A superb blend of mountaining biking, beer, long forest road climbs, slippy singletrack, good company, rain, mud and most importantly, beer – all fused harmoniously into a single event in Wales in November.
Well, you wouldn’t want a warm one would you?
Sandwiched between Brecon town and the vast wasteland that is Sennybridge Training Area lies a surprisingly expansive piece of countryside that is covered comprehensively by bridleways. In the shadow of the Brecon Beacons this area looks less attractive compared to the better known trails within the Park. But don’t be fooled – there’s good riding to be had here, as I found out on Saturday. One in particular is the bridleway that runs south from Battle to Aberyscir that looks nothing on the map. It turned out to be a gem of a trail.
My tyres slithered over the greasy stones as we made the first few turns of the trail. I tried to preserve the delicate balance of keeping the bike both upright and moving forwards as the trail dived down through the trees and into little narrow gullies where exposed roots and loose rocks tested your skill in the wet conditions. We emerged at the bottom, grinning. The joy of riding new trails was almost enough of a distraction not to notice the weather. Yes, it rained for more or less the whole of the three and half hours we were out, but with the right gear on we were never in a situation of discomfort. It’s funny how some of the best rides I’ve ever done have been in foul weather.
Back in Brecon, the upbeat tones of jazz instruments played out from the pubs around town – the 25th Anniversary Brecon Jazz Festival was here. With the worst of the rain past, we ventured into town to soak up some of the atmosphere, drink beer and eat too many Welsh cakes.
Though there were fewer than previous years, some of the buskers were pretty good – like this guy. The notes that poured out of the end of his saxaphone were amazing. A nice end to a day of two halves.
It’s much easier to think of the hardest descent you’ve done, but stangely pointing the question upwards is different. Talking to a good friend of mine recently, all either of us could think of were plenty of climbs we either couldn’t do, or have nearly done. It reminded me of my years bouldering in the Peak District, where problems were impossible up to the point that you solved them, and suddenly they weren’t hard anymore.
I’ve had a good go at numerous hard climbs scattered over the country – Jacobs Ladder, Peak District; Snowdon, North Wales; Lonscale Fell, Keswick; Gwyrne Fawr, Black Mountains; Cockit Hill, Llangorse and many other unnamed trails. I cleared a few of those, but some required the tiniest of foot dabs to deny me that clean ascent.
There’s one climb, though, that for the last 5 years I’ve tried on and off. Above Talybont Forest, the final piece of track that brings you onto the Bryniau Gleision steepens beneath it’s covering of medium size loose rocks. The gradient is sustained, but the surface changes from loose rocks to fixed rocks and a maze of steps and wheel swallowing grooves obstructs what little momentum you have left from the lower section.
Saturday’s sunshine was warm on my back, and I had the feeling that I could ride all day. My tyres rolled easily over everything and my legs felt great after the 45 minute ascent through the forest. The lower section looked more loose than normal, and it was difficult to keep any kind of momentum up before you get to the steps. They looked like they aways did – an awkward maze with no obvious line. The left hand side looked marginally better, but had the most difficult entry. I fluffed the first attempt and returned to the bottom. The lower section was better second time around as I got the measure of floating over the loose material. I cleared the step that stopped me first time, only to find a wheel swallowing groove. I was annoyed – a stupid error ended what was otherwise a good attempt. Back at the bottom, I recomposed myself. It’s a maximal effort to complete this climb, even though it’s only about 70 yards long, so recovery was important. I had an audience now, too. A group of riders we’d passed earlier had caught us up and pushed their way to the top to watch.
I was getting good at the lower section, coming out of it smoothly with more speed. The first big steep cleared, and keeping away from the groove, I muscled the bike over steps two, three and four. Everything was a blur and my planned line now somewhere over to the left. I picked the front up over the final step, but I was tired now. The back didn’t follow. Bugger. I stepped off the bike, having lost my balance at critcal moment. I looked back down the maze of steps and grooves, and then at the (comparitively small) step I’d failed on. Gutted. The assembled crowd dispersed.
I’ll be back for another go soon I expect, having come so close. For now it remains the Hardest Climb I’ve Nearly Done 😉
The cat is out of the bag now. The intended location of Spring Polaris will be Llanwrtyd Wells, and the event planner is none other than, erm, me. Though the location of the event is kept quiet until a few weeks before hand, clues were threaded through this blog in the riding stories I have told. This will be my second Polaris as a planner, the first being an uncharacteristically warm and sunny weekend in the Brecon Beacons in March 2005.
The thermometer said minus-nine on Sunday morning as I wheeled my bike out of the garage. A cloudless sky heralded the promise of a good days riding, not least for the fact we were bound for Llanwrtyd Wells with the aim of correcting a few wrongs. A couple of weeks back, Al and me planned a challenging and slightly exploratory route through a load of trails neither of us were familiar with. We found ourselves pushing our way up several long sections of bridleway, all the time thinking “We should be coming down this…”. They weren’t entirely without reward of course, as we enjoyed some eye-watering descents on the other side, like this one:
The first long climb of the day through the forest afforded spectacular views across the Irfon Valley, over the Sennybridge Range and beyond to the Brecon Beacons. Soon, we left the bright sunshine and disappeared back into the trees to find the target at the end of our gravelly ascent. The bridleway turned out to be a surprisingly technical descent with short sections of exposed rock making line choice critical. Eventually the path opened up enough for it to become a full on blast down through trees. We re-emerged in the valley bottom, which was still thick with frost, and began our climb out again.
That was very much the flavour for the rest of the day – fireroad climbing beneath crisp blue skies, followed by exiting and nicely technical bridleway descents threaded through trees and over rocks. Over 60km and 2200m of climbing later, we arrived back at the van with four excellent descents under our belts, this time completed the right way around.
I should have know better when the weather man said “light rain”. It’d been pouring down all week, but I thought “Light rain? That’ll do, beats heavy rain any day of the week”. So I chucked the bike into the van and off I went towards Rhaeadr. I hadn’t been riding long before Light Rain had brought along some friends and I found myself riding in the company of a lot of water. There’s a trail on the route that has a number of stream crossings. Getting your feet wet is expected under normal circumstances but last weekend it was something else. I’ve never seen the river so swollen, so much in fact that it had overflowed onto the trail on some sections. Fording them was impossible, as I tested the depth with a fence post to discover the edges were waist deep… If I wanted to get that wet, I’d have gone swimming. After a bit of a bog-hop and a sneaky bit of footpath that probably hadn’t seen any feet in a good while, I was back onto the fireroad and back to comparative safety.
Yesterday was another story all together. I picked Al up in the morning and we headed out to Abergwesyn to ride Doethie Valley. A cool breeze made us think twice about leaving the waterproofs behind, but it wasn’t long before we’d shed the extra layer and found ourselves riding beneath a bright sky. I’ve always done Doethie Valley via the track over from Soar y Mynydd, but the bridleway past Nant-llwyd provides a stunning entrance into the valley where you can see a couple of miles of sinuous singletrack stretching out in front of you.
Alan descending into Doethie Valley
There was still plenty of water about from the deluge of the weeks that have gone before us, but trails were a delight to ride – the sort of trails you can just keep coming back to and never get tired of, whatever the weather.
It’s always a joy to discover a new bit of trail in an area you thought you knew. The Real Ale Wobble a couple of weeks ago takes you through a couple of woods I manage, and through a bit of Wales I (should) know like the back of my hand. After a lengthy climb on fire road, and with the rain getting heavier we were looking for short cuts to the first ale stop. A last minute change of heart saw us stick to the planned route across an exposed piece of moor. It looked pretty unexciting at first, and the rain feeling all the more sharp in the wind wasn’t helping. Eventually the sinuous line through the heather brought us to the top of a steep tricky grassy descent before joining a superbly fast and slightly off-camber bridleway. The slippy conditions commanded your attention all the way down. A real gem, hidden in plain view.
Now, if this rain would just ease up a bit, I’ll get myself back out to Abergwesyn and ride all the other trails I thought I knew but haven’t actually ridden…
If there’s one thing I’ve got good at over the years riding my bike, its bad trail habits. As is the way with bad habits, you don’t know you’re doing them until someone points it out to you.
So, it was at the A Quick Release skills day in Sherwood Forest last month where Paul pointed out my mistakes as I made a bit of meal of trying to ride (too) quickly through a complex of three rooty turns we were using for cornering practice.
I met Paul in 2005 when I went out to Luchon for the TORQ Fitness/ AQR training week. He was helping Ian and Kate Potter with their first year of guiding. I was quietly impressed by his skillful yet modest approach to riding and that extra bit of flair he had on descents that told you he was a) really very good at riding a bike and b) not trying that hard, so as not to make us look crap.
Back to those corners then. Paul broke them down into pieces and talked through three fundamental things we needed to do to get more traction and speed out of the bike. I started out slowly and struggled to coordinate the movement of my bike and my body in sync with the trail in the way Paul had described. A different approach was required, I thought. I accelerated down the trail, missed the braking point into the first corner, came out of it late and into the next berm too low before finding the line again for the third having lost most of my speed. At the second attempt I got the braking right, carved through the first corner on the right line, railed the small berm and shot out of the third corner – the three things Paul taught me had begun to come together. It wasn’t perfect, but refinement would come through practice.
A month later and I was riding the Pen Hydd trail at Afan Argoed. The trail flowed fast beneath me as I used every inch of its width to carry my speed through the rocky turns of the Sidewinder descent. Now I’ve been shown the right way to do things, its down to me to make sure I don’t slip back into those bad habits.
Thanks Paul 😉
I went back to one of my old mountain biking haunts at the weekend. Nestled away in the Shropshire hills lies a forest with many acres of fine singletrack, steep climbs and fast flowing descents. The names of the all the trails came back to me immediately: Garlic Run, One Eye, Ariston (a climb that goes on and on), Off Camber, Foxglove and so on. Its a place that was kept quiet for years and used by only a few locals – its since played host to the National Champs in 2005 and also a Trailquest, so I needn’t be so secretive now.
If you’ve read my Nerve post, you’ll have noted my observations with regard to trail grades. I remember a good few test pieces in the Mortimer Forest, but as was the trend at the time they were all UP. Having also done some rock climbing, a system of grading the difficulty of something was very familiar, and we tried to adapt a similar system for our local trails but without much success.
However, the one thing that did prevail was the use of a quote from a Mint Sauce cartoon from December 1993. Mint climbs a long grass climb that ascends up through the clouds and eventually to the seat of god (who incidentally looks the same as Mint). God says to Mint “tough climb eh?”, to which Mint replies “middle ring all the way”. “Oh” says god.
Once you’d managed a climb in the little ring, it seemed a natural progression to attempt it in the middle ring. And by doing so was to downgrade its difficulty so you could poke fun at to your friends doing it in the little ring, but increase its difficulty relative to you doing in the little ring. Which kind of brings me back to climbing where we had our own simple system that graded boulder problems based on percieved difficulty. H-, which wasn’t hard; H, which was hard and H+, which was so hard you couldn’t do it. Simple.
I’ve just got back from a hard two days of riding in Scotland on the 7stanes trails. I don’t normally get that far north, but with TransScotland looming around the corner, and me having to be in Edinburgh for a conference I couldn’t resist taking my bike. I rode the some of the 7stanes a few years ago while they were still building them and noticed straight away they were very different in character to the Welsh trails with which I am very familiar.
The “difficulty” with places like Afan or Nant yr Arian comes when you attack the trails fast – the tight turns, rocky drops and fast-flowing lines become all the more difficult at a faster pace. But if you want to chill a bit, you can take it easy and go with the flow of the trail. Scotland on the other hand is just difficult. The trails required constant attention and repeatedly challenged my nerve with increasingly large drop-offs, big jumps and fades. Here’s what I got up to:
I pulled up at Glentress on Thursday night and took in a quick lap of the Red route to get my eye in, just making back to the van before it got dark. The Spooky Wood descent was brilliant, and I returned first thing Friday morning to repeat it – knowing where the berms where let me push much more harder the second time. The Glentress Black route was punctuated with the odd hail shower and mini snow storm, but didn’t really present me with any great difficulties, apart from being chased along the boundary track by a Red Grouse (yes, really). I think of the two I prefer the red route though. In the afternoon I headed over to Innerleithen for a loop of Black. The hail had cleared and I climbed up onto Minch Moor in the sunshine, battling against a deceptively strong headwind towards the top. On the descent I discovered what the Black grade means – some seriously committing rocky drops brought me to an abrupt halt a few times, and after looking hard at the climb onto and then off Razor Ridge I thought better of it.
I stopped at Dalbeattie Friday night and got ready for an early start for a three trail assault of Dalbeattie-Mabie-Ae on Saturday. The Hardrock trail at Dalbeattie does exactly what it says on the tin – Hard Rock. Graded red, I found a good few bits here much harder than anything at Glentress Black. Last time I rode here I did the Slab, but being on my own this time decided to give it a miss. I made a complete hash of riding the Whale – a technical rock lump with a groove up its spine – I fell off to the right back down onto and over the trail, still attached to my bike. Ouch. I wasn’t too keen with Mabie last time I rode it, but this time things seemed to come together – the climb and descent of Descender Bender was brilliant and I felt like I was getting into a rhythm now. I got to Ae at lunchtime. The most remote of the centres I visited was reflected in the particularly rugged nature of the trails. I enjoyed the climb of Rab’s Slippy One, and the descent down The Face was probably one of the most enjoyable bits of the whole weekend, and the only occasion where I nailed all the rocky drops with unflinching confidence.
Its quite easy sometimes to become a bit obsessed with training and all the data it produces, but of at least equal importance are your trail skills. It goes without saying I guess, but really testing your skill and nerve like I have done over the last couple of days will probably affect my riding for the rest of the year.
Ian Barrington 
