Thursday, April 23, 2009

More Dry Fast Trails

Another Wednesday evening ride made really enjoyable by dry dusty trails, looking forward to hopefully spending some serious quality time with my MTBs over the summer. There were 6 of us in total so a nice group, 5 lads and me as unfortunately Pam couldn't make it.

We rode out from our usual parking spot near the barn, up the always surprisingly hard work Commonwealth down where my legs were quite tired. I was expecting them to be this tired when commuting on Tuesday really but I was fine as long as I didn't try to push too hard.

Over towards Winter Hill we found some new (to us anyway) concessionary bridleways, took the nice gradual singletrack climb up to the masts and followed the diversion track to the top of the Belmont Descent. It was unbelievably dry, one or two slightly soft patches but no real bog.

By the time we were heading down to Belmont it was still light but it was failing and the track had a monochromomatic feel to it, lots of the detail was missing really, interesting hitting bumps that I hadn't seen.

I was doing pretty well until near the bottom where the track broke into ruts and I found myself heading at speed for the edge of a rut, a little grassy lip really, less than a tyre width. Too fast to really change direction and drop into the rut next to me happily. I'd need serious trials skills (and a lot less speed) to actually ride along the lip so I somehow managed to bring myself to a stop without falling off or catapulting myself off the track, which was very lucky.

I managed to get myself into that silly predicament by not looking far enough ahead, my descending speed is starting to come back now so I need to look where I want to go before I get there! We all enjoyed the descent and headed up the road climb then dropped off the cheeky track towards Lead Mines. It was pretty dark by then so it was fun riding some new stuff. Once at Lead Mines we decided against the road hill (my legs wanted none of it) and back to the cars.

A really enjoyable 15 miles.

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