Weon

On Saturday I was up with the larks to head over to the Afan bike trails in sunny Wales for the first time in about 3 or 4 years. Having shoe-horned two bike frames into my bike bag (not an easy feat) and chucked the wheels in the boot, Matt and I headed to Afan to meet up with Cookie, Phil and Alex.

Riding with new people is always cool and Phil and Alex turned out to be good value for money! We parked up at the Glyncorrwg Mountain Bike Centre, reassembled the bikes and headed of for White’s Level. As it turns out Alex is ridiculously fit and therefore on the initial climb out of the valley I was dropping behind. However, this was fine as Phil was there to keep me company due to the fact he was recovering from a kidney infection. So we chatted, wheezed, joked and generally clawed our way to the top of the trail and were treated to some stunning views on the way, none of which I was really able to photograph due to the relentless pace we seemed to be going at!

There are some nice board-walk style sections on White’s Level and they lead into a fairly hairy downhill that very nearly threw me headlong into some nice evil-looking granite boulders! I seemed to be distinctly lacking in confidence, not really helped by my total lack of upper-body strength!

Still, we did the loop and headed back to base to grab some food and chat a bit. We then cruised round to the Afan Forest Park Visitor’s Centre to attempt the Penhydd trail. Old buggers like me remember this being the 9feet.com trail years back. Anyhoo, off we headed on another seemingly endless ascent. By this time Alex was riding up, heading back down to wherever Phil and I had got to and then riding up again, just to so how fit he is. Git!

The uphill on White’s level is pretty technical so it seems more enjoyable than the punishing fireroads of the Penhydd. However, the rewards on the Penhydd are worth the climbs - lots of technical singletrack that slowly weaves its way back to the car park.

Toward the end of the day my confidence was rising but my energy was seriously low so I was glad to be back in the car park, packing up to go home. It was a long day but we all had a great time and hopefully it won’t be four years between visits for me this time!

It did make me think about buying a new frame with a higher bottom bracket too - I lost count of the number of times I hit my pedal on passing rocks. Maybe shorter cranks and more air in the rear shock would be a cheaper, better option!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 11:01 am and is filed under Bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.