Kielder Gravity Enduro

Round 2 of the new Gravity Enduro UK series headed up to Kielder forest last weekend.

It was my first time in Kielder and the things i noticed about it are-

1 It is in the middle of nowhere.
2.The trails are pretty good.
3.There is no phone signal for 20 miles, so no texting, tweeting or internet for me. The humanity!
4.The pub is a shithole.
5.The Midges are relentless.
6.The static caravans are cold and damp.

Sounds good eh?

Ha, maybe it wasn’t all that bad. The stages had a good mix of technical and physical. Stage 1 was like an old school midlands DH race on a new cut track through the forest. After riding the stages in practise on the saturday, in torrential rain, i was a grumpy bugger. Not only was i cold and wet, i had absolutely no energy.
Sunday morning i felt a lot better and the sun was out! Maybe the two things were related?

The race was a mix of pushing hard on the technical stages and trying to survive on the physical ones. My preparation for this race had not been good, i hadn’t found time to do a training ride in almost 2 weeks, so that is probably why saturday almost killed me.

I managed to do pretty good on stages 1, 3 and 4 but got killed on 2 and 5.

I ended up with 3rd in Elite which i was pretty happy with to be honest. I am happy with how the series is going for me and i am still the leader of the series.

My Santa Cruz Blur LTc is the perfect bike for this racing/ riding. The Dirt bike check video seems to have gone down really well and people are really interested in the bikes we are running. It has had more than 360,000 views!

I must say i cant be happier with my bike it really flys up and down. Aren’t Mountain bikes amazing these days!

Roll on Eastridge where i know the trails.

Oh yeah, finally, you can get my MTB skills app free on itunes for your iphone or ipod here.

Coming soon to Andoid.

Photos courtesy of Peter Stevens Photography