Tuesday night ride

With most of the family away I took the opportunity to slip out for a Dodgy Tuesday ride. My intention was to take the AC out but it was still not in a rideable state. I got it back from the shop yesterday and the pivot bearings were all done nicely but the shop wanted the BB was pretty dodgy and it was making one hell of a noise. I was happy to ride with it like that but in the end I had to flag it as I could not get one of the pedals off, the crank insert came off with the pedal and there was no way I was going to ride with flats so the trusty DMR was loaded into the car again.

The weather over the past few days has been gorgeous and as I was having one of those days at work when I could just not focus, I got a good lunch time walk in to stretch my legs out, it took a while to open them up so I am glad I got out prior to the ride. I arrived at Pete’s place at Murawai and there was a good crowd already there, nice mix of teenagers and older folks and there was another single speeded DMR as well which was good, all up 9 of us rode, the biggest crowd yet.

We rode up the road as normal and down the walking track then back to gannet colony and down the steps, traditional start and I am getting more and more comfortable with the steps though I am still one of the slowest riders down both those trails. I have realised that compared to the other riders my home made lights suck big time on the down hills. I am just not getting a range of light that makes me comfortable to hit things at speed. They are ok in the tighter slower stuff or on trails where I know every corner and every root, but for speed in not too familiar territory they just suck !

In the forest we rode up past the start of Dan’s track which we normally do to look at a new trail being built by one of the young guys. It was steep and short with a number of lethal looking jumps. I like steep and short and I am not opposed to jumps, but what pissed me off a bit on this trail was the first jump I saw had a small sand kicker to a steep bank tranny, nothing wrong with that you might think, except the mong had dug a pit on the transition forcing it into a step down. If I had been coming down the hill I would have hit that jump as it was tiny and then landed front wheel first into the pit and brained myself. Given that we are not supposed to ride here and the land owners seem to tolerate sensible trails and well designed jumps – and there are some big jumps here, building something stupid that some one is going to get hurt on is brainless. Anyway….

We rode back and did Dan’s trail which is a fun and well designed short downhill trail and then rode the riverside trail as normal. We then rode back up to the top of AFL through the back road, I haven’t ridden this road for a while and got a bit of a sprint on one of the climbs until I realised/remembered this was the start of the climb – I ended up walking the top of it, it just seemed to go on and on (we are talking Auckland climbing here folks so on and on is not much !)

AFL is such a fun trail to ride down, I really want to do it during the day so I can see here I am going and get to learn all the corners and where the jumps are. I missed one corner and went straight off the side of track, but it is just scrubby cutty grass so no injuries.

From the end of AFL we rode back to the cars and went home.