Magnus & Dave will be turning up the heat for the UK Youth riders on their training camp with Cycle Gran Canaria, will the mountains spit them out the back? let's see!

Cycle Gran Canaria: Europe's Best Winter Training for Cyclists http://ping.fm/SQWJ2

A Most Painful Ride by cyclegrancanaria at Garmin Connect - Details http://ping.fm/j1su9

If Gran Canaria is good enough for Saxobank, then why are you still trudging around Majorca in the cold? http://ping.fm/0fmVD

Hello, Cycle Gran Canaria is the only bespoke cycle holiday company in Gran Canaria, point by point the best island for cycling in the Canaries, so if you travel for your cycling holiday or training camp, then from Nov to April, this is the place for you, so we look forward to riding with you.

Raymond Leddy
Owner of Cycle Gran Canaria

A Cycling Generation Lost, Found & Lost Again..

Bikes, smikes, in the UK the resurgence of cycling is a boon to the green minded and welcome step forward in a country otherwise preoccupied with doing itself down in the quality of life stakes. That is all to the good believe me, and even better a Mintel report which I cannot afford, but of which I garnered a butchers, states that there's "6 million new cyclists that have yet to take a cycling holiday".....as long it's with me in Gran Canaria then doubly welcome! 


The sportive crowd too have their passions sated with a never ending list of events to gurn their way through. MTB sects too have tailor made tracks and routes so much now that email queries from the UK profess familiarity with black and red runs....black and red runs?? Where did that come from? And why do I need to be convinced of one's MTB prowess in order to accept a booking? 


MTB is for all and cycling is for everybody. But one group I fear, aren't catered for, the older generation fear death and debilitating injury on a bike more so than the rest of us and quite rightly too, if the law states that one must ride in the urban environment on the public road, where metal blind rhinos await the merest whiff of your presence to trigger a fatal charge in your direction, it's unsurprising therefore that cycling in the UK is only for the immortal.

But wait...it doesn't have to be like that, students of my very popular Facebook page will know that I've been wintering in Germany during August and September, in fact I am laying this ink down on the return flight. Those same students have seen the photo of me riding a ladies shopping bike with fashionable basket, this, my main mode of transport during my stay along with an asthmatic mark II Golf. I didn't feel embarrassed at all, because my bike was perhaps the most normal looking bike on the dike, and I had plenty to choose from, for Ruegin as a popular destination on the Baltic, is a warren of bike, forest and beach tracks to twiddle along in blissful ignorance of the fashion rules of cycling. 

I am not a spring chicken by any means but I was a warm egg age wise in relation to the other cyclists purposefully pedalling around and past me, and not a helmet, spd or suspension fork amongst them. Riding unfashionably on the pavement in perfect harmony with walkers and on ghastly ugly frames with vertical bar ends, I counted 103 of them at one junction alone, that's 103 old folks riding bikes in all directions for all purposes....I noticed too that all where sitting upright, not a sprinters crouch in the whole pack? 


Closer examination showed head and fork tubes higher than the saddle...hence the comfortable upright position, so bikes made for older people with stiffer joints so that older people can continue to ride and keep fit and healthy, bike tracks used by older people so that they don't have to gamble their effort with their life in the hereafter.

This is the way it is, not a ground breaking facetious initiative by a vote scrounging odious government wrapped around a mean spirited tax incentive scheme...

So have we missed the point, if you see my point?

Just get away from it all,or can we?

This folks, is another stab at the now passe art of blogging. I rather stupidly named the last one with the year, thereby limiting it's life to that year,and oh what a year it was! But that is that, now I suppose this I Cycle title, which was delivered to me in a cold flash, cold I say because I am not in sunny Gran Canaria but ensconced somewhat happily but freezing in Germany.

A place where summer has passed me by, so no happy memories of cycling along sandy lanes alongside the glittering Baltic, full of apfelstrudel and black beer. No this year, it's sitting in with apfelstrudel strudel and black beer and no cycling. Therefore the first few weeks back in GC I have planned an intensive training programme to get rid of said apfelstrudel  of my climbing frame...I hope.

I hope too therefore I have not left it too late, for the BMC beauty is agitating in it's hiding place, no doubt looking forward to getting up into the hills again, while the business of Cycle Gran Canaria which started with a scream of naivety a few years ago, has solidified into something fairly workable.

What amazes me is that each year, is a quantum leap realised, further into the world of cycling...imagine annoying Gerard Vroomen and being blanked continuously by George Hincapie, but being on nodding terms with Indurain and having Lance Armstrong have a word with you, or more recently swapping some Newham Park memories with Cadel Evans, so what will 2012 bring?!

Another spat with big George?!

Raymond