Mountain biking

The most popular trail near to Wageningen is the Posbank. It is a great trail, with lots of hills (by Dutch standards), beautiful woodlands and impressive heathland. Last weekend we went there with the club. It was perfect weather, sunny, little wind, not too hot.  As usual we split into groups so that everyone could go at the pace they were comfortable with. We had a great ride, coffee half way round and with spring-fresh green leaves coming out on the bilberry shrubs it was all looking lovely. If you read my blog last week, you will know that I had found out that nasty noise my bike was making was caused by a crack in the frame. So, whilst riding the trail, I was wondering about what its replacement would be.  What wheel size?  Hardtail or fully? Carbon or Aluminium?  What helped was that (with my bike being a potentially lethal weapon) I had borrowed my daughter's bike. That is a hardtail, but with a decent front fork.  Normally if I ride a hard tail it is a rental and not such brilliant quality, so this was a revelation. I discovered that at least some of the extra grip and so on that I thought came from my rear suspension was coming from the front fork. Of course in rough mountainous country a fully would still be useful, but when it comes to it on holiday the trails  I ride are also not so rocky. But above all, I had forgotten what an unbelievably great direct experience it is without the suspension removing all the effects of the surface of the trail.  So the new bike should be a hardtail, not a fully then. Another thing I paid attention to which bits of the trails I enjoyed.  It was not especially the bits where I could go fastest, but the twisty, winding, swoopy bits. So, not a 29" but a 26" (but no one makes those any more) or 27.5"wheels. And finally, my daughter's bike was definitely lighter than mine and that certainly helped the ride.  So a Carbon frame would be a good idea.

So that very afternoon I called in to my LBS to see what was possible. As it turned out, at least at first sight, less than I hoped. Apparently bike manufacturers have a very strange way of running their business.  Every year they bring out new models, which means that they either have to sell all the bikes they make in one year, or sell the remainder at a discount.  So to prevent that, they make less bikes than they can sell. Which means that at this time of the year, half the models (or model/size combinations) in the catalogue are not available anymore.  But although there were none left in the catalogue, the shop was super helpful and they managed to ask around and found what I was looking for in another shop. And you can see the result in the photo below.  A beautiful Cube 27.5 inch-wheeled, Carbon-framed hardtail.  It did great in my local woods and tomorrow we go to the Posbank to see how it does there...

For a review of the Posbank trail, see here.

For quite some months now, my bike has been making strange creaking and cracking noises, especially if I bounce up and down a bit.  It has gradually been getting louder and I had been trying desperately to track it down.  Maybe the bottom bracket?  Still there after that needed replacing last year.  Perhaps the headset?  No, replacing it didn't help. The saddle or saddle pen?  Stand up and it still does it. Maybe it was in the rear suspension, but taking that out and carefully cleaning all the joints didn't help.  So finally I had a really good look today and the slightly raised scratch under the bottom bracket that I hadn't paid much attention to earlier was indeed a nasty crack that was actually quite scary when examined closely. So now the mystery is solved and it is just a matter of working out what to about it.

Strangely enough, the reason that I finally found this was that the bike was also otherwise misbehaving itself.  A couple of weeks ago, all of a sudden the rear brake lost pressure.  However, after leaving it overnight with the lever bound up, it seemed to recover nicely (as promised by the wisdom of the internet). Then last week I was out with the club and the rear brake completely lost pressure, dropping a pad in the process. I took it into my LBS and they bled it for me, so I was expecting no problems today.  However, after only a few minutes in the woods today, a pad fell out again.  After a bit of a search I found the pad and refitted it (astonishing patience of the others whilst they waited for me to faff around with it), but then it fell out again after only a short distance, the very next time I bounced over a root. So clearly a somewhat bigger problem than just a bit of air in the cable.

When mountain bikes are working properly they are wonderful machines, but not on days like today.

There is a saying* that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Judging by the complete absence of any other mountain bikers last Sunday, it is not only scorching summer sun but also large quantities of rain and wind that deters sane people. Especially towards the end of the afternoon, it was really quite impressively high work pedalling into the wind. It was not only the weather, the day before I had been out with the club and my energy reserves were still depleted from that. However, it was that or sitting drinking tea and making polite conversation the friends my wife was visiting, so storms and tiredness did not seem too bad. We were visiting Almelo, which is a town (officially a city) about an hour's drive northeast of Wageningen, in the province of Overijssel.  The route next to Amelo starts from the village of Wierden.  The landscape is quite flat and open, so the makers of the trail really had to do their best to make something of it. I had been forewarned by the reviews on the MTB routes site that there was quite a lot of asphalt, so that was not such a problem, but there was also a lot of narrow singletrack sandy paths snaking alongside fields and some really great pieces of small woodland with nice windy tracks made through them. The woodland was nearly all broad leaf, so the picture below is completely atypical, but that was the only moment when it stopped raining long enough to take a photo without destroying my phone. The singletrack was not really difficult or technical, but did require me to concentrate on my steering. What was difficult was the sand.  Probably in more normal weather conditions it would have been all right, but with with everything so incredibly wet, it was really hard going cycling through wet sand for a very high proportion of the route. And yes, I did see a March hare as it dashed across a field in front of me, and it did look at me like it thought I was mad.

*From a song by Oscar Wilde