{"id":5935,"date":"2017-11-12T22:52:55","date_gmt":"2017-11-12T22:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/?p=5935"},"modified":"2022-04-11T16:39:13","modified_gmt":"2022-04-11T15:39:13","slug":"lakes-mtb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/lakes-mtb\/","title":{"rendered":"Lakes MTB"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was “off to the Lake District” last weekend, for the annual Bowline<\/a> MTB weekend. With a packed schedule, I opted to head up on Saturday morning, and arrived just in time to rendezvous with the others at Grizedale<\/a> car park for a lap of the North Face Trail<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Heading

Heading off on the North Face trail.
\u00a9\u00a0Haydn Williams 2017<\/p><\/div>\n

We stuck to the time-honoured group ride tactic of ‘ride a section, then stop for a chat’, with much discussion about the singletrack:fireroad ratio, and why it couldn’t be improved a little. I think there was only one crash, and no mechanicals, so that counts as a success.<\/p>\n

\"Proper

Proper hills looking tempting.
\u00a9\u00a0Haydn Williams 2017<\/p><\/div>\n

After a nice sociable loop we retired to the cafe for a hot chocolate and a bite to eat. The sun shone and life was good, so I decided to leave the others to their afternoon of shopping\/relaxing, and went for another lap. I hammered my way around this time, and in fairness the trail was much improved when taken at full pelt.<\/p>\n

\"Rainbow

Rainbow over Langdale Pikes.
\u00a9 Haydn Williams 2017<\/p><\/div>\n

As I wound my way back through the visitor centre courtyard, I rounded a corner and came face-to-face with… some more Bowliners! It would have been churlish to call it a day then, so I turned around and set off for Lap 3 with Andy and Claudia. The day’s weather continued to be best described as ‘changeable’, with hail and rain showers scattered liberally amongst the bouts of sunshine.<\/p>\n

\"Andy

Andy working hard on his DH rig.
\u00a9 Haydn Williams 2017<\/p><\/div>\n

By now it was fairly late in the day, and darkness overtook us with a decent distance still to go. We had a couple of headtorches, but it turns out that riding in the gloaming and then the plain-old-dark is actually really good fun! Accompanied by hooting owls, we tip-toed our way down trails which were just a slightly lighter-coloured line in the surrounding darker woodland floor, with the odd whoop, or shout of “Drop!”. Incredible fun, and nowhere near as scary as I’d anticipated.<\/p>\n

Our personnel were scattered all over the place on Sunday, with a variety of plans in place. I didn’t fancy more slow rocky riding, so thought I’d take a cross-country drive and stop at Gisburn<\/a> on my way home. Unfortunately I got to the top of the first hill to overhear a conversation about how Gisburn was really rocky and slow, just like Grizedale, and how Llandegla<\/a> is the place to go for fast, fun, flowing trails! Nonetheless, that works for me in the long-term because I’m lucky enough to be able to get to Llandegla quite often (and it is really<\/em> good fun).<\/p>\n

\"Awesome

Awesome road on the way to Gisburn.
\u00a9 Haydn Williams 2017<\/p><\/div>\n

Gisburn was indeed a little rocky, but the main issue was me being a bit sleepy after Saturday’s over-enthusiastic 30 miles. I got around though, and finished the day with a run down the Hope Line<\/a> downhill run, which is definitely the best bit and well worth a look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was “off to the Lake District” last weekend, for the annual Bowline MTB weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5928,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1218,1268,1267,163,858,434,276],"class_list":["post-5935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-outdoors","tag-bowline","tag-gisburn","tag-grizedale","tag-lake-district","tag-mountain-biking","tag-mtb","tag-riding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}