2 weeks to go until the Gran Canaria enduro and I was desperate to get a couple of big rides in. I’m riding, running and turbo’ing a lot both in the week and at weekends, but rarely am I riding for longer than 3 hours in one go. As it turned out, I didn’t get chance to do “big” rides and had to settle for a couple of medium rides instead. I decided to do a 30 mile out-and-back on Saturday night following two horrible turbo sessions (one on Friday evening, one Saturday morning).

The route was a familiar one, basically riding northeast towards Rochdale, up through the council estate and then climb up RMR, once at the quarry just past the summit, turn around and ride back.I rode up faster than I have done for a bit, no doubt partly due to the light weight bike I was riding and the nippy Small Block 8 tyres (which are good on tarmac as well as dirt). Coming back down the moor convinced me that the fork is now working as it should too, following several days of on-and-off fettling and playing with air pressures. On the way up, I stopped to survey the damage to some poor sod’s BMW….

On Sunday I got the road bike out and managed another 30-ish miler with as many hills as I could include in the route. It’s still freezing cold at night, there was a fair amount of ice about once it had gone dark and I had one or two “moments”. I need to stop crashing and falling off on road rides. One of these days I’m going to get hurt.