At Easter 2016 I used a Red Letter Voucher to go Mountain Biking with MudTrek. It was so good that I chose to go again in 2017 and paid for it myself as well. Again a really good day. Excellent guiding from Jay and hospitality before and after. A challenging route with a bit of everything mixed in - single track, double track, trails and roads. We ended up doing 33 miles and 4500ft of climbing. This year I was completely done in by about 25 miles. The last hour or so was painful. Every part of me ached and I was totally knackered, but the feeling on completion was fantastic The ride is on Strava here It looked like this:
I went mountain biking in South Wales again over Easter. But I also took my road bike and tried to squeeze in some other hills. It was a holiday with my wife as well so I made just one ride - that of the 100 Climbs No95 - Black Mountain. We struggled to find the start of the climb from the description in the book, so we drove all the way to the car park at the top. This meant that the ride would start with the descent and then I'd turn round at the bottom and ride up. I got the bike out of the car and got changed. It was not cold but the wind at the top was quite brisk so I put several layers on to keep warm. I ended up needing these layers on the descent - I pedalled as hard as I could to try and warm up but the speed ended up faster than I was comfortable with. For this reason I went a lot further "down" the hill than I knew was necessary in order to warm up and be sure of starting the segment properly. In the end I had about 1-1½ miles of warm up which, together with the descent was just about enough. The bottom of the climb starts somewhere near the small group of houses and the bridge (I think). There's a short kick up which saw me drop onto the smaller front ring. However I felt strong enough to use the 3rd and 4th gears for some time although I needed 2nd (34-25) for a while There was about a mile of riding to the cattle grid, but once over the grid it levelled just enough to get into 3rd (34-23) and accelerate from ~8 to 9mph and felt quite strong. This was the pattern for most of the climb - I felt strong enough to ride 3rd pretty well all the way apart from a couple of points (one of the hairpins for example) where the gradient kicked up a little. The last ¾ mile or so ease off even more and I got into the 34-15 gear. There was a tail wind to a degree for most of the climb but all the layers I put on at the start were starting to be 1 too many and I was pretty hot by the end. I rode past the car park to be sure I had "summitted" and then rode back to the car. The ride was done. Here's a video of the climb (with the extra bit at the bottom):
The data is: Climb Length: 4.4 miles Height Gain: 1246ft Average Gradient: 5% (Strava Cat 2) My time: 27:52 My position: 831 of 5316 With the time and overall position I was ecstatic - it was a great performance and I felt there is another minute in there - not getting too hot with the one too many layers I had on and knowing how to pace better could easily get a minute out of the climb - roll on next attempt!
I am not over keen on personal photos but I got a "retro" Peugeot cycling jersey for Christmas and today was the first day of the year the weather was good enough for short sleeves I think its an iconic (risk of overused word) jersey and looks great:
Not Tom Simpson
Whether I do it justice compared to the originals I'll leave it to you:
