, sold them, got investors to buy into them and - crucially - made millions for himself in the process. Skilling, personally, never made a penny until he sold his Enron shares. Think about that.

Anyway, we'll see what happens at Skilling's first appeal in a couple of weeks.

Knowing what I know about the mischief that some people can get up to as soon as a bit of money is involved, it's clear that there's really no choice at all for me and The Missus to make. We'll play a straight bat, and something will come up. It's meant to be.

ITM will be on the flight home Wednesday, after picking up new passport and the like from the various embassies in Dakar. Most of the other people go home today, so he'll have a day to just kind of rest and start to get himself back to normal. That said, he'd much rather be home - it's been over two weeks since he saw ITM-ess and his ITM-ettes and he'll want to get home to them.

After such a fantastic effort, putting so much into something that that, what goes through your head? OK, there's a vague sense of achievement, but do you feel fulfilled now that you've done it? Do you want to do another one now? have you got it out of your system? Is everything in perspective now, or are things muddled?

Sometimes I find this the most scary aspect of this whole affair. Money is money and it's always a soluble problem. The bike, that's just an engineering problem. I mean, for as long as I have Dakar as an objective then I have something to focus on. What about when I do it? Will it be salvation? Will it be something else? Will I be cured? The parts of me I don't like - will I be able to leave them out in the desert when I come home, or will they come with me?

Is Dakar the end of the journey, or is it just the beginning of another one?

You Heard It Here First

Or, more accurately, you heard it here first if you're not fluent in French.

The Heroes Legend website has a press release today that salutes the guys who took part in this years event. Hubert Auriol himself confesses that they made this years event a lot more difficult than previous years.

Every so often, you come across a little tool in a little corner of the Internet and you wondered how you ever managed without it. Google was once such a tool - I recall hitting google back in the day when it boasted of having more than a billion web pages indexed. Now it's got closer to 10 billion.

Anyway, this little tool is called Babel Fish - after that remarkable little translating fish in Hitch Hikers Guid to the Galaxy. Copy and paste the text you want to translate, select the language you want to translate from and to, and hit the button. French becomes English, Chinese becomes Arabic, it truly is a work of art.

The Missus has been very busy Babelling away, studiously translating and reading every single scrap of news published on the Heroes Legend website. They do the press releases in French and only a fraction of them are re-published in English.

The thing about Hubert Auriol, apart from his legendary cheshire-cat grin is that he's a racer. He was the first guy ever to win Dakar both on a bike and in a car. He is arguably the best race director that the Paris-Dakar ever had. It is entirely possible that Hubert Auriol had a bit of a falling out with ASO about their plans to turn Dakar into a brand rather than a destination. He left ASO, taking a lot of people with him, and started up Heroes Legend - a race more in keeping with what Thierry Sabine had envisaged.

The bivouacs for instance. They are deliberately placed as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get. Away from airports, cities and civilisation generally. For Auriol, Dakar is about adventure and discovery - not about TV ratings and how easy it is to fly in the senior management of corporate sponsors for a tour of the bivouac on the rest day without them having to take a lot of time out of their busy diaries.

The fact that he is a racer is important. For him, it wasn't about the numbers, the insurance premiums or the TV coverage. It was about the race. It was about ordinary people, amateur privateers, going from Paris to Dakar. So, where ASO cut and run, Auriol shrugged and - with classic French defiance - decided to run the rally in spite of the security fears in Mauritania.

The bivouacs were visited in Mauritania by Government Ministers, Police and Army chiefs. Mauritania pulled out all the stops to make sure that everything went well, and they praised Hubert Auriol for having the courage of his convictions and running the event.

Anyway, this was to be the last Heroes Legend - those competing forces of affordability for privateers nd the huge logistic cost of running the race meant that it was losing money. The cancellation of the 2008 Dakar gave even more uncertainty.

So, tucked away at the bottom of the press release was a little snippet from the Man himself:

"Après le succès de cette troisième édition et à la demande générale, Hubert Auriol et son équipe vont rapidement préparer la quatrième Légende des Héros."

Which Babel Fish reliably assures us is:

"After success of this third edition and with the general request, Hubert Auriol and his team quickly will prepare the fourth Legend of the Heroes."

Armed with this piece of knowledge, with the hammer-assisted precision engineering going on to rally-prepare the little PR3 and - crucially - with an outstandingly genius plan from The Missus on how we can fund this whilst still making sure that we raise a Lot of Money for Barnardos at the same time, it looks like we'll be going to Dakar after all.

It's funny how things work out. This whole thing has taken on a momentum and a life of its own and, everywhere I look, green lights appear. Big green lights next to road signs which all point to Dakar.

I'm going to Dakar. And you're going with me.

Ordinary Heroes

The eagle has landed. The guys have arrived on the shores of le Lac Rose in Dakar, Senegal.

None of them will know whether to laugh or cry. They, and their bruised and battered bodies, will be so glad that it's over but part of them will be a little sad now that it is. Now begins the frantic search for bottle-openers, corkscrews and - tomorrow - headache tablets for the hangovers.

We were glued to Iritrak this morning, watching them roll in together. Part of us was so glad that they had made it, part of us was so proud of what they have achieved, and part of us was a little bit sad not to have shared it with them.

ITM, Billy, Vince - we are all very proud of you. And you guys deserve to be proud of yourselves. We bought a bottle of champagne for just this moment, and we'll be cracking it open tonight in your honour.

And let's spare a thought for Oz, who would have been there too if it hadn't been for the rapid medevac from Morocco. Oz, don't hang up the bike gear just yet- we'll do it next year.

Let's put this into perspective. The island of Ireland, from why my ITM hails (clue is in the name) is about 200 miles long from top to bottom, and 150 or so wide. That's about 350km. In order to replicate the distance that he's ridden these past few weeks, he'd need to ride up and down Ireland about 30 times.

Over 30 years ago, Thierry Sabine almost lost his life in the Sahara desert after getting lost on a rally. His vision was a race that would "push a man to his absolute limit, then push a little bit further". He made it his mission to bring the beauty of the Sahara to ordinary people who wanted to do extraordinary things.

And, make no mistake, the Heroes Legend guys are truly heroes for this very reason. They are not professional racers, factory riders or national enduro champions. They are plumbers, salesmen, joiners, brickies, computer people, pilots, fathers, husbands. Ordinary people, extraordinary things.

They succeeded where the professionals did not. They made it to Dakar. Hubert Auriol put on a really tough race - almost like a consolation Dakar - and it took a lot of the guys by surprise. Sleep deprivation, blistering heat, freezing cold - they've been through it all.

And now, on the shores of Dakar, they will sip a glass of champagne that never tasted so sweet.

Most imporantly of all, Flat Stanley made it to Dakar exactly as my ITM promised ITM-ette he would. You cannot buy the smile that that wee girl will be wearing.

"Heroes". The clue is in the name.

Why There No Candles in Dakar

The guys crossed over into Senegal this morning, much to the relief of ITM-ette. A very big Thank You to the guys in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs who pre-warned the borders that Flat Stanley was on his way.

About 300km to go, which is nothing compared to what they've already ridden. To try and put it in perspective - you can do that on a single tank of fuel. This will be the first day in two weeks that the guys won't need to be getting all involved with fuel stops and the like.

The temperature is 50 degrees celcius. Think about how hot that actually is. Candle wax turns to liquid at 46 degrees. Doesn't go all soft at that temperature, it turns into liquid.

Now I know that I've been saying that Heroes Legend isn't a drunken jolly, full of drunken people having a laugh. Up to this point, I've been right about that.

Once they all reach the Pink Lake, different rules will apply. Champagne will be popped, and the festivities will commence. It will be one hell of a party. Of course, the champagne is medicinal only - it is to soothe the bumps and bruises that the guys have picked up along the way. It will be carefully dispensed by trained medical personnel, and the amounts will be very carefully monitored.

Something along the lines of "Well done mate, grab a couple of cases of bubbly and get it down your neck - you deserve it". Shrug.

Light Exercise

The guys have made it all the way through Mauritania, and are currently sat on the Senegal border. That's Senegal. That's where Dakar lives. That would make today "Dakar's Eve".

Trail riding today was a lot of fun. I was on a PR4 - Queen Madge II - since Goldilocks is tucked up in the garage at home. This will become important in a bit.

Our riding buddies for the day were Ian, Jill and Martin (a different Martin). Ian and Jill - in their forties - had watched Long Way Down and decided to give this whole offroad thing a go. Jill was terrified, not making it out of first gear for most of the day. But, terrified as she was, she put in a hell of an effort and made it back in one piece.

Martin (the different Martin) was a geeky graphic designer with a bit of a fetish for gadgets and eletronic toys. Having a lot of mountain bike experience, he did really well - even though this was his first time off-road. He flipped the bike over a couple of times, bending his gear lever, so I did the right thing and straightened it out with a rock and a spanner.

I'm not learning a lot of workshop mechanics being out trail riding, but I am learning an awful lot of trail mechanics. Fixing drowned bikes, cable-tying punctured tyres to the rims, makeshift jusry-rigging type of repairs that will get you home. Or, crucially, that would get you to the end of a stage on a long rally. I don't really care if I never learn to regrind valves and stuff, as long as I know how to unbuckle a wheel using some WD40 and a bit of string. You get the point.

Anyway, Martin (yeah, that one) was being a total swine today. He started out by showing me this video on his mobile phone of him going down that hill yesterday. I accused him of photoshopping it, there is no way he went down that hill. He grinned.

We stopped for lunch and I explained to the guys what to expect on the ride back. I explained that we'd reach the top of a hill, that there would be some piss-taking between me and Martin, and then some comments about only going down in helicopters and stuff. Usual thing.

So, Martin in front, we came to the top of the hill. It was a safe bet that he wasn't going down it today. First, because it's that hill. Second, because he had no back brake - the pads were completely worn. Third, because his rear tyre was almost bald and needs replaced.

As he approached the top of the hill, he looked over his shoulder. I saw him give me one of his Cheshire Cat grins, and I braced myself for the piss-taking. But no piss-taking was done. What he did, madman that he is, was just take off down the hill without a whisper - a couple of the guys went to follow him and then saw what they were letting themselves in for. Rapid dismounts all round.

I jumped off my bike and ran to the edge of the hill, just in time to catch a particularly impressive collision with a tree stump which resulted in Martin on his arse.

Which meant that now I was committed. I started muttering "I hate him, I hate him, I hate him ..." and considered the options.

I thought of Jill. Terrified by her experience, trying so hard and putting in so much effort. It occurred to me that the confidence leap she had to make - just to be out here today - was a million times more than the confidence leap I would have to make to go down that hill. If she could push her comfort zone that much, so could I.

Realising that a PR4 was probably a bit heavy, I did the smart thing and grabbed the only tool which would do this particular job - Jane, the little PR3. I set off down the hill, shouting at Martin that he's got to be having a laugh. Physics saw what was going on and promptly took control of the situation. The wheels were locked and I was on and off the brakes trying to avoid skidding all the way down. Like that was ever going to work.

I was picking up speed all the time, and the front wheel was locked so much that it was just snow-ploughing through the mud. The bike started going sideways as I approached the halfway mark, and I'm picking up speed all the time. Skidding down this hill sideways in some sort of bizarre vertical speedway. I saw a tree stump right ahead of me but there was no way to steer - that bike was taking the most direct route down the hill whether I liked it or not. The back wheel hit the stump and tossed me into the air. As I flew, waiting on the impact, I thought to myself that this must be the "light exercise" that the doctor had in mind.

I picked myself and the bike up and got to the bottom of the hill. Then, for some strange reason, I turned the bike around and tried to go back up it. I got about halfway, and then everything was just too slippery so I couldn't get any further, but I was further up than where I fell off. I turned round and went to the bottom of the hill.

Does two halves of a hill make a whole hill?

A fantastic video on the Heroes Legend site today. Beautiful sand. Lots of it. The guys are almost there. Tomorrow, Dakar and the Pink Lake. You can't go to Dakar and not ride round the Pink Lake. A lot of bruised, battered, knackered, unkempt and ecstatic bikers. A lot of guys who are, deservedly, very very proud of what they have achieved.

They've battled and battled to get where they are - this was no relaxing jolly with beers and bonfires. It has been the toughest Heroes Legend that has ever been staged, and it took a lot of them by surprise. They fought through sand, heat, freezing cold, mountains, more sand, rocks, more mountains, broken bikes, broken people and broken hearts since they left Paris two weeks and 9,000km ago.

Going through their heads tonight, will be the two most beautiful words these guys will ever hear:

"Tomorrow, Dakar".

Cooking The Clutch

Just finished reading this great book - "A Mathematician Plays The Market". It's about a guy, a professor of Mathematics, who thinks that his mighty genius will allow him to beat the stock market. He figured out the odds, and he totally lost his shirt. Fantastic read, full of wry humour.

Anyway, there was this one bit I read and it's totally been doing my head in. I told The Missus about it, and it's been doing her head in too. It's an example of how accounting trickery works (think Enron), and the kind of games that Clever People play with the numbers. Goes like this:

Three people go out for a meal. The bill comes to £30. They split it 3 ways, each of them pays £10 each in cash. The Manager realises that he's overcharged them - the cost of the meal was only £25 - so he instructs the waiter to refund them £5.

The waiter, not the most honest of individuals, can't figure out how to split £5 three ways so he changes it into 5 £1 coins. He pockets two of these coins, and refunds the remaining £3 to the guys at the table.

So each of the guys at the table paid £9 for his meal - a total of £27. The waiter has £2 in his pocket. That's a grand total of £29.

But the guys handed over £30. So, the question is, what happened to the extra £1?

Shenanigans like these are the kind of thing that you need to get up to when you're trying to blag your way over borders in order to keep racing in Heroes Legend without a passport. I'll ask my ITM how it works when he gets back - he's a smart guy, he'll know the answer.

ITM-ess has been busy today. Using her girlish charm, she has somehow managed to get the Irish Department for Foreign Affairs to be logging on to the Heroes Legend website to track the progress of the rally. When she calls them to say "and he's just approaching Atar", they say "Yes, we know, isn't he doing well?". They have alerted all borders that a rather unkempt Irishman on a motorcycle will be approaching the border without a passport and would they please let him through because he has to deliver a little flat paper man to Dakar thank you very much.

Martin called this morning at about 8am. Just did it to wind me up because I was supposed to be trail riding today but couldn't make it because I had the fracture clinic. I told him this, but he still thought that it would be funny to phone me at that time - knowing full well that I'd completely freak out thinking that he was expecting me today.

We spoke about clutches. I can highly recommend talking about clutches at 8am, it's very therapeutic. Conversation went like this:

"It's dead easy to cook a clutch on a 4-stroke"

"Really?"

"Well, you should know, you cooked one the first time you were out with me"

Ahh, yes, I remember. As Martin would say - "Yeah, that one". What can I say? That I was young, and I needed the money? That, em, I didn't inhale? That I did not have clutch-cooking relations with that bike?

We spoke about engines. We spoke about the need for 250cc and then some more. Apparently, the research bods at AJP have been busy on this one - they've been shoe-horning all sorts of firepower into the PR3. They started by saying "it's got to be light", and they managed that in spades. Now they've turned the engineers loose on some sort of "and how much power can you cram in?" mission.

Oz had some very philosophical and useful advice about this. His view was that you should take a big big bike with lots of power to just beat those big-ass dunes into submission. When I protested about the amount of weight I was capable of picking up, Oz's reply was wise indeed:

"Yes, but if you ride it well enough then you power your way through, instead of just thinking 'nah, it doesnt matter if I fall cos Ive got a nice light bike'".

There's food for thought there.

Ah, the fracture clinic. The doctor was full of good news. My shoulder is healing nicely. Good. I was kind of forming that opinion myself after smacking on to it at Dawn to Dusk a few times. I am allowed to do "light exercise". That's good - just as well I have a light bike then. I asked him if I'd be able to ride a bike properly, and he assured me that I could. I was very relieved by this, because I've been trying to ride a bike properly for almost a year now ...

So, the Heroes. Working their way south through Mauritania, they passed an important milestone today. Out there in the middle of the Sahara desert, they will have absolutely no idea that they passed this milestone. It's the milestone where both my ITM and Dakar are visible on Iritrak at the scale where you can see roads and villages. When they started out, nearly 2 weeks ago, the only way that my ITM and Dakar appeared on the same map was if you could also see Norway and South Africa - now they're on the same page.

One more border to go, a little more than 1,000km and he's home. Well, he will be once ITM-ess manages to get the new passport couriered out to him. Through a lot of effort, phone calls, paperwork, forms and sheer bloody-mindedness, she's managed to get the Irish Embassy to produce the relevant travel paperwork for him to come home proper.

Just a couple of more sandy pimples, nice little trail ride in the sunshine - maybe stop for an ice-cream and do a spot of sunbathing. Em, not quite. Over 1,000km in blistering heat, over the top of talcum-powder covered dunes the height of Wales. With a bike leaking oil, a battered and bruised body and - no doubt - a fairly chronic dose of Monkey Butt.

To Dakar. Where Flat Stanley gets his pictures taken and then gets posted back to an expectant ITM-ette. And all because, the little lady loves, Daddy keeping his promises.

He'll come home to a Heroes welcome, and he'll be choc full of tales and Legends. I suppose that the major clue of the rally is in the name. Much easier to figure out than the missing £1.

Touching Messages

Two things hit the Inbox late last night. One of them was so moving, that a tearful Missus woke me up to show it me.

Both of them were in response to by posting about Hubert Kosloff - who sadly was killed in a road accident on Sunday.

I won't contaminate them any further, I'll just show you them as I received them.

The first one was from Thomas:

"Hubert was my uncle. A great man, father, grandfather, brother, uncle and pilot who lived his life 120% every day. We always knew he wouldn't leave us lying on a bed, but this seems like an unlikely way to go. It would have made more sense if it had happened on his bike, during the race.

He will be sorely missed by his family in France, Brazil and those of us who live in the United States. He remains, in my mind, the perfect definition of a gentleman. Always corteous, smiling, happy, animated and definitely a way with the ladies.

Hubert, I love you always and will forever remember you. Your legacy will live on in your children, Nicolas and Mathieu, your sister Claudine, your nephews Jean-Marc, Cedric, Alexa and me, Thomas. Not to mention the little ones who have recently or will in the future be part of our family.

On t'aime oncle Hub!

Thomas"

and the second was from ITM-ess.

"please make sure that Thomas, nephew of Hubert knows that all of us, even the ones not actually taking part in the rally but supporting the participants feel the pain of his family..."

I can't add anything.

Luck of the Irish

A "jury rig" refers to a kind of makeshift slapping together of whatever you have to hand in order to solve a problem. Oz, mechanical wizard that he is, is a great jury rigger - making exhaust pipes out of old shock absorbers. Jury rigging is all about making the best out of what you have and somehow - somehow - figuring out a solution.

When the Apollo 13 mission set off on April 11 1970, their problems began fairly early on. The Ron Howard film tells us about the oxygen canisters exploding and stuff like that - which they did - but didn't tell us about the less-known problem of the engines being shut down by a computer two minutes early during lift-off.

In order to compensate for this, they burned the external engines for four minutes longer than planned. This greatly changed the vibration and stresses on the Apollo 13 rocket from those planned by the engineers - the engine itself was experiencing 68g during lift-off. That's amost as much as the forces experienced by a motorcycle being ridden by Oz.

It may well be that the extra stresses on the rocket is what contributed to the catastrphic failure of the oxygen tanks later on in the mission - when a routine mixing caused them to explode. The resulting crippling of the command module meant that - barring some miracle - these guys were just going to float around in space until their oxygen ran out.

Luckily for them, the flight director at mission control was a guy by the name of Eugene Krantz. he demanded that the engineers and scientists come up with a solution, and do it quickly.

What they decided to do was to slingshot the rocket around the moon - using the moon's gravity to speed it up a little and give it a push - similar to the way that a discus thrower jumps round in circles a bit before letting go of the disc. The engineers and scientists got to work, did some sums, and figured out that they could get the rocket about halfway back.

When they showed Ktrantz their equations and stuff, he went a bit mental. Told them that he didn't care what the laws of physics said - their answer was just not acceptable. The engineers went back to work. The figured that with a carefully-timed firing of the lunar module rocket, they could get enough grunt in the crippled rocket to bring it back to earth. This is jury-rigging in action.

As they approached earth's atmosphere, it appeared that they were coming in a bit too shallow. This meant that there was a real danger of them just bouncing off the atmosphere and off into space - like skimming a stone on a pond.

During re-entry, radio communication was not possible. Everybody on the ground had to wait over two minutes to find out if radio contact with Apollo 13 would be re-established. If it was, then it would mean that they had survived re-entry. If not, then it would mean that something had went wrong.

All of the effort that could have been done by mission control had been done. Every problem that had arisen up to now, they had found a way of solving it. They had tracked the craft all the way since it left earth and now, they were helpless. The laws of physics were in control.

There being nothing these clever bods and scientists could do except wait, they waited. And watched. And listened. And waited some more. And kept waiting. For what seemed like an age, they waited. Waited for news that the stricken spacecraft had managed to defy the odds and cross the border between space and earth.

Welcome to the world of ITM-ess. She's been frantic on the phone for the last few days, trying to jury-rig passports, visas and the like to my ITM who decided that these bits of paper were weighing him down a bit so he'd drop them as ballast in the Moroccan desert. Heroes Legend mission control were trying to jury-rig him over the Mauritanian border somehow. My ITM is trying to jury-rig his bike, which is now drinking a litre of oil a day.

He approached the border earlier today. We waited. We waited for some confirmation that he hadn't gone bouncing off into space. Hubert Auriol, and the Heroes Legend organisation, were having some kind of french shruggy conflab in the border control office. He made it out of Morocco, into the no-mans-land between the tank berms. Not bad, considering that it's harder to get out of Morocco than it is to get into it. - no passport remember? Some more conflabby-shruggy stuff, and he pops up in Mauritania.

A bit less smartly dressed than when he left Paris - several kilos and one passport lighter, with a bike that's starting to complain a little, but still - Mauritania.

That's got to be what you call "the luck of the Irish".

More Apollo 13 moments await - phone coverage is worse in Mauritania than it is in Morocco. We wait some more.