We’ve returned from our annual pilgrimage to Glentress!  It was awesome, although slightly (and quite literally) dampened by the weather.  It rained solidly every single day except for our anniversary – however we were at the zoo rather than on our bikes.  There were bears.  Bears are awesome.

See?

On the days we spent at Glentress, it was exceedingly muddy, but still great fun.  The blue route in particular holds up well in the wet, whereas the red gets a little more slippy.  I found this out to my dismay as I came a cropper on a steepish corner on Pennel’s Vennel… which is the first section of the red.  Long story short, got over the first drop, took a line to the right when I should have gone left, and went barrelling down off the side of the hill, over the handle bars into a large pine tree.  To my credit, I managed to find time to scream loudly.

I was shaken rather than hurt, and a distraught Mr Toast came running to my aid – you’ve never seen a man in spd shoes run so fast!  I sat their sobbing for a bit, distinctly cross with myself.  Two chaps came down (one pushing his bike down) – apparently they heard me scream from the top of the section.  That must have been interesting for them…

That was pretty much all of the red I did sadly – given the poor weather I decided not to push my luck and stuck to the blue for the rest of our adventures, with some light dashes of freeride.

Despite my woeful performance on the red, I was still pretty chuffed with my progression.  This year I could not only get up the entirety of the Osprey carpark to Buzzard’s Nest carpark without stopping, I also did it three times in one day!  I also did a good chunk of the red obstacles on the climb up, all of the obstacles on the Admiral, felt a lot more comfortable going at speed and chasing Mr Toast, and the easiest freeride course from top to bottom, including the fly-off – which I didn’t even consider doing last year.  I also did stuff first time on the skills course that gave me a bit of grief last year… although I did fall off the long log skinny.  Oh dear.

I’m planning on doing a skills course sometime soon – although I’m sloooowly gaining in confidence, there are still very basic things that I’m rubbish at – lifting the front wheel, or any form of jumping, for example.   I’d like to tackle step up obstacles with a technique slightly more refined that charging into it full speed and hoping for the best.