Back of our Audi Q5 courtesy car full up with bike stuff

As the title says I actually completed it and god does my body keep telling me, it was hard. The Highland fling is a 100km off-road mountain bike endurance  event in the forest about 2 hrs south west of Sydney.  Sanna and I packed up our Audi Q5 with bike bits which was our courtesy car from Audi and off we went.

The course is 2% road about a third on fire trail and 2 thirds on hilly rocky single track. It must have felt like doing 200km on the road, it was such hard going.  By the halfway mark I was working in the 80-90% maximum heart rate zone for a few hours and that results in muscle lactic acid build-up. My legs were in so much pain from my hips down to my ankles and on and off I couldn’t feel my right foot 100% it was numb due to all the oxygen going to my leg muscles and no further. I had just not trained enough long distance which resulted in that. I was eating energy gel and water every 40 minutes as recommend but the pain was there for hours till the end.

I used the Runkeeper app on the iPhone to record the event and used Sanna’s wireless compatible heart rate monitor to monitor my head rate. At one point during a massive hill climb my heart rate went into the 180’s which is 90-100% of maximum heart rate zone, I cant describe how hard that felt.

Click here to use the full interactive map and stats from the race

The battery on Sanna’s iPhone died about 5km’s from the end so that’s why it doesn’t show the full 100km but you can see I burned just over 3000 Calories, that’s a day and a half’s normal day of food, no wonder I was hungry at the end.

The After 6 hours and 35 minutes of riding (in which the last stage I had to push the bike up some of the hills) I got across the finish line.

Crossing the finishing line after 6 hours and 35 minutes of riding

And here are my final results, the course was in three stages, the Ground Effect stage, the Shimano stage and the GU stage. Apparently most first timers do it in around 7 hours so I’m pretty happy with my time, I’m just glad I finished, it was probably the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done, probably even harder than a marathon.

My 2011 Highland fling result 6:35

This is an blog update mainly aimed at all my sponsors who between you raised $340 a big thank you!

Now onto the bad news, on Saturday morning I started feeling really ill really quickly and by lunchtime I realised of had terrible food poisoning. It must have been from something I ate on Friday but I can’t remember eating anything out of the ordinary. Come Saturday afternoon I was still in a lot of stomach pain and so weak and couldn’t leave the couch under a blanket so I had no choice but to make arrangements to not start the race at 6:30am the following morning. I’m very sorry to let you down after you gave money to sponsor me.

My two other riding partners Brendon and Sanna did start though, Brendon had a problem with the rear wheel on his bike ¾ of the way and had to stop but Sanna managed to make it all the way to the 90km end. She said it felt a lot harder this year than last year, maybe as it was quite a hot day in the sun out there.

All is not lost though as its now Monday and I’m already feeling better and next weekend is an even bigger event the Briars Highland fling, a 100km off-road mountain bike endurance event one of the toughest in Australia (and possibly the world due to the rough terrain) Map attached if you want to take a look. I will use your sponsorship as inspiration to encourage me through the pain and the tough times of this ride.

The 2001 Briars Highland Fling Trail map

I have reached my fundraising target for the Sydney to Wollongong (the Gong) for 2011!

 

The ride takes place next weekend November the 6th over 90km on the road South. Here’s a map of the ride and a map showing the hills if your interested to see what I’ll be going through.  This is my 4th attempt of the ride and this time I’m planning on doing it at the quickest speed possible.

A BIG thankyou to all my sponsors  from both Australia and back in England. Especially a BIG mention to Richard Wright who was my biggest sponsor with $80!

Update 28/10/11
My Grandad has just sponsored me $20, my total is now upto $310 thanks Grandad!

A recent photo from friend Ian’s wedding.

Remember don’t smoke kids, its bad for you, as you can see from my face!!

Not the most flattering photo in the world but it captured
the moment just after Sanna said Yes

Hi all, I am sure everybody in my friends and family knows this news now, but just to be sure, and to stop all the 100’s of women that approach me every day, Sanna and I are engaged!

I proposed to Sanna in Tokyo on the way over to England to my sisters wedding, the exact place was right at the top of the Odaiba ferris wheel in the Palette town region of Tokyo. The wheel was so massive, one of the biggest in the world, that on the way up to the top I heard a bit of creaking and wind rushing by, my hands were sweating and I was so nervous. After I proposed at the top Sanna though I was nervous from proposing, no, it was actually the bloody height of the wheel!

Odaiba ferris wheel in the Palette town region of Tokyo

Our plans at the moment are to get married at the end of the next Australian summer so around February 2013 so about 16 months time, that’ll give us plenty of time to get it organised. Our thoughts at the moment are for it to take place over a weekend away in the Hunter valley wine region at a vineyard just North of Sydney for our family and friends to enjoy the wedding and to get away for a weekend in the Australian countryside.

Happy  Birthday to my best mate Brendon! 29 on Friday! We surprised him at a friends recording studio Tommirock in Newcastle. We all hid in the studio with the lights out and jumped out, he didn’t have a clue, well done to Easton for organising the surprise and not letting it on to him.

Happy Birthday Captain Sunnies

Cake portion control out of control

Easton’s portion was just totally out of control

Music studio webcams, good job Brendon didn’t
know about these before we surprised him

We were in a music studio so we had to record a amazing live version of the Nyan Cat song haha I was rocking out at the piano at the back in the pink sunnies.

Hi family and friends, we have been back in Australia for one week now and I’m over my jet lag (it took 4 days this time) so I’ll post some photos and even some video of our lovely trip here on my blog.

Japan

We really didn’t get too many photos of our 6 day trip to Japan as we seemed to be filming everything on the video camera and leave the digital camera behind in the hotel room, but here are some.

On the way to the hotel in Tokyo from the airport Sanna posed to make a joke of the lady behind her on the bus.

All Tokyo toilets are either a hole in the floor style or the majority super electric ones like this that wash your bits after your done. Click on the photo to zoom in and read the label too as the English is so bad its funny.

We went out to a great restaurant on the first night and got talking to a few people in the restaurant and made some new friends. Some spoke alright English and some not much at all. It was fun comparing Japan culture to Australian/English culture. The guy to the right bought me some Sake’s when I was already a bit drunk and got me really drunk, they were all so friendly. The next day I had a Sake hangover.

A selection of small Japanese drinks we got in the local convenience store. We worked out by tasting them 3 were alcoholic and 1 was an energy drink. We were not sure what was floating in 2 of them, they looked like large olives or cows balls, we think they were apricots maybe.

England

England the main reason for the Trip to Europe for 2011 was for my sister Nicki’s wedding at my families local church with the wedding reception at my parents barn and land.

We organised a local tractor and trailer to ferry the wedding guests from the church to the reception at my parents, it was a unique and fun way to move everyone around and a good idea.

The wedding in the tiny St Mary’s village church in our village of Barnham.

Here is the wedding reception guests in the large marquee that was put up on my families land, this photo was taken during the speeches.

Here is the top table during my dad’s speech, this was taken from my view off to the side where I was doing the wedding MC’ duties on the microphone through the evening.

My sister in her wedding dress on the bucking bronco, other games for everyone to have fun on also were, bungee run, coconut shy, horse shoe throwing, bouncy castle (jumping castle for the Aussie readers) and tug of war (which we forgot to do).

I made a short video slideshow made up of photos of me and Nicki growing up and Michael her husband growing up and lastly photos made up of the wedding day. I showed this video at around 10pm at the wedding reception and it was received well by the crowd.

Here catching up with old mates Dom and Leo in a Chichester pub, Rich Earnshaw was out of town DJ’ing in North America but I caught up with Mark Akky, Claire With’s and Rich Wright also, good times Lovely to see you all.

Leo is now also finally a official stuntman now for Hollywood films. He’s been training for some 6-8 years by memory now and he’s now officially paid to hang out with famous stars and jump off very large buildings with explosions going off. He’s in the latest ‘Pirates of the Caribbean film’ with a short speaking part during a chase down some stairs with Johnny Depp, check his part out in this video.

Portugal

Sanna and I escaped England for 6 days to the south coast Algarve region of Portugal for some beach time and exploring the countryside in our hire car.

Beautiful Sea of the Algarve, beautiful colour

Sagres beer along with Super Bock are the two national beers of Portugal, I preferred Sagres.

Typical beach of the Algarve with the warm setting sun.

This was taken playing around with a 3 second exposure on the camera and Sanna walking slowly across the frame

Sanna having fun in the Hotel Delfin’s pool

Exploring the inland areas of the Algarve we found these MASSIVE wind turbines, the base was wider than a typical small car.

On top of the tallest mountain in the Algarve region we found this mountain goats hanging around a watering hole.

We got shipwrecked on this lake and had to try and build a raft

A restaurant and bar that was 3 levels built into the rock face on the beach, we had a lovely meal here on our last evening in Portugal

Thanks for reading, speak soon, Mark.

Step 1, buy all the parts of course!

Getting stuck into the video editing of my video show Supercar Spin every month has become a real patience test and a half in recent months. The trouble is, as we are getting a little bit better and better with more HD footage and more videos of the cars we feature and the show creeps each episode a little bit longer, my old laptop is really starting to grind. I thought about it for a minute, all the times I press ‘play’ to preview a change I’ve made, if you add all those up through the video editing complete process, they work out to be close to hours wasted.

The solution was to spec out and build a fast video editing workstation specifically designed to power through the video editing process  from beginning to end, to give me more time being creative and less time waiting for the laptop to play catch-up.

After a few evenings of research on the internet to find out what the best ‘bang for yer buck’ parts were for a ‘video editing workstation’ I learnt it is (warning this gets real geeky now):

• as fast a CPU as you can afford – so I bought a Intel i7 960 quad core CPU
• a SSD (Solid State Drive) – for Windows and all programs for ultra fast random read/writes
• 2 x ‘Raptor’ drives in RAID 0 configuration – for all video content to be written to/read from
• NVidia GTX470 video card – compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro hardware acceleration
• 8Gb of RAM minimum – RAM is so cheap nowadays so I opted for 12Gb
• A 64bit operating system – So I went with Windows 7 64bit
• A good backup solution – so I got a 2Tb USB 3 external hard disk that gets locked in the safe after every monthly backup

I haven’t built a PC at home for about 10 years now, but I’ve been building servers in the day job in that time so how hard could it be? Driving all around Sydney to get all the parts for the cheapest prices around from dodgy hard to find Asian suburbs was the hardest thing to do!

Driving all the way round bloody Sydney just to get the cheapest parts

Actually building the workstation wasn’t too hard. Firstly you go buy all the parts as mentioned above and you can see in the first photo at the top of this blog post. Next is to get all the parts out of their over packaged boxes and start prodding expensive shiny looking parts with your fingers showing excitement, I did this part when Sanna was out so she didn’t get jealous of my excitement

Lay all the expensive bits out on a table to poke at

Now we build the complete computer on the kitchen table and power it up and start to install Windows. You don’t have to build the whole computer on the kitchen table but it does look quite cool doing so, it also does provide good opportunities for short-circuiting stuff so its not really advisable, but it looks cool!

Turn the kitchen table into a electrical hazard

Now you have to get your new computers case and strip out all the wires and install the power supply usually at the bottom at the back. If your a cashed up teenager, this is usually when you install silly things like water cooling and neon lights in the computer, because we all know neon lights make your computer more powerful! just like stripes on a car make it go faster!

Empty case, boring and doesn’t let you edit too many videos

Lastly we bung all of the parts you saw on the table before into the case as neatly as possible. Would you believe it, after not building a computer for myself in 10 years it all worked first time, no troubleshooting! and boy is it miles faster than my old SONY  VAIO laptop.

Fully built video editing workstation, does let you edit videos in blistering speed

So I set out with the aim to research and build a purpose built workstation for video editing and rendering HD videos for supercar spin and yes it delivers well, its bloody fast! The only way I could prove this to myself was to run up Adobe Premiere Pro and set it on a versus rendering faceoff between the old laptop and the new workstation in the video below.

Ok ‘geekyness’ over with, time to return to normal life and make another episode of Supercar Spin.