Andrew and Iain Todd write about endurance sport, football and the everyday absurdity of life. Twin brothers, occasional triathletes, and authors of six books between them.
The first ‘adventure book’ I read was Ben Fogle and James Cracknell’s ‘The Crossing’. Their story of how they rowed across the Atlantic – and a book which inspired the format of book TwinBikeRun – which you can buy here! – as chapters jump between the viewpoints of both of them. A format which leads to two perspectives on events. And a format which would have greatly benefitted ‘Up: My Life’s Journey To Everest’ as while I don’t quite agree with this one star Amazon review:
“Fairly well written but disappointed to discover Mr Fogle is such a selfish man. Will not be buying anything else he writes.”
It does have a point. If you want to read about Ben Fogle and only Ben Fogle then this book is the one for you even though his attempt to climb Everest was a joint challenge with former Olympic cyclist, Victoria Pendleton, she barely gets a mention. Even though hers is arguably the better story – she had no experience of climbing, no history of adventure and the challenges she faced and the decisions she made were far harder than any Ben Fogle faced. His toughest challenge was paying his Sherpa a summit bonus and to head back down the mountain before they’d reached the top so that Fogle could take their equipment when his own failed.
While the book is called “My Life’s Journey” and not “our journey” and it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than his story, it did feel like another voice was missing and only part of the journey was told.
A couple of week ago I went on vacation to Gran Canaria. It was a trip that was originally booked back in 2019 but the small matter of a global pandemic got in the way.
It was a 4 hour journey from Glasgow to Gran Canaria. All passengers had to wear a face mask on the plane. I thought maybe I could get away with taking it off whilst drinking but the stewardess announced over the radio “If you’re thinking you can order one drink and then nurse it mask-less all the way to GC then forget about it! Keep your masks on!”
You can’t get anything past an air stewardess. They have seen every trick in the book.
Both Glasgow and Gran Canaria airport were very quiet. Which meant we were in and out of both pretty quick.
I could claim the holiday was winter weather training but I’ve never understood why people go somewhere sunny to train. 90% of Scottish races are in the cold and rain.
If I want to train I should go somewhere with weather worse than Scotland. Then, on race day, even if the weather was bad I be relieved that it’s not as bad as the time I trained in hailstones and a gale in the the Arctic circle.
I hired electric mountain bikes from http://www.free-motion.com/en/gran-canaria/ I’ve free-motion bike a few times. They are easy to deal with and the bikes are good quality.
From out hotel in Melonares there was a few good on and off road routes to try. Check out the video below to see an example.
I’ve cycled in Gran Canaria, Tenerife and Lanzarote, Of the three islands. I prefer Gran Canaria. The roads are quieter than Tenerife and it is not as windy as Lanza.
But I didn’t see any professional cyclists training. I have seen professional on both Terneriffe and Lanza so maybe don’t come here if you have any ambitions to win the Tour De France. Just come if you want a lovely place for a spin on your bike.
A selection of routes to try:
Degollada de las Yeguas
Popular lookout point in an expansive nature reserve offering sweeping views of the canyon.
No, I’m not Brad Pitt. I know I look like him but I can assure you that while we might share the same chiseled features and unmistakable look of almighty handsome-ness, I am not him.
Is what I didn’t say because no one has ever asked me that. But I can but hope.
“Yes,” I said.
“What do you think of that t-shirt?” And he pointed at a neon pink t-shirt hanging on a rail at the back of the shop.
I was in a running shop to buy a t-shirt. In fact, I was now at the till having picked up a t-shirt and brought it to the till to pay for it. I had seen the pink t-shirt while browsing but hadn’t tried it on because it was a colour that can only be described with words like “shocking”, “blinding” or “confident in my sexuality”.
I’m not sure what to say so I try and think of something neutral. I say: “I prefer t-shirts with a pattern.”
It’s only when I say it that I realise I’ve handed him a simple blue t-shirt. I now look like a man who says I don’t like running while standing in a running shop buying running gear and talking about running.
The assistant doesn’t notice, instead they ask: “Would you buy it?”
Would I heck. I’d sooner run naked than wear a top that can be seen from the moon. You couldn’t give away a t-shirt like this. They should cut their losses now and just burn it. But I can’t say that. I say: “I’ve already paid for this one.” And I hold up the blue one.
But the assistant won’t take my evasion for an answer. “I know it’s divisive. We just want to know what people think of it?”
And I look at it again and I realise that while I wouldn’t buy it, I would actually wear it as I have a t-shirt which is exactly the same colour – and I worn it many times while out running. The only difference between my t-shirt and this one is that I received my one for free after a race.
And that’s when I realised that you could give it away because runners will accept anything if it’s free. I have race t-shirst I would never have considered buying. Insipid colours. Garish patterns. T-shirts which look like they’d been designed by a dog running through a paint pot. As long as it’s free, runners will keep it, wear it and not give it a second thought.
Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here
Bradford City
Nickname: The Bantams
Ground: Coral Windows Stadium
Stadium Capacity: 25,136
Song: Let’s Get Ready For Wembley
In 2013 Bradford City became the first ever team from the fourth tier of English football to reach a major domestic Wembley cup final – the Football League Cup. On the pitch Bradford lost 5 – 0 to Swansea but off the pitch the Bantams scored with the unofficial song ‘Let’s Get Ready For Wembley’ based on the Ant and Dec classic ‘Let’s Get Ready To Rumble’.
The song was created by Bantam’s Banter, the unofficial Bradford City podcast, which Tom Fletcher and Dom Newton-Collinge record live from the Valley Parade press box. This was the first independent podcast to reach number one in the iTunes charts. The otherwise excellent song and video for ‘Let Get Ready For Wembley’ has one crime against the English language: Wembley is rhymed with tremble-y.
Ant and Dec would be proud – as would York City (see York City for a similar abuse of the English language).
Bradford City’s the only professional football club in England to wear claret and amber. Although Motherwell have the same colours in Scotland it’s thought it ‘borrowed’ them from Bradford. The origin of Bradford City’s colours is less well known but it’s assumed it adopted the same colours of the West Yorkshire Regiment that it first used as changing rooms for the club.
In 1985, 56 spectators died and many more were seriously injured when a fire engulfed a stand at the Valley Parade ground. It was the worst fire disaster in the history of English football. A special recording of the Liverpool FC anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ was recorded to raise money for victims of the fire. It featured Gerry Marsden and Paul McCartney and was recorded under the name “The Crowd”.
Film Friday is a weekly recommendation of one video to watch this weekend.
Sometimes you don’t have to see any more than the thumbnail to now what happens next. 3000 squats in a month. 100 a day. What could happen? The photo on the right might give it away…
Like many kids, my first injury involved falling off my bike.
And like many kids, it also involved crashing into a car.
However, unlike any other kid, I crashed into a parked car. Even worse I crashed into a parked car while cycling uphill. I can’t even say I lost control, or my brakes failed, or any of the many other reasons an accident could happen. I cycled deliberately into a parked car that I could have easily involved if I’d just looked up.
It was raining. My head was down and I cycling uphill towards our house, which is near the top of a steep road. One minute I was cycling, the next I was face planting onto the rear window of a Ford Fiesta.
I can’t blame my bike, I can’t blame the conditions, I can only blame myself for not looking where I was going. A common cause of accidents as, this week, I managed to do exactly the same thing.
(Though not a Ford Fiesta, this time it was a tree).
There are many ways to have an accident while riding a mountain bike. You could crash while riding downhill through a particularly gnarly black run. You could fall off a cliff while attempting a dangerous Danny MacAskill ridge crossing. Or you could do what I did and ride up a path, get stuck in a rut, see a bush ahead and think, I can just cycle through that.
(Not stop and avoid the bush, oh no, I had to keep going.)
And that’s why Iain TwinBikeRun asked “Why did you ride into that tree, while going uphill, on a clear path, when you could have just stopped?”
And I didn’t have an answer because I was lying on the ground, nursing my elbow and wandering why 30 years after my fist accident I still wasn’t looking where I was going.
Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here
Bolton Wanderers
Nickname: The Trotters
Ground: The Reebok Stadium
Stadium Capacity: 28,100
Song: Just Can’t Get Enough
In March 2011, Bolton Wanderers started blasting out ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ by Depeche Mode over the speakers every time a goal was scored to try and improve the atmosphere around the stands of The Reebok Stadium.
The club had used a similar trick to improve atmosphere on the club’s return to the Premier League with James Brown’s ‘I Feel Good’.
Owen Coyle, then Bolton manager, explained that the decision was part of Bolton’s efforts to improve the match day experience for fans.
“The important thing is that we try and build an atmosphere, and that it gets better” he told The Bolton News, before he added: “It’s not my personal favourite but it might prove to be if we keep using it because it means we’ve scored goals.”
It’s fair to say that Owen Coyle never became a fan of Depeche Mode. He left the club in 2012 after Bolton was relegated from the Premiership after failing to score enough goals to stay up. Recent years have seen the club fall further and be threatened with winding up due to unpaid debts.
It’s surprising that Bolton’s Reebok Stadium lacks atmosphere, as, according to a survey by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Boltonians are the friendliest people in Britain. This friendliness is not reflected in the stadium design. Rather than walk onto the pitch together, teams emerge from separate tunnels on either side of the halfway line. Also, the away fans are seated in the lower tiers not covered by the Reebok stadium’s roof. Visiting fans are advised to bring waterproofs if it looks like it might rain.
The club is proud of its history. In 1939 every member of the team volunteered to fight the Nazis. In front of a 23,000 strong crowd, the Bolton skipper gave a rousing speech before leading the entire team to sign up at a local Territorial Army hall.
For the next six years, the players faced some of the heaviest fighting of the war in France, North Africa and Italy, while also establishing themselves as a formidable regimental football team. They were even pulled off the front line to play King Farouk’s side in Cairo. Incredibly, after six years of fighting, all but one of the team survived the war.
Before moving to The Reebok Stadium in 1997, the club played for over 100 years at Burnden Park. Its most famous song relates to the older stadium and is sung to the tune of ‘The Blaydon Races’, a famous Geordie folk song (see Newcastle United).
The original is considered to be the unofficial anthem of Tyneside and is frequently sung by supporters of both Newcastle United and Newcastle Falcons rugby club. The song is used by a number of sides (Walsall, Blackburn, Berwick Rangers and Portadown) by changing the geographical references and dialect. The lyrics are changed to suit the club but the tune remains the same.
“Aw went to Blaydon Races, ’twas on the ninth of Joon,
Eiteen hundred an’ sixty-two, on a summer’s efternoon;
Aw tyuk the ‘bus frae Balmbra’s, an’ she wis heavy laden,
Away we went alang Collingwood Street, that’s on the road to Blaydon.“
