Day Four – 7 Stanes (Dalbeattie)

Posted on 12th May 2010 in Ride Reviews, Trail Centres

Day four – 7 Stanes (Dalbeattie)

The day isn’t a misprint. Discretion being the better part of valour, we opted to have an off-bike day on day three, and a very pleasant day wandering around a book town was had too.

Anyway. Dalbeattie. The day didn’t start off on the best of footings, with a complete misery permeating everything. The weather was the usual – cloudy with occasional breaks of sunshine – but sleeping was proving elusive and sleep is a little bit vital at the moment. As a result, we didn’t turn up in the car park with me in my usual state of raring to go. I dribbled out of the car, spent too long over shoe choice and was generally hesitant about the whole thing.

Dalbeattie doesn’t have a Trailhead in the traditional sense of the word. The bike wash is a standpipe with a hose attached and a log to rest your bike against. There are no toilets, no café, no showers, no one at all. There is a distinct absence of everything that there is to be found at all the other Stanes Trailheads that we’ve visited so far. There’s a car park, a shelter with some maps on it, an empty box where the mobile form of the map should be, and that’s your lot.

Hidden depths.

We set off, following the signs past the skills area to the ‘Main Trails’. The usual uphill slog began. So far, so normal. And then suddenly, the rules of the game changed and we weren’t in Kansas any more. Our experience to this point of Northshore has involved Gisburn’s attempt on the Blue route – a short and brief spurt which gives you a taste of the unnerving feel of rolling across narrow pieces of wood slatted together with a bog lurking below – Dalbeattie’s Northshore is not short. It’s long, forgivingly wide, winds you through some incredibly soggy looking ground and whilst treating you very gently, gives you a lovely introduction to the slightly weird sound the wood makes beneath your tyres. I pootled along it, I admit.

Eventually the usual fire road appeared, and things seemed to return to situation same as. Then the trail darted off the fire road and we were presented with some singletrack gorgeousness. Somewhat tellingly, the feel of it was a little similar to Kirroughtree, but with a day between me and the nightmare, things seemed to have clicked and we both flew along it. Emerging the other side, a little breathless and with very big grins, glad we’d bothered to get out of bed seemed somewhat of an understatement.

More fire road. And more. And yet more. The Blue at Dalbeattie is 14km long, a bit of an epic for a Blue route even by Scottish standards, and my trail centre guidebook tells me that not a lot of it is singletrack. Well, frankly, it’s not. But that’s not the point of Dalbeattie. The point of Dalbeattie is to learn how to deal with hills. Little ones and big ones alike, there are many of them there. Let me tell you about hills. If you’ve got no energy left in your muscles, hills are pootled up in bottom gear on the granny ring because that’s all the energy you can muster, and 70 year olds whizzing past you be damned. Once your muscles are in that bad place, even when the track evens out, you’ve not got the power to build up the speed to attack the next hill properly, and so every single damn hill turns into an epic, as you start from the bottom in the lowest gear with no momentum to take the sting out of the t(r)ail.

We got to 8km, the point where we’re usually looking for the end of the route, and I was struggling. Humidity levels were making the forest feel like a Brazilian one, the sun was by turns beating down mercilessly or hiding behind a cloud, my balance had decided to take a temporary holiday and a muscle in my left thigh was twanging quietly to itself. We were, absolutely literally, miles from anywhere. Felling machinery could be heard in the distance, but the last person we’d seen was a runner 6km back and there was no escape route, and no easy way home.

That’s where you learn. That’s when you stop messing about, grit your teeth, get your head down and decide that holding energy reserves back constantly is getting you nowhere anyway, so sitting down for 15 minutes, gathering yourself, getting some liquid and food down and thinking about something else and then manning (womanning?) up and going for it is the only thing left to do.

So I did. I attacked the trail instead of pootling over it. I forgot about the curious incident of the LouLou going over the handlebars in the daytime and just pushed and pushed and pushed. Suddenly, the hills which I’d been pootling up? Momentum was getting me halfway up and determination was doing the rest. My muscles felt nicely warm instead of filled with acid, my breathing went oddly quiet, my heart rate wasn’t spiking all over the place, the earth moved…..

Okay, so the earth didn’t move. But I did, and fast. Singletrack appeared and got the same treatment, and suddenly, without a second thought, everything just clicked. More Northshore appeared and was ridden properly, I ended up on top of blind horizons with just enough momentum that there was a pause to scope the trail in front before dropping down again, berms were ridden properly, the little ups were attacked and disappeared into nothing and I landed at the car park with the biggest grin on my face ever.

Yesterday (today is day five) I rode like I meant it. I rode as best I could, as fast as I could, with as much commitment, focus and determination as I could. I didn’t hold back. I didn’t meander mindlessly around the trails. I switched up, looked sharp and pushed. For about 45 minutes, all the fat on my body disappeared, my muscles and lungs were those of someone far fitter than me, and my mind? My mind, I think, was in ‘the zone’. The happy place. The place where it doesn’t actually matter what the trail throws at you, you’ll deal with it. If there had been drop offs I’d have done them, if there’d been jumps I would have had a go. From a morning of utter apathy and sadness came one of the best rides I’ve ever had, where I found something buried inside myself that I didn’t know I had.

I bought a Marin because I loved it. Now, finally, I am starting to believe I can be the rider that this daft as all hell bike deserves. I also understand that unless I am prepared to ride like I want to be there, push hard and learn from my own mistakes, that I have no right calling myself a mountain biker. Everyone is allowed off days. Absolutely everyone. But yesterday wasn’t one of them, and yesterday I became a mountain biker. Something changed. I don’t think it will ever change back.

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Day Two – 7 Stanes (Kirroughtree)

Posted on 8th May 2010 in Ride Reviews, Trail Centres

Everyone has a wake up call. Or at least, I’d guess so. Mine was the Kirroughtree Blue route. The clues were there, if I’d looked close enough – someone on Singletrack’s forum mentioned Dalbeattie and Kirroughtree’s Blues were ‘the best’ Blue routes of the 7 Stanes, and I should know well enough by know that what a competent Red route rider deems best is probably not actually a Blue route but a Blue route cunningly disguised as a bit of a Red route without the drop offs and jumps. The other clue should have been the map at the Trailhead, showing as it did that the Blue and Red shared really quite a lot of track – something which is quite unusual down in that there England.

None of this had actually registered in my enthused state of mind. I had a new bike, Glentrool had gone well overall, I had brakes, what was there to worry about?

Not all singletrack is created equal, let me tell you that for a start. Singletrack, until I went to Kirroughtree, was at least 40cm wide, didn’t have sheer drops at the side of it, and no one was evil enough to put boulders on the insides of corners at the crests of hills, waiting to jump out and grab you given half the chance.

Kirroughtree was my wake up call. Specifically, the first descent at Kirroughtree was my wake up call. Sometimes, the uphills all merge into one, but I have a good memory for the descents, because each one so far has been unique in the challenges which it presents. Each trail centre has a character, a sense of itself, and the memories they leave are coloured in some way. Or in this case the nightmares.

I wasn’t expecting it, was the thing. By now, uphills are a pretty regular pattern of my calves and quads burning and cramping for the first 2km, at which point they concede defeat, all goes quiet, my gear selection muscle memory returns and all drifts into a rhythm of hill section, stop and pant for 2 mins, hill section, pant for 2 mins and pretty much rinse and repeat the whole way up. So when the trail disappeared off the fire road with a sign next to it which clearly stated a graphic of a sloped triangle innocuously marked ‘Descent,’ I just didn’t register it.

All I remember is thinking ‘oh my god, I can’t do this’ constantly for 3 minutes. I don’t get scared (yet another story for another day, but the quick version is, I wasn’t born with the fear chip activating in the right place) but the confluence of 20cm singletrack, sweeping curves with drops on the inside and stones littered all over the place when I was in uphill droning lalaland resulted in a serious denting of confidence. I finally caught up with my partner at the other end and darkly muttered something about escape routes.

We carried on, of course. There are two things that are written in my mountain bike rulebook currently. One, thou shalt not walk up any hill ever, no matter how many times you have to stop and pant and die quietly, and two, thou shalt not return to the Trailhead in any other way than by following the little blue arrows, unless a) you’ve got a migraine b) you can’t stand up or c) you can’t see/breathe any more. Being scared is not a valid reason for aborting anything – this applies to no one else and if my other half had ever had enough we’d back at the car park quicker than you could yell ‘eeeep,’ but I used to wuss out way too easily and the rules stop that happening.

Things, as they usually do, came together. Pedal positioning is something I have hitherto been entirely lazy about. If I switch my left pedal down to go around a left cornering berm, the left foot stays down. When a rock is placed on the exit of a berm for the sole reason of throwing you off your bike for your laziness, you quickly learn. It took, I’d say, about 10 minutes for the message to sink in.

Then there was the narrow track. Somewhere along the line, that sunk in as well. By the time we were doing the last bits of descent of the route, I wasn’t even aware of it, and whizzing between tree trunks not so far off the end of my handlebars wasn’t registering either – something I’d been hesitant about when reading of such things. Rocky Road happened somewhere in there too – and I must confess I walked it. I do not understand what on earth it was doing there, I do not understand how you are supposed to be able to ride that on a hybrid, I do not understand where the line between momentum and a very painful impact is, and I do not understand what the hell it was doing on a Blue route with no chicken run next to it. But then, this is Scotland. There are no chickens here, only cows. No frightened mountain bikers here. Only ones made of rubber-coated titanium.

Also in the middle of this, right after Rocky Road, I encountered someone who, frankly, deserves a medal. Whilst landing from the adrenaline rush, along with a few others (breaks in descents on singletrack where it crosses fireroad are guaranteed gathering points for the lesser spotted mountain biker) a racer went by.

Nope, that wasn’t a typo. A man, on a road racing bike, with dropped handlebars and road brakes, no suspension and a bloody big grin went by. Mouths hit floors. The smell of WTF gave the air a certain frisson. The echo of a ‘wahoooooo!’ echoed up from the next bit of singletrack as he descended without a pause for breath. His partner, somewhat apologetically mentioned in a brief pause for breath that ‘he hadn’t got round to hiring a mountain bike’.

Anyone who thinks they’ve got grit? You try it. On road tyres.

After that, any hesitation and fear I felt sort of went out of the window. I mean, I’ve got a bike made for this stuff sitting under me and this bloke has just made me feel really rather an embarrassment. So off we went again. This time, the track looked a little different and my mindset was a little better and things really did start to come together, though I still wasn’t having quite the day at the office I’d hoped for. Car parks were arrived at, sneering bike shop assistants were endured, bikes were washed, coffee was gulped. A brief conversation was had about going around again. It was brief.

As a footnote, I’d like to say thank you to the lovely couple who chatted with me at the top of the very final descent. I’m sorry I didn’t ask where you were from, and indeed didn’t manage to observe any of the social rules of engagement acknowledged amongst mountain bikers. I was absolutely exhausted and I’m very sorry. You were lovely, and disguised your shock at our plans to ride 5 of the 7 Stanes in one week very well :O)

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Day one – 7 Stanes (Glentrool)

Posted on 5th May 2010 in Ride Reviews, Trail Centres

As perhaps has been previously mentioned (though perhaps not, I lose track), holidays are a one sided planning affair in our household. The usual conversation goes along the lines of ‘shall we go on holiday?’, he replies ‘sounds like a plan’ and I wander off and hammer Google for 2 weeks straight, trying to find somewhere which treads the fine line between comfortable, peaceful (me) and near to a pub (him).

The one we are currently in the midst of went a little differently. ‘Shall we go on a mountain biking holiday?’ I proposed. ‘Sounds like a plan’ he said. From there things took a slightly different route. Location was reduced to ‘is it near one of the 7 Stanes trail centres’, comfort involved ‘does it have a bike store and a passing familiarity with people turning up looking like they’ve gone two rounds with a mud monster’ and near a pub became a bit of an irrelevance.

So, here we are in Castle Douglas. It’s perfectly located, the apartment has a bike store and a hose pipe (though suspicions are high this is accidental as it’s also located next to the only flowerbed), and the weather is being Scottish. By which I mean to say, it’s neither sunny or raining, but a weird mix of indeterminable origin where the weatherman says it will rain, it feels frequently like we’re riding in a rainforest and occasionally the heavens open with a viciousness henceforth only seen on TV in the dramatic bits of films.

We’re also in a bit of a bike tangle. I’ve got my new Marin, only ridden so far along towpaths and not in anger. The other half (who I really should introduce properly at some point, but there’s a comic to go with it and it’s in draft so must wait) does not have his shiny new bike as TNT delivery services didn’t, and so he has a Marin full sus on loan from the very very nice man at Blazing Saddles in Hebden Bridge. Be nice to your Local Friendly Bikeshop and my gosh will they be nice to you.

As a result, we approached Glentrool, our first 7 Stanes Blue route with something approaching quiet apprehension. I’d read Glentrool was quiet. The quietest of all the Stanes trail centres. They weren’t joking. Roll call involved two other cars; one exploding Scottish male mountain bikers in full voice and raucousness, and the other with no occupants and no bike rack either (it’s funny how you start assessing people on the accessories attached to their car, isn’t it).

Raucous group of raucousness turned out to be there to do the epic Purple route – 58km of quiet roads and forest tracks taking them down what transpired to be beautiful scenery when we got high enough to see it. We muttered about insanity biting late in life and found the beginning of the Blue route. The usual traditions of the rides my other half and I embark on rolled out as usual – him being sparky and positive and me quietly dying after the first 0.5km – except this time there was something a bit different. My Marin weighs half what my old bike does. I noticed this with some smugness after the first 10 minutes, the smugness generated by the look of slight bemusement on my partner’s face, who for the first time got a glimpse into the drastic difference an extra few pounds makes when trying to generate enough power to pull you up a hill. The full sus he was on was a bus, and as a result the sparkyness quietly dissipated until he’d got used to the energy transference not quite working the way he was used to.

We slogged up the hill, got drizzled on, felt very isolated, slogged some more, started to wonder if there was another living thing within a 2 mile radius of us, saw some sheep running off in the distance, dodged some cow pats on the loop around the edge of felling operations and generally tried to get used to our respective bikes. Partner failed to jump his, I failed to make friends with mine. Levels of irritation rose as I started to wonder if I was cut out for this mountain biking lark at all.

Then we went around a corner and the view of the Galloway hills opened in front of us and finally something started to make sense. Another 1km or so and we got to the top, the very highest bit of the route. Below us were two lochs and unbelievably, the sounds of raucous group of raucousness echoing back up at us from the valley below. It was one of the most stunning views I’ve ever worked for. So we sat for a bit, and gathered ourselves and I moaned a bit about traction and other half let some air out of my tyres and I resolved to get rid of the Mountain Kings pretty much about then, I think.

I don’t remember a lot about the down, but I did learn one valuable lesson in about the safest place to do so – Marins and cheap GT’s are not created equal. I used to be able to leave my brakes alone on downs, just coasting along, using the track and momentum to get me a little way up the inevitable up the other side.

The sound of my hubs and derailleur disappearing entirely because I am going so fast is not a sound I want to be hearing again. Fast is good. Fast is what I live for. Fast is absolute bliss. Too fast is when you know that if you came off, there would be a bit of snap, crackle and pop going on and you’re not wearing any body armour at all. A time out was called. Wits were gathered. I got back on, and I learnt my lesson and I throttled back – way back, in some ways too far back, a theme which was to continue.

Glentrool is a lovely Blue route. Absolutely lovely. It’s not technical, it’s not particularly challenging, it’s not going to change the world. What it is going to do is remind you why you pedal push, because the views are to die for, the berms at the bottom are actually really quite clever and the waterfalls by the visitor centre are pretty epic when in spate. This is Scotland so that will be quite often. Don’t go there for adrenaline highs, go there to have the side of a hill entirely to yourself for the day. To have the views to yourself. Sometimes, I think, everyone needs to stop and look and this is a wonderful place to do it.

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Finding your own serenity

Posted on 21st April 2010 in Random Scribbles, Ride Reviews, Trail Centres

It is, perhaps, not an accident that phonetically I pronounce Coed Llandegla as Klandeathla. As previously mentioned, I am a hefty lass. I am fitter than I was at the beginning, but not as fit as I will be at the end of this journey, though I doubt there will be an end.

Perhaps if I had looked at the route profile of the blue route at Llandegla, I wouldn’t have picked it as the first trail to try at a proper trail centre. Bear in mind that only a year ago, Gisburn was not a proper trail centre by any stretch of the imagination, merely a forgotten backwater, a pale imitation of the golden trails that now reside there. Llandegla was the first place I encountered many things: bike washes, hire sheds, visitor centre replete with toilets, bacon butties replete with provenance of ingredients attached (the composition of a decent bacon butty rant is one for another day), bike racks full of more shiny, complicated and expensive kit than I had ever seen in my whole life.

In my limited experience, there are two kinds of trail. One goes up for what feels like forever, and then comes down at a rate akin to a stock market crash, the other undulates merrily with no rhyme or reason, throwing in surprise gear crunching ups, and following them with blissful but monentary downs. Llandegla falls firmly into the former camp. Somewhere between 5km and 6km is the ascent which greets you with all the harshness of a winters day. The gradient isn’t the killer. The duration is. On and on and on and on. Deceptive crests greet you around every corner, enticing you to put that last little bit of effort in, inducing a vain hope that the pain will soon be over, and over every crest is yet another muscle draining climb.

And yet. We go back. We all go back. I know we do because the privately owned operation keeps on going, because the car park is always rammed, because that damn ascent is littered with the many multi coloured hues of the modern mountain bikers livery. It’s like a sirens call. I can only speak for myself in what follows, but I suspect that perhaps I am not alone.

Going down requires focus. Absolute concentration. High speed data processing and a little bit of magic added in for good measure. But going up does not. Or, at the very least, going up fire roads does not, and that’s what the majority of the up is at Llandegla. Predictable surfaces and gentle corners. And this is where the magic happens for me, because I’ll own up right now, I’m probably the biggest geek going. I consume data in streams, multiple streams, from following over 700 people on Twitter and keeping up to 3 email accounts, 4 regular forums, untold blogs and journals and even an old antiquated Bulletin Board System. But on my bike, there is none of this. Instead there is radio silence. No input, no data, no phones, no email, no one nagging for my attention, no one asking for advice, help or a paddle to get out of the creek they’ve found themselves in. No noise, just silence.

It’s my space. Mine. No one can take it, no one can intrude on it. The odd cheery hello is returned, but I quickly and smoothly switch back into the serenity that I find. With nothing else to focus on but the smooth turning of my pedals and the occasioinal twitter of a bird, there is nothing. It’s where I write. It’s where I remember how to breath. It’s the reset button on every bit of stress accrued during the week and it’s the place where I find myself. It’s a place where I am totally in control, but where I don’t actually need to be. I can merrily daydream away, and my legs will keep on pushing. And pushing. And pushing.

Sometimes, when I get to the top, I find other people there. Sometimes I see on their faces, the ones who are not in a group, the same serenity I know is inside me. I don’t smile, or nod, or intrude. I don’t need to, I don’t think. It is, perhaps, imagined, but I really don’t think it is. For some of us, the adrenaline is the thing, but in obtaining it, we find our serenity.

I’m on cell 3 in the comic by the way. I came around the same stupid corner and misjudged the change in gradient, lost my gears and nearly fell sideways. Thus resulted a walk. This is an improvement on the previous visits where at different places on the trail I did actually fall sideways. I give thanks on a regular basis that blue routes are so quiet that hitherto no one has witnessed these catastrophic schoolgirl errors, and live in hope that next time will be the time no error occurs at all. It’s one of the things which keeps me riding, truth be told, though there are hundreds of those reasons. But should you be riding at Llandegla in the future, and witness a fat girl doing the happy dance of joy after the Somme berm at the top of the shared blue/red ascent, it will be me, and I will be in cell 4, having just ridden 100% of that damn hill.

I suspect for most, a mountain biking nemesis will be a technical feature on the down. I make no apologies for mine being staying on my bike the whole way up a hill. Small victories, my friends, small victories.

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Losing on a technicality

Posted on 18th April 2010 in Random Scribbles, Ride Reviews, Skills, Trail Centres
 
The things they don’t tell you when buy your first bike are many. The things they don’t tell you are all of them if you buy it from certain chains, but we wont go there.Suffice to say, I was told with all seriousness when we bought my first bike that it could surive a drop off as high as the shop door. It had Suntour coil forks and I weighed the same then as I do now. It wasn’t an auspicious start.
Technical features are mentioned in trail centre grade reviews. They are not mentioned on bridleways. Bridleways are enticing little buggers, marked on a map as they are with those intriguing long dash black lines, weaving their way innocently across the countryside. The thought process when attempting one 3 weeks after acquiring a new bike went something along the lines of ‘it’s local, horses can get up it, how hard can it be’. Oh the innocence of the inexperienced.
An exhilerating ride down the side of a steep hill peppered with tree roots later and I had a mouthful of flies and dust, had learnt that the mountain bikers kitted out head to foot in gear might not necessarily be faster than me and I’d broken my forks. I didn’t realise at the time, only mentioning in passing to my other half that the suspension seemed ‘stuck’ but broken they were. Despite the complete blast we had that evening, we’ve not been back. I decided trail centres and graded trails might be a better idea until I was a little more technically proficient.
Which is where the berm comes in. A berm is a banked turn. Mostly a switchback (u-turn), sometimes slightly less tight a turn than that, they are always banked. Again, the height of the bank can vary. The point of a berm is to carry as much speed as you are comfortable with through or around a turn. It allows less turn of the handlebars, which then allows for more contact with the ground because your weight is better distributed to allow for this.Or something. Anyway, they work. You know how I know this? 
Coed Llandegla is how I know this. The otherwise genius trailbuilders, in their erstwhile wisdom put the first berm on their blue route, and thus the first berm I ever met on my bike right before a fence exit. So, after slogging up 5km of endless agonising uphill, I see this berm, and I think, wahoo! time for some fun. I’ve read that the whole point of a berm is to carry speed, so I don’t slow down, rip around it, feel chuffed for 1/2 a second that I’ve got a beautiful line on my first whizzy corner and then get a short sharp lesson in braking, traction, gravity and sheer luck. It was…..unpleasant. The audience was…….mortifying. 
Having said that, as time has passed and I have come to understand a little better the psychology of trail builders (evil surprises but generally in sight line, utter genius on the downs but agonising creatures of doom on the ups) berms have become my best friend. While no 2 above has not happened to me (but to others who shall remain nameless, leading to me locking on hard on the blue at Whinlatter), there has been a definite progression, a creeping understanding born from post match analysis over a bacon butty of where our lines have actually been compared to where the actually should be. 
Through this analysis has come an appreciation of the other side of mountain biking. Hurtling down the side of a hill over compacted smooth mud, around turns and over little drop offs is the best place on earth. It just is. The feeling of utter joy it gives me is difficult to put into words, but it’s a cross between how standing in front of the speakers with my hands in the air and lasers tracing over my head at old raves, crossed with hearing Epic by Faith No More performed live as the sun went down last summer, crossed with an afternoon with nothing to do but read a book and drink freshly made lemonade, crossed with those fantastic conversations you get with new people who you just click with. It is a reason, an obsession, a happiness, a freedom. But it isn’t as simple as that.
Once you get off road and onto mud, into trail centres and drawn into the determination to get better and ride your first red, you start to think. To process. To see the problems coming at you as you look ahead at the trail in front, and to process and analyse where your wheels must be, the line to take, your weight distribution, how much feathering of the brakes, what position your pedals must be in. Data coming at you at high speed must be gathered, processed and interpreted and everything must change to respond to that. It’s no longer a game of who is the fastest rider, but who is the fastest thinker, and the rules change again.
Thuds, and the errors of judgement which preclude them, however, come to all of us. I’ve still got the bruises to prove it.
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A long hard road

Posted on 14th April 2010 in Random Scribbles, Ride Reviews, Trail Centres
I remember the first time I road my then shiny and new GT Outpost in anger. It was March 2008. I rode it along a canal, I think, right at the beginning, but it wasn’t very exciting and it didn’t make my heart sing. I wanted something more, and it involved adrenaline, mainly. We then road it around a country park near Preston, but it was only a 2 mile hack and that didn’t quite float my boat either.
Then we went to Gisburn. Right now, most of the mountain biking world knows where and what Gisburn is. A year ago (oh how things change, thank you Adrenaline Gateway, thank you nice Council people) things were very very different. Gisburn was a hidden little backwater, certainly not a trail centre, just a tiny collection of routes which a involved a 30 minute internet trawl to yield something as simple as an up to date trail map. No toilets. No signposts. No cafe. No showers. No one else there.
The red route was a 10km hack around mostly forest roads, with a little bit of singletrack thrown in. ‘The Rollercoaster’ was work in progress and as a result a er…..diversion had been put in place which involved walking mid calf deep through assorted bogs. I remember sitting on the forest road after the diversion and asking Al why I was putting myself through this. Everything hurt. I was severely unfit at this point, drenched in sweat, bright red in the face and to add insult to injury had walked into a tree branch, though it thankfully missed my eye.
And then.
Then we found the singletrack. And I fell off. And I got back on. And I rode some more. And we found the rock garden in the middle of the bit where all the felling had happened, below the barn forest road. And I had to get off and walk it. And I remember muttering under my breath about not getting off one day.
And that was how I got bitten by the singletrack bug. By the mountain biking bug. By the understanding that all the pain of the uphill will always be rewarded by the sheer glee of the down. By being reminded what my body was designed to do and relishing the feeling of bruises and aching muscles. By being absolutely covered in mud, across my face and up my back, and knowing that I’d found something which would get me up off the sofa and out into the big wide open spaces.
I rode that rock garden 4 weeks later. On a GT Outpost. But that’s another story.
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