Tuesday Bonus

I had an early start this morning, up at 5am to get the 6.26 train from Oxford. However, rather than heading into London I changed at Reading and caught the train to Staines. The meeting started at 8.30am and we worked straight through to 1pm. The client had to finish our meeting as he had another meeting to go to.  This meant that I had an early start back to Oxford, getting home around 4pm. It had been a wet and windy start to the day and the blustery weather had continued all day. However, arriving home it looked like the sun was trying to shine through, although it was still quite breezy.

So I decided to head out on the mountain bike to make the most of the weather.

From home I headed up to Headington and crossed under the A40 to Barton. First stop was the little park area where I had seen local kids playing on a small pump track. Luckily for me there was no one there today, so I tore across the grass and pumped over the few bumps. It was a good place to refresh the techniques learnt from the mountain biking course, but there weren’t enough bumps to really make a track, so I pushed on. Back up the roundabout and then down past Barton leisure center to follow the bridleway to Forest Hill. For some reason it didn’t seem as fast as it had done in the past. May be it was because the grass was longer, I don’t know. I do know that I found the bar ends to be too far up, I need to adjust them to be flatter. I was going to do it on the ride but found that my Smart Tool doesn’t have a small enough Allen key. Do I really need to carry another multi tool as well as the smart tool?

From Forest Hill I headed down the road towards the A40 and Wheatley. At the junction of the A40 and the Forest Hill road there is a bit of woodland with some tracks in it. There was no one else there today so I dropped in for a quick play. I think the tracks must have been made by trail bikes rather than mountain bikes. Even so there were some good drops and slopes, there were some that I considered but rejected as being just too steep and too long to tackle by myself.

From there I crossed the A40 and dropped into Wheatley, turning right towards Littleworth but then taking the side road to Shotover. I saw the long hill in plenty of time and dropped to the lowest gear. I managed to crank it out for a few minutes and made good progress up about 80% of the hill. But, by then my legs just ran out of energy and I had to push the bike up the final section of the steep bit. The road evens out a bit near the end and I was able to cycle the rest of the way to the top.

Near the car park on the city side of the park I dropped into the wood and headed down the bridleway.  It was a mixture of bone dry and slightly damp. A fast but by no means scary descent via some small steps. From the bottom of the hill a quick blast through Brasenose Wood took me back to Horspath road. I rode up to the ring road and across to the Slade. I took a side road to cut the corner and came out near the cross roads of Old road,The Slade and Windmill Road.

I had a quick tour of the single tracks in the old quarry before heading home via Headington.

The full route is on Trailzilla, 19km (11.8 miles) in abut 1.5 hours.