When we all started going mountain biking together about two years ago, we used to head up to the Blue Mountains and ride the fire trails. It was good fun in a ‘great to be outdoors away from the city’ way, but it was fairly straightforward. After all, the trails are built so fire control vehicles can access forest fires, so other than being rough ground, they’re not exactly challenging on a bike.

Then myself and Tom started bringing our bikes down to Canberra on the weeks we were working there, we discovered singletrack and we haven’t looked back. Canberra is full of great singletrack through almost every forest in the region, built and maintained by the good folks at Canberra Off-Road Cyclists (CORC).

For those who’ve no idea what I’m on about, singletrack is like a one person wide path, weaving in and out amongst the trees, over logs & rocks, into and out of gullies, uphill, downhill, under branches and over jumps. In short, it’s great fun, requires constant attention and, depending on how fast you ride it, can be as difficult as you want to make it. It’s what MTBing is all about.

Myself and Tom have been going on about it to Kevin and Niall for months and months, telling them that they had to organise a weekend in Canberra. Well, last weekend it finally happened, and they joined myself and Tom for an MTB weekend in the capital. They arrived on Saturday morning, checked in to the hotel, got the bikes ready, then we all headed off to meet Paul for a ride around Majura Pines. We arrived back at the hotel 4.5 hours later exhilarated, thoroughly exhausted and with a couple of cuts and bruises spread throughout the group. After a shower and a short rest it was off to Debacle for some good food and quality Belgian beers. We were in bed shortly after 10 ;-)

Sunday morning saw us up early and off to Sparrow Hill, a 23km loop of twisting singletrack just outside Queanbeyan. We only managed to get half the loop done as we had to get back to the hotel in time to check out, but it certainly grabbed our attention and we’ll be heading back there asap to give the full lap a go.

We checked out of the hotel, grabbed some lunch and then headed back to Sydney, but not before Kev had locked his keys in the car! While waiting for the NRMA to rescue the keys, we checked out some bike porn at Mal Adjusted before finally getting on the road. Our last stop of the trip was Penrose State Forest just north of Marulan, about half-way between Canberra and Sydney. I’d seen the forest many a time on the way to Canberra and had wondered about riding around in it, but I thought it was just fire trails. It was only when Tom picked up a copy of Australian Mountain Bike mag which contained a trail map for the forest that we realised there was a lot more to it than met the eye.

It turns out that the forest hosts a round of the Working Week Series (five 8hr MTB races = 40hr week – geddit?), as does Sparrow Hill, so we decided to ride the competition trail. It was brilliant, and took us 1h15m, including a couple of regrouping stops and one or two detours where the trail was a bit ambiguous. By this time everyone’s legs were tired after almost 8 hours of MTBing spread over the two days, so it was time to call a halt to proceedings and head back to Sydney.

Needless to say, Kev & Niall are now total converts and there’ll be many more MTB trips in the future. Now all I need to do is convince them to enter an MTB enduro race as a team…

B: 114.7km – R: 19.5km