Sounds like it's all happening at Merida 100 Central Command - with three months to go before the first Merida 100 Marathon all five 2004 events are filling up quickly.

For anyone who isn't familiar with enduro/marathon stuff in general and the Merida 100 in particular, the freshly-revamped www.mtb-marathon.co.uk is an excellent first port of call, including training and diet advice, technical know-how and details of all of this year's events. Not to mention the handy on-line entry...

As well as the site there's a new 2004 edition of the treeware MTB-Marathon Guidebook. If you entered any of last year's events it'll probably appear magically on your doorstep, otherwise head to the site, submit your address details and a free copy will wing its way to you.

All of the events have long and short course options, with the entry fee pegged at £25 including free camping, free parking, pasta party, bike wash, free food/service stations around the course, finisher t-shirt, goodies and lots more. A lot of those services are supplied by the impressive list of sponsors - (deep breath) mukshop.com, What Mountain Bike, USE, The Wales Tourist Board, Sugoi, High 5, Schwalbe, RockShox, SRAM, Ciclosport, Evans, Pedros, PPG and Bikemagic.com. That lot are also between them responsible for the impressive £15,000 prize draw fund...

As well as the three Welsh events (Rhayader, 29/30 May; Builth Wells, 3/4 July; Ruthin, 18/19 September) the Merida 100 calendar is spreading its wings to cover an event in Scotland (Selkirk, 31 June) and Austria (Bad Goisern, 10/11 July). Which would appear to make one of its wings considerably longer than the other. But we digress.

The Austrian event is a tie-in with the second UCI MTB Marathon World Championships and Salzkammergut Trophy, making for something of an enduro festival. Saturday sees what's billed as "Europe's hardest MTB marathon" over the 100km World Championship course and an additional 200km course with a total of 7,000m of climbing. We haven't quite worked out whether the marathon involves one course or the other or both, but whichever way you look at it it's a toughie...

There's also 27km or 47km options for the more sensible. And of course the World Championships themselves on the Sunday - you'll need a valid UCI race licence to take part in that one. The Merida guys have sorted out all sorts of travel and accomodation options to make the trip to Austria as easy as possible - check the site for details.

Also falling under the Merida marathon umbrella is the second 12 Hours of Bristol, part of June's Bristol Bike Fest (www.bristolbikefest.com). The course includes bucketloads of prime Ashton Court/Timberland Trail singletrack and should be a corker...