mactually

Second local evening xc ride with a bunch from the HTB forum.

Distance: 17 miles
Time: 90 minutes
Surface: On and Off-road
Weather: Wet, but dry under tyre
Bike: Inbred Singlespeed (32:17, with 2.2″ tyres)

Third local evening xc ride with a bunch from the HTB forum. The Yuba Mundo is surprisingly good off-road!

Distance: 17 miles
Time: 90 minutes
Surface: On and Off-road
Weather: Wet, but dry under tyre
Bike: Yuba Mundo

Second local evening xc ride with a bunch from the HTB forum.

Distance: 17 miles
Time: 90 minutes
Surface: On and Off-road
Weather: Wet, but dry under tyre
Bike: Inbred Singlespeed (32:17, with 2.2″ tyres)

First local evening xc ride with a bunch from the HTB forum.

Distance: 16 miles
Time: 90 minutes
Surface: On and Off-road
Weather: Dry, but wet under tyre
Bike: Inbred Singlespeed (32:17, with 2.2″ tyres)

Tried riding to Dalby on a fully loaded cargo bike. Gave up. 30 miles all in.

Got a lift to Dalby the next day and did one lap of the course on the Sunday.

Distance: 40 miles over the weekend
Climbing: ? feet
Surface: On and Off-road
Weather: wet then dry
Bike: Yuba Mundo andInbred Singlespeed (32:17, with 2.2″ tyres) at Dalby

Rode up to Hamsterley, did a loop of the Black Route and then rode home again. Felt surprisingly good, considering I’d barely ridden for 8 months.

Distance: 57 miles
Climbing: ?
Surface: On- and off-road
Time: ? hours
Weather: warm and dry!
Bike: Inbred Singlespeed (32:17, with 2.2″ tyres)

Hamsterley with my brother and his girlfriend. Couple of laps of the Skills Loop, Special K, Grove Link, climb to Black Hill, Dangerous Descent, climb to DH hut, end of Black loop.

Distance: ?
Climbing: ?
Surface: Off-road
Time: ? hours
Weather: warm and dry!
Bike: Inbred Singlespeed (32:17, with 2.2″ tyres)

Not coughing any more but not riding bikes (apart from commuting) until February to make sure I’ve fully recovered.

Growing a beard.

January got off to a good start, with 202 miles on the clock it was further than I’d ridden in all but one month of 2007, courtesy of a metric century ride and a slightly longer commuting route.

February saw another decent mileage for the month, with the longer commute continuing and an aborted attempt at the Hamsterley Hill Rush.

March was a commuting-only month.

InApril I rode a bit of a local Sustrans route, but being away for Easter knocked the distance down a bit.

In May I found some local bluebell-lined singletrack.

June saw me getting in a 50 mile road ride and a group ride at Hamsterley, plus some extra trips about town on the bike, netting me my first ever 300 mile month. By the end of June, I’d ridden about 37% further than the same time in 2007, but that was the high-point of the year, and it tailed off a bit from there.

July was by first proper MTB race at Hit the North, though I didn’t do nearly as well as I’d have liked (I was crap, rather than just bad).

August: Darlington - Swaledale - Bowes - Barnard Castle - Darlington

In September I used car to get to the and from a ride for the only time in the year, riding High Street in the Lakes with HTB. I missed out on my ‘usual’ road century and the Great Milk Stout Ride this ear, because they were reorganised and so fell on the same day, which also clashed with a friends’ kid’s christening.

After riding in the Lakes, I seem to have given up riding bikes for anything other than getting about, which is a bit depressing. I also seem to have given up blogging for the last part of the year, so I don’t even really now why. Illness over Christmas has also stopped me from hitting the 2000 mile mark for the year, getting a total of 1953.5 miles for the year, which is only 15% more than 2007 (5.3 miles per day average, compared to 4.6 for 2007).

Most depressingly, I only did eight proper rides in 2008! That’s officially crap, especially when doing more proper rides was a target for the year after only doing 14 rides in each of the previous two years. 36 rides in three years!?!

Update after some more number-crunching: My eight proper rides totalled 376 miles, which is about half of what I did in both 2006 and 2007. That averages to 47 miles per ride, which is about the same as each of the last two years. I did just over 1500 miles for ‘utility’ purposes, which is 50% more than each of the last two years.

Happy New Year and all that.