Spring

Again, a long period of neglect on this blog, although I have been out on the bike a fair bit. Since November the snow never returned, but there has been a fair bit of mub. The last month in particular has been deep mud in the Pentlands, not even worth trying to ride round it, so we have got better at ploughing straight through, or pulling a small manual to get the front wheel over the worst.

We have been setting a few challenges in the Pentlands: riding up Harbour hill a few times, and sliding down, racing down to Glencorse - which I still win, and racing though the woods around Harlaw reservoir.

In order to ride down Black Hill path, we used to ride upthe field, but I realise I should be able to ride the narrow path. very narrow, and a sharp drop on the left hand side, but it can be done mostly, except for the bottom section.

Beautiful Pentland morning in Feburary

A great new place to play is the beach at Harlaw - covered in rocks which makes it a good place to practice balance, choosing lines in rocks, but also being able to ride straight through piles of 10cm stones, which is a useful skill for the mountains of Spain. Shame I ripped a few teeth of the chainwheel after riding over a 50cm rock a few times.

These new routes have made the Pentland routes much more interesting - I think of all the time we wasted riding round the landrover tracks, when we should have been ducking though the trees, riding the beach and climbing the hard paths.

Looking down Harbour hill to city

The last ride Neil and I did was pouring with rain, and very windy, so we decided to climb the steepest hill this side of the Pentlands, up from Dreghorn. There is one point it is impossible to ride, especially when most of the effort is going into stopping oneself being blown off the bike. On the way down we swapped bikes, so I couldh ave a go on a FSR and Neil could remember what a hard tail is like. A strangely soft ride, no hard jolt when coming off a little jump. Unfortunately his front brake was not working - the Bike coop had been meant to fix it the week before, but apparently had broken something when they bled the brakes.

It was my turn to break the brakes the following week. After doing some long interval training out to the Pentlands and up puke hill I realised the rear disk pads had worn right off, after only about 6 rides. the clip was grinding on the disk, so I took them out and rode home without them. Of course I then slammed on the brakes and broke of a pin fromthe piston - had to by a whole new back brake. grr.