• I did some MOUNTAIN BIKING (tm) today.

    I even took my helmet to try and get that big ol placebo in safety protection, and let some air out of my front tyre to maximise that contact patch.

    If you’re familiar with the county of Berkshire you’ll know there are no mountains, nor are there really any hills. We’ve documented this many times now in this thread. What there is however, is very steep mounds of dirt, you’ll never go down more than 50 meters or so, but you’ll climb and descend that 50 meters 4 or 5 times in the same trail.

    This became painfully apparent to me on my first detour into one of the DIY trails over by hut hill, lots of twisty and tight trails with short and steep kickers, gears were clunking over time, manageable but no sweet down country. A couple hundred meters of this and then You hit a steep climb to the trail head.

    At the start I assumed I was just doing this backwards, but after doing this another 2 or so times I realised that they all seemed to be bi directional and neither direction was a sweet no effort roll down hill.

    Maybe this is different on the formal trails?

    Hucking over to the infamous blue tech bit, first time on my big bike; recently CRUSHED on my single speed, I got to it. As you can imagine it wasn’t as riveting as on the 35c tiny bike, but much like my original review, there was a comforting amount of plush carrying around berms and over the lumps. It didn’t feel like the fight for survival it did in the previous review of this section

    “Time for a red”

    At the back of this trail you can ride 20 foot and be into a red section, i chose to do this. It was much more of the up and down roller coaster trail building previously seen but with a bit more of a deliberate design. I was getting into it at this point, getting a little cocky, luckily the builder saw yuppie monster cross riders like me coming and had built what can only be described as a meandering gutter of wall rides as a finale.

    “What the fuck?? How does one ride this”

    As if the mountain bikers heard such a call from a gravel biker and were looking to score a nice 3 pointer from mid court a full suss project manager steamed by and and rode the feature effortlessly.

    “Oh like that i suppose”

    While I gave it a go I kept getting caught out by the uphill sections, 2 foot downs, absolutely no chance of a medal position score. To my credit however, I did finish. It wasn’t pretty but it was empowering, I sought out another section and this time it’s token feature was some raised decking, a “skinny” I believe they call it.

    “This is ableist, absolutely disgusting, how is a dyspraxic woman who can barely keep it on the road supposed to ride this???”

    The answer was simply “I didn’t” I edged my bike around the side shaking my head, choosing to double down on out woking the trail feature instead of admitting my fear and lack of skill.

    One thing had become clear in this point however, other than my lack of talent, it’s that I had received a suspiciously low amount of waves and thank yous from the Santa Cruz gang, shed hard tail gang? They were throwing them out if you even made eye contact. The Santa Cruz gang tho, might as well have been a Windsor chain gang.

    Disgusting, must be the micro plastics from their carbon rotting their brains.

    At this point I was bonking hard, to be honest I had been bonking since I left, I had a slap up breakfast but not much yesterday and I was feeling it.
    I was out of tea, I’d eaten my pbj, my homebrew lucazade was half gone and I had a bag of prawn cocktail left.

    One more DIY? Yeah.

    I went back to the hut hill side and found this swweweeeet' double drop down gutter run pushing up from a different line. Last time I encountered one of these I backed out but not today, I was just dehydrated enough and had my trusty helmet.

    Reaching the top I shuffled the bike round and tried the “if I don’t brake I have to ride it as it’s too steep to stop with rim brakes” technique

    Worked a charm

    The first drop, boing, the second boingier, and the whole time trying not to clip a boutique pedal or bar end, but I did it, it felt awesome. So much so I forgot to shift up my cassette and had to push up the other side. But didn’t stop me smiling.

    At this point I was pretty zombified I rolled to the edge and took the quick way home. Soon to pay for my day of fun with a tumble as I forgot to put the air in my tyre before leaving, causing me to wash out on the cycle path. I only realised it was more the air than my physical state when I jumped off a kerb and pinch flatted my tube for a further delay.

    But it was nice, I was in one of many parks and I didn’t have tubeless tyres so i could actually change them without peeling the skin from my thumbs.

    I only took two pics today, which I suppose shows How much fun I was having, or how carb deficient I was, I’ll let you decide.

  • If you’re familiar with the county of Berkshire you’ll know there are no mountains, nor are there really any hills.

    Lies. You just need to know where to look.

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