A normal ride for me and my various riding crews is to ride a trail, usually as hard as possible and then stop at the end of the trail for a chat and wait for the group to reform. The plan for this and next weeks Saturday morning ride is to do 3 x 30 minute non-stop sessions as a final build up to the 12 hour event in 2 weeks. Most of the trails in Woodhill are about 10 minutes long so I am very used to a 10 minute ride, rest, another 10 minute ride. While I can now do these rides at a reasonable pace, I need to be able to easily sustain 30 minutes at pace.

It was another good riding day, cloudy and cool with no wind. 3 of us rode this morning same as crew as last week. We took the first climb up Powerball at a leisurely pace as a warm up and then started the first 30 minute ride on Big Mama, I tried to keep to a fairly regular pace along the trails and was feeling good at the top of the Big Mama hill, possibly the easiest I have done it on the SS. By the end of Big Mama I had a bit of a gap on the other two riders, so I dropped the pace a touch as we went into Big Mama’s tail. I haven’t ridden that trail for ages, may even be the first time on the SS, the trail starts off quite nice with a swooping twisty ride down hill before rolling up and down for a lot longer than I remembered. Pretty much hit the 30 minute mark at the end of the trail. I have developed a really bad habit of riding with fingers over the break levers – I have dropped this to one finger now. But what this means is I feather brakes going into most corners, whether I need to or not, this is very very evident on trails I do not ride much. Today I really focused on keeping all my fingers around the bars except on down hill sections where I tried to brake as little as possible. I think I succeeded, I definitely went into some corners faster than I felt comfortable with but I never came close to crashing so I have new boundaries to push in my drive to be faster round the track.

Next ride was Upland, Lightening, Enchanted forest, all of Haggis and Tree Huggas. It took just over 30 minutes. I stopped briefly on Haggis to make sure my riding friends went straight ahead rather than taking the turn into Conifer. When we stopped we got passed by a rider who was hitting a nice fast pace so I caught him and hung on his rear wheel for most of the trail until he ducked off near the start of No Brakes. I did get run down and passed by a fast rider at the end of Haggis though. Man I haven’t been passed while riding for months, it sucks…

Next lap was a quick ride to the end Link, Cookie, Off Piste 2 and Raceface down. I haven’t done Off Piste for months so that was kinda fun. This last section took almost 30 minutes as well, though we were chatting as we rode.

Good ride, 3 30 minute rides as planned.

I have been listening to a bit of Slayer lately, really liking them at the moment.