Getting a Little Dirty

The Off Season is a good time to experiment with different forms of training. This weekend the Club held a mountain biking session at Lysterfield Park. Neither Elaine nor I had ever done mountain biking before, so we were quite excited about the session.

Trailmix is a Cafe and Bike shop located within the park that hires mountain bikes out for $35 for two hours, or $50 for the day. We took the two hour option because I was doing a trail run after the ride. The hire bikes are surprisingly good Specialized hard tail mountain bikes (I think Rockhoppers) with 29 inch wheels. Hard tail means they only have front suspension which is perfect for the trails at Lysterfield park.

Once we'd sorted out the hiring, Clint sent the group off to practice on the beginner trail. It is about 500m long with a couple of optional hazards to practice on. The hazards are basically humps (usually a stack of logs covered in dirt) of varying heights and I describe them as optional because on the beginner trail there is an alternative flat path around each hazard. On the first run, I simply followed another club member Peter and we avoided most of the larger humps. As I gained confidence, I learnt to trust the front suspension and found that as long as I had some speed, it was relatively easy to traverse all of the hazards on the beginner trail.

Then we started the session and as soon as we entered the National Park, I completely lost all sense of direction until we finally returned to the car park nearly 2 hours later. The group soon split into 2 groups, with Sarah looking after the slightly slower riders (including Elaine). Talking to Elaine after the ride, she came off a few times (as did all the others in her group), but still loved the session and can't wait to do it again. My group had far less crashes, ironically extra speed (and falsely founded confidence) helps to avoid the accidents. Like Elaine, I also loved the mountain biking and can't wait to get back.