A great Woodhill ride

The last week has had some stunning winter weather, crisp and cool with cloudless skies and no wind – it was also the officially coldest June in since 1972. The forecast for the coming week is not so hot unfortunately with rain supposed to settle in this afternoon, luckily my head cold chose this week to start so I am not going to miss out on too many crystal clear nights.

Had a most awesome ride on Saturday – for a change I rode with 2 other single speeders and no geared bikes. We all had different gear ratios, levels of fitness and abilities though when everything was all added together we were reasonably compatible and I think everyone felt as broken as me at the end of the ride. I had ridden with 1 of the riders before as we are both Vorbii but the second guy was a complete stranger to both of us, but we all got on well which was good.

We rode up Powerball, down Spaghetti to Afterglow, Afterglow, then up the road to Northern Exposure then onto my trail – No Brakes. Someone had changed the entrance to the new extension on the track, using a couple of small logs they had blocked off the existing trail forcing people to ride the extension - I wasn’t complaining as the track needed wheels on it to bed it in, I hadn’t even run my own wheels over it since I had completed the grooming. The track rode well; only one corner that felt like it needed changing so I will wait a few more weeks and then re-evaluate it.

After that we rode Python, Anaconda and back along the fence line to the top of Cookie then back down the new part of the Raceface trail that I helped dig a couple of weeks back. That trail has had a lot of bikes over it and is really well packed in – rides quite nicely. Not sure how many KM’s we did, but all up we were out for close to 3 hours and we were not riding particularly slowly either.

One of the great things about this ride is I spent a bit of time following the new rider, who has been riding single speed bikes for quite a few years. He rode his bike exactly how you read it the magazines so I tried to emulate him, follow his lines and body positions as we rode the tracks. I think I learned something !

Listening to Film School today – never heard of them before – quite like it so far.