Month: February 2021

Sunshine and warmth has arrived, at last!

So went hunting for more bits of Roubaix in the local area. Found one of the good local bits trashed by the farmer over the winter – good foot of mud over the cobbles. Pretty much unridable, hoping that it will dry out and be back to a more usable state by the summer.

Re-rode the “descent” from the Leeds-Liverpool canal down to Crosby, there is a 22m drop…

So the last week has been cold in our area, uncharacteristically so because living by the sea tends to give us a microclimate that is a bit warmer than everything else. Yet this last week the mercury hasn’t gone above freezing which has meant that the trails have gone from saturated and muddy to rock solid and frozen.

The trails are just as waterlogged as they were but today the riding was on the whole fast and I returned home with a bike that wasn’t in need of a full clean and prep.

The highlight of the ride were numerous ice puddles, look like puddles but turn out to be half an inch of water over sheet ice of varying strength and thickness, but all equally lethal if you try and turn too sharply.