Monday 17 October 2016

Opening Your Options

It’s all too easy to get in a bit of a rut with any route you ride regularly. Once you’ve gone to the effort of pouring over the map to plan it out and then riding it to find out that it works it’s tempting to keep repeating the same ride over and over again. This has advantages as you’ll navigate effortlessly round it and know what to expect, but it does mean you might have missed something great. Perhaps on rides further from home this is why it might make sense to look at what other people have done, or recommend, but on your local trails you have the opportunity to keep exploring.

Look at the map again. There are probably a few other options to take to link things together at some points. It’s worth trying them and you’ll end up with a stronger knowledge of all the ridable paths in the area and you’ll open up more variation.

I’m very guilty of this and since mapping out the ride from Watton-at-Stone I had only varied it once. Basically the ride looks like this:


It’s really not a bad ride and has a lot of good fast (albeit pretty flat) riding along the way. It shouldn’t take an irritation to change it, but there was one bit I hadn’t quite been happy with. A double-back up a field which is now ploughed over followed by lines across the middle of other fields, all with a tendency to get clogged with mud as things get damper, had the potential to ruin the ride. There was an obvious detour that could cut out that section and I decided to try it out before the conditions deteriorated too much into winter. For good measure there was an alternative end to the ride that I thought I might as well try.


The verdict? The first alternative route is much better and I think will stand up to winter a little better. To be honest it is generally better, adding in a rooty section, open field ridge, and a fast stony track to replace the slight slog before. We’ll call it now option A for the ride and retire the other version for use if I get bored or in the blazing middle of summer where carving through leg-whipping crops seems fun. The alternative ending has nothing much to recommend it over the existing option. It includes more tarmac and replaces field crossings with a stony track. In my head this is now classified as the wet-weather option and good to have in the back pocket for when the ideal option seems too clogged with mud.

I’ve come off the ride with a better understanding of the possible routes out there and that’s a good thing. The links I’ve ridden now also pull in ideas for shorter rides if they’re needed, escape routes, and other things to think about.


A

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