We’ve got ten ideas for you to kickstart the year and boost your motivation:

Get app smart

Most people have smartphones these days and there are literally dozens of training apps, like Strava and Endomondo, that can make it easy to track how much riding you’ve done. You can also set weekly and monthly riding goals and use such apps to keep on top of your goals. Sharing them through Twitter and Facebook with your riding buddies so you can compare how much you’re all doing.

Strava has been known to cause disputes amongst friends… Beating your mates on a ride is as motivating as anything after all!

New year, new trails

There’s nothing like riding new trails, and we’re betting there are new trails to be explored right on your doorstep. The easiest way to explore new trails and areas is to just ride them and follow your nose. You can get more advanced by using Google Earth to explore areas that might be hiding good trails (it gets pretty addictive looking for the best hillside and imagining what may lie beneath that forest canopy). Or how about building some of your own? Even better still, get in the Bike Magic forum and ask around.

Get out and find some fresh trails near to home, or how about building some? Image by Addy Pope via Flickr

Enter an event

There’s no easier way to find motivation to ride your bike than having an event, a goal, to aim for. With hundreds of events across the UK, from cross-country races to marathons to the new breed of enduros, there’s something for everyone.

If you’ve never raced, get yourself entered into any event and you’ll suddenly find yourself motivated to train and prepare. Image © Joolze Dymond

Ride somewhere new

Make 2013 the year when you ride somewhere completely new. Never been to Scotland? Never ridden Dartmoor? The UK is littered with top riding spots and most are but a short drive away, so why not broaden your riding horizons and go explore some brand new trails. If you’re stuck for inspiration, the Bike Magic route guide is a good place to start.

View Bikemagic UK mountain bike trail guide in a larger map

Learn new skills

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can always teach a mountain biker new skills. There’s been an increase in the choice of skills courses available right across the country, and they cater for all abilities. So if you’re just getting into mountain biking and want to learn the basics like how to handle rooty corners, or have been riding for 10 years and want to make 2013 the year you finally learn how to jump, a skills course is a good investment.

There are skills courses being run all over the UK, get yourself to one and the new skills you’ll learn will leave you motivated to get out and practise whatever the weather may be doing.

Ride your first enduro

Enduro is one of the newest and most exciting disciplines in mountain biking and they’re getting more popular every year. There’s currently two series in the UK so chances are there’s a round not that far from you. Enduros feature timed stages with non timed linking sections and are predominantly downhill focused. Most courses in the UK require nothing more than a decent trail bike and some knee pads.

More here.

How about entering an enduro race? Everyone’s talking about enduro after all. The courses aren’t scary, they’re fun, so too the events as a whole.

Book a riding holiday

Fed up with wet muddy trails? Now is the time to book yourself a riding trip to somewhere sunny. Get a couple of mates together and book yourself a holiday where the trails are guaranteed to be dry and dusty. France and Spain are popular choices, but Italy, Austria and further afield places like Canada, New Zealand are all on our list of places we’d love to go on holiday right now.

More here.

Go on, book a holiday. Especially if your local trails are flooded like ours you’ll be wanting to see some fairytale sunsets and dusty trails soon. Keep an eye on our travel guides. Photo © Doug Mcdonald

Spice up your commute

Cycling to the office is a great way to keep fit, but unless you’re fortunate enough to have an awesome off-road commute, it’s likely miles of road lie between your home and office. As Rod Fountain has discovered, a cyclocross bike is a great way to make the commute more interesting, and is ideal for sniffing out bits of cheeky singletrack and dicing with cars and buses that dominate the roads.

More here.

Make the commute more fun – try taking Rod Fountain’s example and make the most of any green spaces on the way to work and you’ll find yourself leaving home extra early before you know it.

Go night riding

The days are all too short, but with the advent of seriously high powered yet affordable bike lights, there’s less excuse than ever for stopping your riding just because it’s dark. Night riding is brilliant fun and is really good for honing your skills. There’s also nothing like the thrill of dashing between the trees with just a small pool of light to illuminate your path.

More here.

Get some lights and get out at night – the riding’s even more exciting when you can only see the lit bits.

Make new friends – join a club

There’s loads of well organised mountain bike clubs around the country and they are a good way of meeting like minded people. Most organise weekly rides, weekend jaunts and regular night rides, so if you’re bored of riding on your own, why not join a club and make some new riding friends.

Join a club and you’ll find yourself being dragged out on weekly rides, which of course is a good thing! Plus you’ll meet like-mined people and have an excuse to chat about bikes no doubt over an apres-ride beer.

Motivation can be hard to come by at this time of year. The weather has been doing its damnedest the past few weeks to nip any in the bud, and the bike and kit cleaning can be a bit tedious. It just sucks the motivation to get out and ride right out of you.

Mountain biking is brilliant fun in the winter though. An easy way to overcome any deficit of motivation is to enter an event, so I did just that, and entered the first round of the Merida Brass Monkeys last weekend.

Bikemagic’s man Dave “Pro Jaw” Arthur powering along on the Santa Cruz Tall Boy Al long-termer. Image: Joolz Dymond

Organised by the Gorrick team, it’s a very well run three date series of two-hour or four-hour races at various locations south west of London. Which explains its huge popularity and the fact it sold out days before the weekend. That and the fact the Merida Brass Monkeys event is well established on the events calendar now, and for many a firm fixture through the winter.

The three races offer well-designed courses that somehow manage to put fun right at the top of the agenda, though suffering and pain is usually pretty close behind. Courses typically have plenty os singletrack and just a tiny bit of fireroad, so they’re always proper good fun to ride.

Makes a nice change from pine forests. Image: Joolz Dymond

Or race, if that’s your preference. Because judging by those surrounding me on the start line for the two-hour race, there’s a real mixture. Up front there’s the usual skinny whippets with pointy elbows who take it really seriously but the further back you go the more relaxed the approach gets. And the baggier the clothing gets too. Racers and weekend warriors really can mix on the same circuit.

This opening round at Caesar’s Camp in Aldershot, just south west of Guildford, got the series off to a lung-busting start with reportedly the highest amount of climbing of the three races. A course featuring bit more fireroad than the usual mix, but the climbs were mercifully short and the payback was lots of technical singletrack that was still fast despite the muddy conditions. It was a good reward for the anaerobic workout on the climbs.

Despite some impressively heavy rain over the days leading up to the race, the course had drained well and under a blue sky was riding well. Even on summer tyres the course was, with a bit of good luck and careful weight balance, 100% rideable.

Experiments with chocolate custard as a chain lubricant were deemed only a partial success. Image: Joolz Dymond

There wasn’t an ounce of clean clothing or skin by the time I crossed the line, not on myself or any of my fellow racers. But I was surrounded by more smiling and grinning mountain bikers than I can remember at any other race. It may be a race, and we had numbers on our handlebars, but only a few were taking it that seriously. Most were out for a good fun ride and have a few laughs with their mates.

A positive change this year is the start times for both the two-hour and four-hour races have been tweaked so that they finish at the same time. That means a later start (and longer lie in) for the two-hour racers, and creates a better atmosphere with everyone crossing the line to finish at the same time. Nice.

Men’s four-hour winner Al Fairbairn (Hargroves CC) Image: Joolz Dymond

The next round heads to Windmill Hill, Deepcut, Surrey on Sunday 16th December and it’s worth getting your entries in early if you want to ride. The first round was nearly full a week before, so don’t leave it till the last minute. And I’ll see you there.

You can enter online at http://armycyclingunion.co.uk/?page_id=419

On Strava? Here’s my Strava of the race

Were you there? The pics here are by Joolze Dymond. She snapped everybody so you can find a pro pic of yourself at her website. 

Mad dash Le Mans start. Image by Jon Brooke

The historic Cheddar Challenge used to be the unofficial end of the UK mountain bike season. Sadly it ceased to be a few years ago, despite the organisers of the popular and successful Bristol Bikefest taking over the organisational reins for the last couple of years of its existence. They decided what was needed was to shift the event back to their home turf and the event has been run in the grounds of Ashton Court for a while now.

I had been looking for an event that would nicely bring some closure to the mountain bike season. You could argue that increasingly the start and finish of the ‘season’ is getting more blurred, but still traditional dictates that it’s good to have a final blow-out before settling into the winter grind.

After riding the Stan’s NoTubes Oktoberfest powered by Mercedes-Benz Vito Sport event, I’ve found an event that can proudly claim the unofficial job of bringing the curtain down on the mountain bike season. It’s got everything such an event needs: a chilled atmosphere, fantastic course, smooth organisation, and thankfully good weather.

Your author takes on the 4hr solo race. Image by Jon Brooke

The Oktoberfest really follows the same format as the Bristol Bikefest but with shorter eight and four hour rides to choose from. But why is it called Oktoberfest? That’s a question we put to organiser Mike Wilkens.

“Our first thought was to call it Midfest but then we thought that might send the wrong message. We wanted to stick to the ‘Fest’ theme and by running the event in October and the Oktoberfest being a well recognised name we thought that it would do the trick. The fact that I am German and we have lots of King Ludwig flags out is kind of secondary. It shows however the more relaxed atmosphere of the event.”

And that relaxed atmosphere shows. I got there early Saturday morning and already the event arena was buzzing with activity and excitement. With fewer highly-strung Lycra-clad whippets and definitely more baggy shorts and hydration packs on show, it was drawing in the more casual trail riders looking to challenge themselves, rather than race for the top spots.

The format is pretty simple. You choose from the eight or four hour category, and decide if you’re going to ride solo, pairs with a friend/partner or in a team of four. There seemed to be a good mix of solo riders and teams, judging from the different pace of people on the course.

As for the course, well that’s classic Bikefest fare. Using the Ashton Court circuit, now a fully way-marked and surfaced trail, meant that despite the conditions the course was riding well. Just a few squidgy bits through the camp site challenged the grip of your tyres, but mostly it was all fast running and plentiful traction.

Feet out flat out. Image by Jon Brooke

The days leading up to the event had been a mixed old bag with bouts of torrential rain and bursts of sunshine. Still that didn’t deter some 1,200 riders from turning up, though you would never have known that from riding the course.

Sure the start was a chaotic mess with bikes and bodies everywhere in the ridiculous Le Mans start. It got busy out on the course at times, with some sections of trail causing bottlenecks. But mostly the speeds were more or less similar enough to not cause too much of a problem.

In a funny old season, I somehow haven’t done a lot of racing since my fifth place in the Bristol Bikefest back in May. Having always enjoyed the course and the slick organisation, I got my entry in and lined up for the four-hour solo race.

I opted for the earlier start figuring the course might be in better condition for the first four hours compared to the second four-hour stint. I was right, the course was very slippery for the first couple of laps, with the surface wet and the rocks slick. After a while it got grippier as a racing line developed, but traction noticeably deteriorated towards the end of the race, with mud from the camp site section being dragged onto the surfaced course.

Overtaking here is always tricky and while some struggle to hide their frustration, most people are well-mannered enough and just relax and take their time. The key is, if you’re trying to race fast, is to blast up the three hills on the course and make sure to get ahead of any riders ahead before entering the next section of singletrack.

Opting for a casual ride rather than an out-and-out race effort I walked, rather than ran, the Le Mans-style start. The first lap was chaotic with riders jostling for position and slow starting speed whippets trying to carve through the melee. After a couple of laps the pace settles down nicely and what follows is several enjoyable hours of mountain biking.

All in it’s a great fun day out with a cracking good course, super chilled atmosphere, loads of supportive marshals and spectators and the riders clearly enjoying themselves. It’s a vibrant event and I’ll be back next year. I suggest you do too.

And just like at a beer festival from which the event takes its name, every entrant received a nice memorabilia pint glass. Nice.

Photos at RightPlaceRightTime and results at TimeLaps.

Pretzels for prizes. Image by Jon Brooke

I’m doing the Mega next month, any tips? First time for me, any advice for people in the same boat who might be doing it for the first time?

Jerome: Just have fun, take your time on the training to look at the race. Have a rest, don’t ride all week full speed. Take a break, to be fit and in good shape for the race so you can enjoy it more.

What about kit. What tyres should I run.

2.3′s, depending on the weather if it’s dry you can go light. A strong casing, not too much grip because it’s not that hard technical, not that steep. A downhill casing, and 2.3.

Tubeless or downhill tubes?

Jerome: Tubeless for me. I prefer to ride tubeless. But downhill casing is important. Especially on the glacier, it’s very rocky, you’re following a lot of people so you don’t see everything. Rocks can move at the last moment.

Last night over dinner you mentioned the important of holding onto your bike if you crash?

Jerome: That’s a good one too. On the glacier at the start, if you crash,hold your bike because otherwise you will never find it again!

It’s grown massively in popularity over the years and these days there’s nearly as many Brits as they are Europeans. Last year 1,400 people lined up 3300m above sea level with a 30km course stretching out in front of them. And this year I’ll be one of them.

Scared? Yes, just a little bit…

Mega Preparation

My preparation for the event started in earnest with a trip to the UK Bike Park last weekend. Based down in Blandford, this venue offers several graded downhill tricks of rising difficulty with a fast uplift. The website promises up to 30 uplifts. We lost count but we got pretty close.

Though extremely short in comparison to what I’ll face in the Megavalanche, the multiple runs did allow me to work on my technique and boost my confidence at carrying speed over challenging terrain. The four tracks offer a good mix, with a bit of everything thrown in; massive roots, fast open berms, plenty of differing sized jumps, braking bumps.

I was tired at the end of the day, but I felt a lot more confident by the close of play and was pinning the tracks with more speed compared to the first couple of tentative runs. A box ticked. It also allowed me to test out some kit that I’m might use in France, but more of that later.

A Mega suitable bike

Aside from actually entering, the biggest decision is over which bike to use. For many, that means the same bike they use every weekend. I didn’t have such a bike that I could use, which led to a very long period of umming and arring.  My shortlist, after some thought, wasn’t that short at all! Gradually, I whittled it down though.

Then I settled on the perfect bike, on paper at least. I checked the company’s website, it looked good. A carbon fibre frame, to keep the weight low, with a build kit that looked ready to go from the box, bar a couple of changes for personal preference.

A phone call to Hotlines (UK Laperrie importer) quickly followed, and amazingly they agreed to my mad plan, and said yes. A couple of weeks later, the bike arrived (via the Dirt office, hence i’s used patina). It’s the all-new Lapierre Spicy, a 160mm rig which ticks all the boxes; long travel, tough build kit, big forks, fat tyres.

I’m confident the bike will be up to the job. I’ve recently tested the Zesty, which is essentially a shorter travel version of the same platform, and been impressed with how good the suspension is in loads of different situations. The stiffness of the frame impressed too.

The Spicy gets a bit more travel than the Zesty. It gets the beefier Fox 36 forks too, a 12×142 bolt-thru rear axle which should stiffen up the once downside of the Zesty (a slightly flexy tail), a 2×10 drivetrain and dropper post. I’ll give you a proper first look at the bike in another article.

Mega is demanding race on equipment and isn’t the place for failures, so the bike and build needs to be bulletproof. Changes planned include some sort of chain device. I need to decide whether I’m sticking with 2×10, or going to 1×10 for Mega (any suggestions?), and some chunkier rubber.

Are you riding Mega? Let us know below if you are.

Enduro racing consists of multiple timed stages linked together with untimed transition stages. Your time from each stage, in this case there were eight, are added up and the lowest overall time wins the race. The timed stages are generally gravity assisted, or set on challenging trails to test bike handling skills.

The X-fusion Enduro1 (previously SuperEnduro) consists of three races dotted around the south of the UK, from the Forest of Dean to Salisbury Plain and Hampshire, each one having its own unique flavour. They’re pitched at all-mountain and trail riders, so in a way the event isn’t too dissimilar to the style of riding many people across the country are already doing at the weekends. Which sounds good to me.

Having read Mark’s report from the first round over at the Forest of Dean recently, I was keen to stick a toe in this new format. So, clearing the diary, I stuck an entry in and last weekend found myself on the start line of the second round of the series, held near Tidoworth on Salisbury Plain.

Preparing for the race was a little tricky. The website only gave brief descriptions of what each stage would consist of, and with ‘only’ 25km of riding and not a huge amount of vertical gain to worry about, it didn’t seem the event would be of the gravity style of enduro.

It seems we’re seeing a slight split in the enduro format already, with the downhill/gravity events like the Fetish series and the Enduro1 here pitching itself at the cross-country/trail end of the riding spectrum. Not a bad thing certainly and shows that the format is adaptable to the terrain and type of rider.

And nowhere was this split clearer than a look around the car park on Sunday morning. We spotted everything from an old school GT Zaskar (1997 vintage with v-brakes) to modern 140-160mm trail bikes, most with dropper posts and adjustable forks. There was a smattering of long forked hardtails too and even quite a few 29ers. But really the dominant choice was the typical trail centre fare, 120-140mm 26-27lb all-round trail bikes.

What did we go with? A Lapierre Zesty, which with its 140mm travel seemed the right choice then. It was modified for a spot of uplift action at the UK Bike Park the day before though, which saw a pair of 2.4in tyres (far from ideal as it would turn out, but not the end of the world), dropper post and 50mm stem/750mm bars going on in place of the stock items. And it proved just about perfect.

The enduro format is the perfect test for the new breed of light and long travel full suspension bikes that, after a good ten years of evolution, have reached a point where they are so capable and versatile they’ll go up, over, down and across any sort of terrain. And no where is this better tested than in an enduro event.

The course, well that was a mix of everything. The first and last stages were the longest, and included quite a lot of the lush green grass that is in plentiful supply on Salisbury Plain. This meant the linking stages from stage one to two and between seven and eight were the longest. There was no rush though; the time given to get to the start of the next section was generous enough that you needn’t race.

Two skill sections were included. The first required riding a tightly taped rooty trail in a figure of eight layout, without dabbing. Not as easy as it sounded, and I was forced into dabbing once on the last tricky left-hander. Some cleaned it, and some made a mess of it. It was a well judged bit of planning, in that it wasn’t impossible but sufficiently testing enough to challenge everybody.

The second was a hill climb. Ride as far up the hill as you could with the 50 board the successful completion of the challenge. A dab before that point saw the end of your attempt and the points from the board closest to your stop the points you’d gain. It wasn’t too hard, and could have easily been extended. I carried on riding to the top, where a bonus 50 point card could have easily been placed.

The fun came with stages five, six and seven. Tightly packed into the area resided over by the Tidworth Freeride crew, these three trails would prove to be the highlight of the race and the main talking point all day. A set of downhill tracks carved into the hillside crisscrossing with some massive berms, tight rooty corners and a shed load of drops, jumps and doubles proved a serious test for everyone.

Here the course was well taped, yet racing the track essentially blind proved tough. Trying to keep the speed up while scanning quickly ahead to see where the red tape directed the course, and making assessments on the many jumps and drops with barely any time to make a considered choice. This is the test of a good enduro racer it seems, being able to ride quickly on new trails and making nanosecond decisions on line choice.

This led to the topic of racing trails blind with no prior opportunity to ‘learn’ the track, by walking them, being the main talking point back at the event arena when everyone had crossed the finish line. It’s understandable: most other forms of racing – downhill, cross-country – allow you to check out the course so you know what to expect when you come to race it. Enduro doesn’t give you that opportunity and it led to many complaints.

But that is part of the unique challenge of the enduro format – it’s impossible to recce every section of the event in a 25km route, so riding them blind is necessary. When we chatted with Jerome Clementz recently, he touched on this very subject. “In France you don’t know the trail when you race,” he told us, continuing, “o a really important thing is to know your limits and find a good pace when you start, to not be too slow but no too fast, and to have a nice flowing run. That means you own your bike, you know where you’re going and you don’t make any mistakes.”

Well, we certainly made plenty of mistakes! Enduro really pushes you to scan the trail ahead, to make split second decisions based on very little information other than what is rushing towards you.

We felt that the organisers had done a good job with the available terrain and choice of trails, with a good variety that tested your all-round bike skills. Some of the stages could have been modified every so slightly to the better though, and some of the linking stages would have made fantastic timed sections, either as separate sections or extensions of the planned sections.

It was a fun day out, and we’ve ticked the box beside enduro that up until last weekend had been stubbornly empty. Perhaps the most appealing aspect is the social side of the event. It’s the mix of intense race efforts against the clock on the timed stages interspersed with the social and relaxed effort chat-with-your-mates linking stages that really makes the enduro format so much fun.

You get to race against your mates, you get variety of challenges to test yourself against through the day and you get a bloody good workout. If you’ve bored of regular mountain bike events like cross-country races, marathons or multi-lap timed events like 24-hour races, then give an enduro a whirl. You might just enjoy it.

More info about round 3 at www.enduro1.co.uk

It’s been a long while since I last rode a 12-hour race. In fact, I can’t actually place my finger on the last time I did ride a 12-hour – it might even have been the Bikefest a good few years ago. Which probably explains why I felt compelled to return to the format this year, for no other good reason than it’s been a while.

So it was on Saturday morning that I found myself sitting in my tent, stuffing as much granola cereal as I could stomach into my body. Three large bowls later, and washed down with a double espresso from the mobile coffee stall in the main arena, it was time to get kitted up and head to the start.

Ah, the start. What a frantic disorganised affair that was. I’m not a fan of running, that’s why I ride bikes, so having to lay the bike at the side of the track and trot 250metres further down the hill to await the starting hooter, didn’t go down well. I lined up just behind the fast looking team and solo racers, hoping to at least keep up with them on the first lap.

All hopes of this went out the window as soon as the run started; it was chaos. Luckily, having spotted that another rider had roped in a friend to stand by his bike holding aloft a Union Jack flag, I easily located my bike. Getting on the bike was another matter as another runner clattered into me, almost toppling me over into the long grass.

Onto my bike and on the wide gravel track, I managed to carefully negotiate the sea of runners and people mounting bikes. There were arms and wheels flinging around everywhere, it was quite a sight. Back through the start arena, flags waving and hooters blaring, and into the woods that marked the first part of the course, a fantastic ribbon of singletrack that flowed and weaved through the trees.

The downside; it’s narrow. This makes for tricky overtaking and in places it’s impossible, but does serve as an opportunity to catch your breath. Especially useful if you’re riding solo!

The course – one of the best in the UK?

The Bikefest has used more or less the exact same route in its 11 years, with slight variations on the theme over the years. The big change this year was the recent work carried out by Architect, who surfaced the trail and carried out some major repairs. It’s a trail that, so close to Bristol, gets a lot of traffic. There’s even a trail centre-style café being built, proof of the popularity of the area with local mountain bikers.

The upshot of this work is the trails ability to cope with bad weather, which it certainly did. Having been battered with rain just the day before, seeing to it that the camp site resembled a swamp by the end of the day as people were arriving, the course was 99% dry on Saturday. Just a few squelchy patches remained, but fast rolling everywhere and bikes finishing the day with a light covering of dust – fast summer tyres were the order of the day.

Arrival at the end of the first section of singletrack, between 6-8 minutes of riding depending on your pace, brought you out into a flat double track. Crossing a road the course diverted up a wide gravel track of reasonable gradient, which in itself wasn’t a big challenge. The strong unrelenting wind that was blasting down climb for the entire day made it doubly difficult however. I was certainly glad of my lowest gears.

At the top of this climb the course turned left and dived back into the cover of the trees, and onto another man-made piece of singletrack. With two fast open turns and few small doubles, culminating in a large bomb hole and small rise up to the top of the zig zag, it was ample reward fro the lung busting climb.

Down a fast fireroad descent with two sharp corners seemed a waste of hard-earned altitude. The climb back up was equally unsatisfying, a slippery rocky climb that had many off and walking towards the end of the day. Reaching the top, a short downhill double track to catch your breath, and then it was back onto the singletrack.

Slow and arduous at first with a series of 90 degree corners which were harder to carry speed through than they gave the impression of. Example; a Shred rider, having blasted past me on the previous climb, wiped out his advantage by sliding the rear wheel on a corner right in front of me, landing in a heap to the side of the trail. I nipped past and didn’t see him until the end of the lap.

After much wiggling and weaving through the berm-laden trail, another climb winched you to the stop of the optional Red graded trail at Ashton Court. The most challenging section here and while not difficult, carrying good speed through the many rock gardens, steps, doubles and tight corners required good skill. It served as a good test of handling skills.

Popping out of the tree cover again, a quick blast across a field turned you back onto the same gravel track that serves as the earlier climb, only further along. A short section battling against the strong headwind, before turning right and back into the event arena, to hand over to your team mate. Or for the soloists it’s straight on through for another lap.

It was a brilliant course that excelled under difficult conditions. It’s fun to ride and race and is as challenging as you want it to be. It’s welcoming for newbies and a suitable test for more experienced types. It isn’t the toughest cross-country course; there’s not all that much climbing, but I didn’t hear many people complaining.

My race

Well, it went rather well. I hadn’t exactly been training for the 12-hour solo race, I was relying on just getting through it based on experience alone. That’s not to say I hadn’t been riding plenty, I had, but I would say much of it was specially targeted at the event.

So I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started. My approach was to start reasonably quick, following a good start, then back it off to a more sustainable pace and see how long I could keep that up for. As it turned out, I had a pretty torid start, but getting caught up in the middle of the pack did prevent me from hitting the red zone too early.

Being unsupported I had to stretch out my time on the bike as much as possible. With one 500ml bottle on the bike and three gels in my jersey pocket, I managed to ride three to four laps between having to pull into the solo pit area to replenish my stock. W

ith eight 500ml bottles pre-filled with energy drink and a bag of gels, I was hoping I wouldn’t lose too much time here. I was up against some well supported solo racers, with the luxury of having bottles handed up. So I tried to make my stops as brief as possible. In the end, I stopped for 17 minutes, which is far too long when racing against guys who barely stopped at all.

As the race wore on, so the pace started to tell. The short lap (between 29-34 minutes) tested my mental concentration. Staying focused on the simple act of pushing hard on the pedals got harder. Trying to avoid the mental shut down and resultant lapse in pace was hard. I dug deep. And deeper.

I hit some troughs at several points through the ride. Six hours was tough. Eight hours was Tougher. Then, with the finish, and the countdown of laps that I knew I could squeeze in, in sight, it began to get easier. I began imagine the emotional rush that I would look forward to upon crossing the line for the last time. Spurred on, I managed to increase my pace just a little.

I really had no idea how many laps I had completed until Timelaps published the results. And to see I rode 20 laps of the course, well I was shocked. Then, to see that I finished 5th, behind some properly fast guys well known for their endurance racing exploits, well I was stunned. I pushed as hard as I possibly could and managed to keep the effort level up for most of the 12-hours, and to get such a result, well I’m elated. I think it might just be my best ride of the year.

Now, if my entire body would stop bloody hurting…

Thanks to Graham Haller for the photo.

Over 300 people raced in one of the three races, the main 12-hour race and two 6-hour races running back-to-back, in a variety of categories from solo for the nutters and pairs and teams of four for the sane.

A course that surprised those who had never strayed into this part of Wiltshire consisted of large quantities of tightly packed singletrack. Running 740mm bars will be remembered as a mistake; clouting the bar ends on the trees that closely lined the trails isn’t something you want to be doing too often. It’s a course that reminded me very much of the one used by the Brighton Big Dog, only seemingly longer and harder.

For an area that looks mostly flat on the map, the area turned up a surprising amount of climbing. Most people commented that the course was harder than they thought it would be. The long undulating grass climb combined with the strong wind that was blowing across the fields was a hell of a drag.

The Erlestoke Twelve has been around for a few years, though its format has changed a little over that time. This latest incarnation seems to be the right recipe. The 12-hour riders get a few hours of night riding to contend with, while those not fancying such a long ride can opt for the 6-hour race, starting at the same time.

It’s perhaps no surprise that most 6-hour racers opted for the midday start. Very few lined up at 6pm, and it was very quiet from then on as a consequence. This had a noticeable impact on how busy the course and event felt, because up until 6pm the event had a really nice atmosphere: always plenty of people on course to pass and be passed by, and chat to from time to time.

A great event with a low-key atmosphere that is a nice antidote to the bigger over-subcribed events on the calendar, held in a lovely part of the countryside with one of the most fun, yet properly challenge courses we’ve ridden in a while.

These amazing photos were snapped by www.mbkphotos.co.uk - check out the website for more from the event.

www.erlestoketwelve.com

As soon as Santa Cruz released the eminently more affordable alu Tallboy, following the massive success of the carbon model, we were straight on the blower to Santa Cruz’s UK distributor Jungle.

As soon as it arrived we quickly set about building it, wanting to get it ready for the summer with a packed calendar of weekend rides and events to look forwards to. The Tallboy is going to be our pick of choice for these rides, with everything from 12-hour solo attempts to shorter cross-country evening races and long lazy trail blasts at the weekend.

Here’s the full detailed specification (some bits will change as we settle in with it, but this is our current setup)

Size large Santa Cruz Tallboy aluminium with Fox RP23 Kashima shock
Magura TS8 29er fork 120mm travel 15mm bolt-thru
Shimano XTR race groupset in 2×10 guise
Shimano XTR disc brakes with 180mm front rotor and 160mm rear
USE Sumo Carbon seatpost and aluminium 80mm stem
Mt Zoom carbon flat handlebar 690mm
Shimano XT pedals
Fulcrum Red Power XL wheels
Kenda Slant Six 2in tyres (currently fitted with inner tubes)
3T lock-on grips
WTB Vulcrum saddle
SRAM 10-speed chain
KCNC disc rotors
MT Zoom titanium bottle cage

The office opinion is that it looks great, and that it somehow manages to look a lot less like a 29er than some 29ers. We put that down to the well shaped tube profiles and nicely proportioned layout.

All that remains is to get riding it, and see if, in the transition to aluminium, the Tallboy loses any of the incredible performance that has made its carbon sibling one of the sought after bikes around at the moment.

Closer inspection at the photo above reveals there are 11 sprockets on that cassette. So the new groupset is going to be 1×11, wow we didn’t see that coming.

Campaganolo is the first groupset manufacturer to go 11-speed, and they did that a couple of years ago. That was a pure road groupset. It’s widely anticipated that Shimano will follow suit on their new Dura-Ace groupset. The tide is turning towards 11-speed then.

So it seems odd that SRAM is going to release its first 11-speed offering on the mountain bike side, rather than on the road. Having just released the new RED top-end road groupset, with 10 sprockets, it’s clear there’s nothing in the pipeline for our roadie friends. So SRAM is stepping into the 11-speed game with its new XX1 mountain bike groupset.

And this makes a lot of sense. 1×10 is hugely popular with racers and trail riders alike, and is perfect for the way mountain biking is currently evolving. Riding styles are constantly shifting and things are leaning towards the enduro style of riding, where single ring groupset with a wide range cassette work well. It’s simple, offers plenty of gears and there isn’t the risk of dropping the chain to ruin your ride.

Look at the teeth on the chainring in the photo above. Looks a little odd doesn’t it? A very astute comment from Daniel Zoppellini on our Facebook page is a pretty good guess as to what the enlarged tooth profiles are all about:

“Looking at the teeth on the chainring, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had designed magnetic chainring teeth which ‘held onto’ the chain to prevent chain drop.”

We think he’s hit the nail on the head there. Combined with the new clutch-style rear mechs that SRAM released a while back, we can see the perfect setup removing the chance of dropped chains, but without the weight and complexity of a chain device.

So SRAM’s XX1 will be a 1×11 groupset with a magnetic chainring teeth eliminating a conventional chain device, with a Type 2 rear mech. Interesting stuff.

More details on this story when we get them.