07/06/2018 - Team Update
Our amazing team riders Chay and Swinny are enjoying the dusty trails and race prepping. Here's a life update from Swinny...
- Joined a gym
- Testing shocks
- Clocking up miles
- Recovering from illness
- New YouTube vids in the pipeline
To say it's June already is pretty crazy! The year has flown by for good and bad reasons.
In mid March, a week after my 31st Birthday I fell into an illness that lasted a good couple of months. A combination of things caused this sudden illness, resulting in a drop in health... I won't bore you with the details! But in this time I lost a good 7kgs in body weights and was generally run down, and this is usually the time of year where I'm racking up the kilometers up on the bike. Whether that's road, hardtail or full bouncer it's the time of year I really enjoy getting out on the bike as the daylight hours improve, and it proves so beneficial to get out now to get an amazing summer's riding. Usually, as the weather improves, so does the riding fitness. Not this year, though.
I missed the first race of the year, Vallelujah. I had no energy or drive to get back on the bike. My workplace have been incredibly supportive throughout the whole saga and I can't thank them enough for helping me through it all. Enough of the sob story, let's move on...
I've started up my YouTube channel again, search for James Swinden! Hit follow. I'll be trying to keep an online diary of my year as it unfolds. Unfortunately I lost my camera at Steel City DH! No one was kind enough to hand it in so whoever has it, karma will get you! Clearly mine with the content on it.
It's aiming to be another shameless vlog. I enjoy watching vlogs, I get hooked! (Watch Will Smith's, it's great). As I lost my camera, I've been unable to finish off a few of these, however, there are a few coming so stay tuned as there's stuff like a return to DH Racing and carrying a big ass log in the snow up a hill.
So what else is new... I've joined a gym for the first time in my life... After illness and realising I needed to get back to fitness and build my strength back up, I joined a lad from work who mentioned there's this gym around the corner from work when I fancy a quick workout. There's some big buggers there so it's exciting to train. I'm usually reluctant to train with others, but I'm enjoying this.
So, I minced around the gym for a bit, trying out the machines and free weights then got chatting to the owner, Jon Clark, who I instantly clicked with. We chatted bikes and training and he put together a program for me. I'm now a proud member of Evolution Gym in Halfway, Sheffield. Cheers Jon!
As I said earlier, racking up the KMs are important this time of year as there's a huge number of races coming up. Nationals up at Tweedlove, EWS in Italy and all the others in between. Not really wanting to pedal isn't ideal training conditions, but with the sun shining it's been easier to get back into the swing of things. Plus the dog needs to stretch his legs too!
Cane Creek are supporting the team with suspension this year, so I've spent a bit of time getting to know how it works and understanding it. I've never been a fan of air shocks for some reason, but thankfully Cane Creeks Air IL has been a breath of fresh air. Supple yet supportive, it's been so easy to set up using Cane Creek's Dialled app. A series of simple questions, answered by your own feel on the trail ten a suggestion on what corrections to make...simple but proved very effective.
I've been toying between the Air Inline and the Coil Inline and love both for different reasons. I think depending on the trail I could tailor each shock to suit, but I would be happy to run either regardless of the terrain. So a huge thanks to Cane Creek for their support this year! Really enjoying using your suspension.
A huge thanks to our continued support from our sponsors, it's so important to us. Cheers to all, here's to a great year getting fitter, riding and racing.