saturday ride

Today we decided on an mtb ride on the road, the roads are still very dirty and potholed at the moment. My friend Mick Ellis is featured on the front of the local Dorking newspaper. Having hit an eight inch deep hole, he was ko'd and broke his collar bone in three places. Get well soon Mick!

We have a couple of hilly routes that are mostly lanes, that we call the tour of the hills.(toth) Today we choose the toth pt2., which cuts out the Leith Hill loop from the full toth. It's a lot warmer than it has been for ages, around 8C and it feels almost balmy. Consequently, we are wearing too many clothes and overheat on the first climb :o

We ride up over Ranmore, down through Albury to climb around the back of St Martha's (here,we sprinted for the top and my chain sucked and locked the pedals. The bike bucked and I almost went over the bars as the back end came up and I rode along on the front wheel! The full force went through my mid back and it hurts a lot!) and up to Pitch Hill, drop down into Shere and retrace our steps via Coombe Bottom.

A nice 55km of riding with over a thousand metres of climbing.

Spring is approaching :)

Saturday ride

So far this year each time me and Jane decided on a road ride, Gary calls and says 'it's icy and we're meeting up for an mtb ride'. :)

So we ride down to Rykers to meet the others and we pick up Gary en route.

At Rykers we have a dozen riders and some amazing bikes ranging from the dawn of mountain biking to the present day! It's soooo cool like a living mtb museum :) There are hardtails, full sus, fully rigid, singlespeed. Many with kit that I'd forgotten existed - canti's, v brakes, six speed, seven speed. I'm not being a gear snob, it's great to see that we don't need at least six inches of travel front and rear and a two grand frame to have some fun off road :)

Anyway we had a great couple of hours pottering around the trails and stopping for tea at Newland's Corner.

Sunday ride - 14 Feb

We woke to snow again this morning and were glad that we'd put in a hard 3 hrs+ yesterday, phew :) First was a text was from Paul, he'd forgotten to get out of bed! Next was an email from the mighty D saying she'd forgotten her shoes and had to go back home! (after all the threats,tantrums and cajoling she'd had to do to get them in the first place! :-))

That left just me and Jane and Jane said 'lets go to Starbucks' As a compromise, I suggested a shortish ride. So we set out for a loop around the Epsom race course. The snow had melted by the time we set out and the chalk of the downs was exceptionally slippery. We'd forgotten what it was like to ride in the mud, and rather than letting the bike do it's thing, we were trying to control it :) So we had a nice hour and three quarters slip sliding and grinding through the mud.