samuri.co.uk

Bike:Chameleon
Distance:24 miles

At the end of a particularly shitty weekend, I chucked the bike into the back of the car and headed for Llandegla. I don’t understand the issues people have with the place. Yeah, it’s not massively technical, yeah, it’s quite easy but it’s a trail centre for heavens sake. None of them are technical or difficult. What do you expect? Even the *hard core* ones like Glentress, Inners and Afan are easy, I don’t get what the bitching is about. They’re fun, and there’s usually a nice cafe at the end. And Llandegla is close and the downhill sections are swoopy and jumpy, jesus, what do you want?

Anyway. I nipped down, got there at 9, sprinted out and put in a quick first loop of the black. Not a massively quick loop admittedly, 1 hour 10 minutes. In my defence it was incredibly slippy and even at that time was crammed with slower riders who got in my way a bit and I did have two small quickly fixed mechanicals not to mention a few minutes on a callout. But I know now it can easily be done in under an hour assuming it’s dry and empty.

Then I did a slightly slower loop. Halfway up the big climb a chap passed me so I speeded up and tagged onto him. He was very quick though and left me a while later. Never mind, time for some jumps. I caught some proper air this time round, even crossed up right in between some lads chatting on top of a jump, that was cool. And I stopped for some tangfastics. Got back to the car and watched a guy in a 4×4 reverse into someone’s car and drive off like a cock without even checking, another idiot in a car that’s too big for him.. No damage done though. I was going to stop for some food and a hot chocolate but decided to just leave in the end. Not a bad day out and two laps gave me over a thousand metres climbing.