Love the Mud

The time between Christmas and New Year. Its kind of dead, and not being the Oxford St queuing type it seemed like a good time to go for a ride, despite a bad bout of food poisoning initiated by mayonnaise from my parents' fridge dated Aug 08...


The day dawned as it had closed the previous evening, with torrential rain at about 1.8 degrees C and the type of gray overcast that makes you wonder if it really IS daylight at all. All packed and onto the M1, with the sights set firmly on Peaslake. The M1 was like running a long, wet gauntlet. Driving past lorries produced that great, slightly nervous feeling when even the fastest setting on the windscreen wipers doesn't come close and for all you know, you stand as reasonable chance of driving into a black hole, as making past the cab in one piece. Trail conditions might be a tad sucky today...



Luckily Surrey is always hospitable and after a coffee from the stores, I was ready to roll. Finter arrived and we set off into certain drivetrain wearing muddy conditions. It really was quite horrific and after a quick blast along yogurt pots and the off camber route off telegraph road, we re sessioned and did some photos on a sneaky bit of loose trail. All good fun. Then back down on the Peaslake side where we ran a few trails and did some exploring. I should point out that the picture of the puddle above is really quite a tiddler. On several occasions we were up to our BB's in water. It was quite epic!


Wet trail and roots. Daryl gets on with destroying his drivetrain...



Joyrider, as you've never ridden it before!

It really was that proper cold that eats you when you are wet, so after a bit of dicking around and cameras not working - hence the shots here - it was time to run BKB and see how the new surface was taking this amount of water. It was doing well and definitely the fastest bit of trail we'd run all day. IT NEEDS SOME JUMPS/DROPS though as it is thoroughly boring without. So after a quick chat to a riding mate of Daryl's we headed back up and ran Joyrider. This would have been excellent for me ecept I was now into the backing plate of my rear pads and then the travel on the piston ran out, leaving just the front brake working. In anything other than these conditions, I'd have been fine, but it was sheet mud and front brake happy was not the way to go. Boo.

After that we decided to call it a day as we were both freezing and ended off with a nice chat and santa cruz analysis in the shop. Lovely.

I'm off to CRC to order new bits fro everything that moves on my bike...