Saturday 18th March Go Ride & Youth Ride, Sunday 19th Power Pack at Cyclopark

Go Ride
We've entered a new phase; with our founding riders and those that followed shortly after established as skillful bike riders, it's time to start on the next generation.  It's back to basics and time to provide lots of opportunities to practise skills and gain fitness.  Today it was all about slow and controlled riding, sometimes with one hand.

We kicked off with an old favourite "squares".  Riders have to negotiate a square of cones, passing their front wheel outside the cone and then their back wheel inside.  We set up a variety of different sized squares and before long everyone was having a go.  That was just a little skills exercise.............

Our warm up activity was another one of my old favourites, I call it "mirror", it's an oval circuit with a channel running through the centre.  Riders set off in pairs down the channel, diverging at the end and rejoining at the other end.  The idea is to keep an eye on your partner, match their speed and re-enter the channel at the same time.  We added in high fiving as an intro to one handed riding, before moving onto monster bottle pick.  That's the same as normal bottle pick but with bottles and teddies and sticks and off the box, off the floor etc etc etc.  The thing is just to keep trying new things, harder things, different things.  All the time improving control, just not really noticing.

We needed a break from skills so we had a biscuit - picked up from a helper/box of course, before moving onto our endurance challenge; 15 minutes continuous riding with a few lumps and bumps.  Just something to get the blood pumping before our final team challenge.

We finished off with team challenge bottle pick, I remember that because my team won and we definitely did not cheat (well that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

Another great session watching our brilliant riders become better and fitter bike riders, doesn't get much better than that ;-).

Youth Ride
Moving swiftly on, just a few Youth Riders today (KVRT were racing at Lee Valley), I had to turn Dan away as I was short on adults (partly because it was KVG training camp week).  Nevertheless, Luke, Hope and Eloise joined myself and Christophe on a 16 mile loop called "Kite"; lots of tail and just a small diamond kite at the top.  It was sunny, we were on our bikes, no tears, no punctures, it doesn't get much better than that ;-) (hold on I've already said that once about today).

 It was a good day, the only bad thing that happened was that the automatic gate at school wouldn't shut when I left :-(.  Never mind, it's not a bike riding thing so nothing to worry about.

Ready to head back down the Col de Mote

Sunday 19th March - Power Pack at Cyclopark
Looks like everyone had a good time at Power Pack today, both our club Isla bikes got an outing,  Christophe sent me these photos.