Saturday 22nd November - Youth Ride and Go Ride

Today we tackled the Week 2 routes with our Youth Riders.  The shorter ride was a slightly longer version of last week's ride (15km), the longer ride headed over towards the infamous Col de Mote and totalled 33km. More details from Damian:


The long ride set off from Stocks Green to tackle Col de Mote, with a warm up via Nizels Lane.  Calvin powered to the top with a late attack.  With Bee temporarily out of action with a puncture, but with a promise to met the group on the way back,  the group made the fast decent into and out of Plaxtol and down Puttenden Road  / Higham Lane before looping back up Ashes Lane.  With the group pushing hard a brief halt allowed Ellen to stave of an asthma attack before heading back up Puttenden Road and Claygate Lane (where Sophia made an unscheduled dismount).

With Bee back in the group, it was the run for home via Hildenborough Road and Riding Lane, where a further stop was necessary to allow Toni to compose herself following an further incident with a squirrel (already deceased).  Along the route we picked up Kary , Claire and Michelle, who had finished the short ride and so we all finished the ride together.  All in all quite an incident packed ride this week, but everyone back safe and sound.  Good ride: 20.6 miles at an average speed of 13.1 mph in old money or 33.2km at 21.1km/h.  Thank too to Bee and Hamish 

Go Ride
By the afternoon the heavy showers that had plagued us earlier had disappeared and it was positively barmy (the weather that is not just the coaches).  With a good turnout and range of ages we split the riders into two groups; our less experienced riders worked with Katy and Claire, while Damian and I attempted some more core mountain biking techniques with our older riders.  Everyone was already comfortable riding out of their saddle and adopting a good ready position so we moved onto unweighting or lifting the front wheel.  The key to getting to grips with this is our old friend 'weight shift'.  Riders had lots of opportunity to practise, first over the painted lines on the playground and then progressing onto small obstacles and finally pallets.