Now that was a cold day out!
What a difference a week can make. After missing out on last weeks sheffield trailquest which was bathed in sunshine I was motivated to get back out on the bike and see how the legs felt… but after 30 mins of riding I had lost most of the feeling in my hands, arms, feet and legs.
One of these days I will be able to look at the map pick a good route and stick to it for the whole ride. Rather than pick an over ambitious route resulting in a frantic 30min sprint back to the start and finish. though i suppose thats not too bad for training purposes!

Great to get be riding on new trails, I’m not to familiar with the west side of the peak district. Shame Andy was away would have been on his home turf.

Great event more for its character building qualities, the snow deffinately separated the men from the boys!

Riders
Pete Crawforth
3 hour trailquest

round 6/7

venue Hayfield

On Sunday was North Yorkshire MTBO’s event at Gilling woods. It was a 25 control course through mixed pine and deciduous forest across some steep little valleys around the lake. It was a ‘medium’ course so was a good test of navigation and route choice along with a full-on cardio punisher!

I had a good race. Felt like getting some fitness back. Rode and navigated well, feeling strong on the speed of my map reading and map memory. Also felt more at home gunning some of the muddy downhills, doing my best Danny Hart impression on my scale.

The course was great with a few big climbs, some nice traversing singletrack and even the option of a downhill track between 2 controls.

Finished the day in 2nd on the A course behind winner Killian Lomas.

Pete Crawforth

Mountain bike Vs CycloCross

Ah what a great race! I had been looking forward to this race since I had missed it in 2011 but had great fun in 2010. My day started with the alarm going off at 5.50 am and a big drive from nottingham. Arriving nice and early paid off, as I missed the frantic queues at the sign on tent allowing me to attempt to warm up. The race started a good 15 minutes later than planned resulting in my legs starting to cool off dramatically, by the time the race started the gentle fireroad climb hit hard. Unfortunately for the first lap I couldn’t really think about much else other than my freezing legs and hands and that I could probably done with eating a bit more before the race had started. A few shot blocks later and I started to enjoy myself.
I was pleased with my decision with sticking with the trusty mountain bike, I don’t think I actually saw anyone who was riding a cross bike look like they were enjoying themselves!
I knew prior to the race that there would be loads of faster riders out and so wasn’t really looking for a result, just to keep up a consistent average speed and to feel like I was riding stronger at the end of the race. Which I did, So I can’t really sniff at 51st though when you see some familiar names in the results that were only a few places ahead, I can’t help but feel that I should have possibly tried a little harder! Haha

Hats off to hit the north, great event definitely didn’t envy you guys with
having to take down the arena in that snow!
Same again next year please!

Philips Park, Whitefield, Manchester
Map

Riders
Pete Crawforth
Andy Douglas

My hopes were set pretty high in expectation for the first race of 2012 looking forward to riding on some proper singletrack on some familiar turf. This round of the Dark and White series is the only one which makes use of the BMBO maps which require some experience to be able to read them confidently. My tactic was to attempt to clear all the points in the forest then head out along the roads and collect the rest which were marked on the more familiar OS style map. However this didn’t quite go  as smoothly as I’d hoped, during the first part of race I was very aware of where I was within the forest but had no idea where I was on the map! After realising that I had spent far to long in the woods I headed out and attempted to collected the further afield check points which carried more value, these where considerably spaced out required some good efforts to push through the strong head winds. All things considered, I am pretty pleased with my riding performance and am feeling  reasonably encouraged with how my legs are feeling. As a race, my result was pretty poor but I’m putting that down to those damn BMBO maps!

Andy rode a storming ride. Typically starting late. He didn’t give himself much time to prepare, but that didn’t seem to slow him down to much since he managing to clear all the check points and to finish perfectly timed with less than a minute to go. It would be nice if a ride like that would be a winning ride, however, when Killian Lomas starts that is never given. Killian cleared them all and finished with 10 minutes to spare, a great ride.

Cheers again to Dark and white for putting on another top notch event!

results can be found here

Over all results

Results with split times

Sherwood Pines