This weekend all the south west XC boys and girls will be heading to Okehampton for the last in the South West Fully Sussed series.

Regular racer Mike Tomlinson took the opportunity, along with a few others, to check out the Jay Horton-designed course ahead of the race on 15 August:

“Myself, Henry, Nick, Chris and Matt took the opportunity last Sunday to have a gander at the race course with course designer Jay Horton.

“Of all the XC courses I have ever ridden I can honestly say I enjoyed this more than any other. For hard, fast and fully challenging riding this course tops the lot and for racing it will make for some really fierce and exciting battles with little opportunity to eat or drink and some overtaking manoeuvres that will lead to a need for the extra brown safety shorts.

The course has an exciting collusion of high speed single track, off camber roots and rocks that left all of us smiling like grandma at Bingo. The first section of trail has at least five possible lines so we selected one each and hit them all at the same time in the big ring hopping and jumping off tree stumps and drop offs whilst whooping in a somewhat embarrassing manner.

“Jay gave us a free reign to add a ‘hardcore’ descent to the course and left us for a few hours to play while he completed his risk assessment. Two more laps of the course and some time spent sessioning the table top jumps on descent number two and jumping a stream near the end of the lap made us realise that finding a descent more challenging than those already in the course was far too difficult.

“The solution was obvious. The five of us got off our bikes and started clearing a new trail that we could call our own and the South Fork Climb was born. The course is now about 8km and with 4 laps for some categories many will be out there for at around 2 hours, a proper race.”

Mike will be marshalling at this round due to injury.

More info and to enter head to www.fullysussed.co.uk