(Free) Ride Sunday

It's valentines weekend and clearly those of us whose first love is really our mountain bike were out for a ride- 8 of us started out. 

The Sunday rides from Nirvana Cycles are advertised as free but this one truly became a FreeRide, unintentionally we ended up not piling on the miles this week but instead finding anything that we could rollover that might trip us up or we could launch off to get 3 inches of air, and there was plenty of material around Leith Hill.

We'd lost Nick off the back in the first climb so we played on the Summer Lightning DH trail jumps getting some good speed and air off the first 5 jumps while we waited for him to find us. Then we let Jason ride his nemesis jump that had ripped his shoulder rotator cuff some months ago, fortunately no repeat of that. 

Heading on up to Leith- Gilles and Simon sessioned Donnie Darko until Nick found us, then we played on Windy willows a little then back up to a packed Leith Tower for tea and cake. We met with Ian, Jo and Vier and picked up a couple of other riders at the Agony Aunt log jump, who tagged on to play on some drop ins and then play on the jumps in the quarry.

There was quite a bit of sessioning the kickers in the quarry until Gilles cleared the big one and hit his high for the day. We started back over to Redlands via Deliverance which we all made it down in a variety of sketchiness and then we watched Simon's build up to the big jump and then his bunny hop technique off the ramp at the bottom (what an anti-climax!)

Over in Redlands there's a fallen tree to ride over and our confident team knew they could ride it no problem but with a camera on them their unanticipated circus antics were entertaining for the cameraman if not the riders!

The trails are pretty muddy but all still ridable and again we were blessed with sunshine and the warmest day we have had in ages.

Finished at the shop for some of Liz's cake and a cuppa with Simon to tell our tales and show videos!