It's been a long time...

 

Nineteen straight days in the workshop - that's where I was on Bank Holiday Friday, on day nineteen. During that time I worked non-stop, from 8.30am to 6pm or later, with just an hour at most on my static bike, each morning, prior to showering and heading back to the shop. I tackled a whole range of jobs during this time, from simple cable swaps to tapping a bottom bracket shell (above). Some of the jobs were more demanding than others, such as the Reverb dropper post (below), which just had brown inside it! It took a significant amount of cleaning and replacing almost all of the internals, but I got it back to 'as new' condition for the owner.

I had some beautiful bikes to work on though, such as this Evil Wreckoning (below), which needed a bunch of work, including brake bleeds and a new headset. I think I'm right in saying that literally every single customer that came into the workshop, stopped and took an admiring glance in it's direction. Who wouldn't though, looks like a real weapon!

By day seventeen I was struggling - the weather was stunning (a decent warm, dry spell) and the trails were in primo condition. I decided I needed a ride, so took the afternoon off to go hit Cann Woods. I forget the last time I rode my Levo SL, but I soon got a reminder of just why I love this bike so much! After a few of my favourite warm up trails, I chanced across an absolute gem of a newly built trail (see below). After diving over a double, into a tight right-hander, you hit another double and then come into this new line. It takes you over a small gap jump and then into these new berms, with the best line being to the right. You miss the first berm and use the jump to double into the second berm, which then fires you into the next four berms - pow, pow, pow, pow!!! It's a seriously grin-inducing ride, especially for a mechanic who hasn't set tyre outside his workshop in seventeen days!

As awesome and much-needed as this ride was, it was straight back to the workshop for the next two days. However, by the time close-of-play on Friday rolled around, I had made a decision, I needed the rest of the Bank Holiday Weekend off. As a founder and Head Coach of The MTB Collective, a not-for-profit Community Interest Company that provides mountain biking opportunities to kids from Plymouth, I'd spent a fair bit of time planning our first ride of 2021. Due to Covid restrictions, we'd not been able to run a single trip since 2020, so this opening Sunday was planned for maximum impact. We had five trained Leaders, six untrained volunteers, and fifteen young riders (sadly, two of our riders weren't able to attend, otherwise it would have been seventeen), along with some fantastic weather. 

Following some socially distanced bike checks (above), we split into five groups of no more than six people, with two groups heading to Cann Woods, two to Plymbridge Woods, and one to Saltram pump track. I was with the Saltram group, with one of our first real success stories. The young volunteer who rode with me was Monty, who had previously been one of our young riders. Now eighteen, Monty has returned to train as a Trail Leader, keen to give back and help other young people enjoy mountain biking too. It was a bit of a baptism of fire for Monty though, with our group having two of our least experienced riders. However, with a lot of perseverance, between us we managed to reach a point where I decided we should head off and look to ride some proper trails. After lunch, we headed across the way, to Plymbridge Woods, and rode up onto the hillside, which in itself was a challenge. One of our riders has moderate learning difficulties and struggles to process too many sensory inputs at once. As soon as he is challenged he almost shuts down, which can make riding quite tricky, but on this ride, with the right encouragement, he really excelled. That's not to say that he rode everything, but unquestionably he rode the most challenging trails I've ever seen him ride. Thanks to Monty's help, we were able to take the whole group round the entirety of the Blue trail at Plymbridge!

With the weather so good and the trails running so well, and with all of the Trail Leaders and new volunteers on quite a high (everyone enjoyed the day as much as Monty and I), some of us decided to head up into Cann for a bit of a blast. Anyhow, I hadn't quite done the math, not until afterwards anyway, but I think I'm somewhere around fifteen years older than the next oldest rider in the group, not to mention my medical issues. Suffice to say that, though I'm glad I was able to hang on and hold my own on the trails, I think it's fair to say that for the following couple of days, I've been feeling my age for the first time in a long time! Thanks goodness for the long weekend and the fact that I had the day before, to recover from work, and the day after, to recover from the ride 😁

Well, I appreciate that's a lot for one post, but the pace of the last couple of weeks has just meant I've not been able to get to this before now and so I thought I'd just do a catch-up. Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for my legs to catch up and recover from that ride at Cann. Lucky for me, being my own boss meant I could take much of today off too, so that I got my four day weekend after all!