Singletrack Staff Blog

This time last week, Sim and I were talking about doing photo-shoots in banks of stacked, golden leaves. Riding crispy trails with perfect traction and yellow and red tinged leafy borders. That’s all gone to cock now, as Winter (capital W needed) has now arrived. Autumn has left the building quicker than Chuck Berry with a bunch of cash and the promoter’s daughter…

We went out on Sunday on one of those rides that you know will have been great. In that it was comedy misery while we were riding, but the beer and chilli-filled Yorkshire pubs in the pub afterwards immediately started to heal the pain… I was actually quite toasty, but only because I was wearing winter boots, winter tights, fully waterproof Endura Event trousers, a base layer, a (great…) new Helly Hansen mid-layer and a Goretex Paclite jacket. And a Buff. And winter gloves…

The ride was actually pretty fun. Splooshing through puddles, laughing at Matt’s lack of winter boots and worries of faux-frostbite, and generally feeling secretly smug that we were out on the hills when the vast majority of the population were indoors with the ironing and the Sunday afternoon film. Afterwards, I managed to put wet stuff on the radiator while I ran an un-necessarily hot bath (the colour of Lagavulin, due to the rain and my house’s reliance on spring-fed water…) which I promptly soaked (and then fell asleep) in…

Winter? It’s crap. But at least you expect it to be - unlike this summer. And you can go out dressed for it. And you know that the Karma Bank(tm) will deposit one dusty, dusky, sunburn-glow sunny ride in your Ride Account for you to collect next summer. It’s the way it goes… A wet ride for a dusty one. Everyone knows that…

Don’t they?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 1:14 am and is filed under Blogroll . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.