Had a long day yesterday! 6 hours and about 30km of off-road cycling. Myself, Tom, Kev and Niall headed up to the Blue Mountains to have a go at The Oaks Trail. Left Bondi just before 9am, drove to Glenbrook, parked the cars and hopped onto the 10.02 train to Woodford.

After a bit of faffing, we hit the trail. It started off with short downhills followed by short uphills for a few kilometres. The new shocks were working perfectly and it was a lot easier to go fast and maintain control. Tom was the first casualty of the day, going over the handlebars on one downhill. Kevin had already fallen off his bike, but that happens so often it’s no longer regarded as exceptional. A third of the way through the trail we found the helipad area. There was a couple of bits of tree trunks lying about, which provided the perfect opportunity for everyone to practice their bunny-hops.

Shortly afterwards we hit the main downhill section and we took off. I nailed a maximum speed of 53kmh down one section, an indication of how well the shocks were working. Myself and Kevin stopped half way down to wait for Niall and Tom. When they still hadn’t arrrived 15mins later we figured something must be wrong, so we started cycling back up the hill. Rounded the previous corner to see the lads watching someone fix Niall’s puncture. We’d seen the guy having a rest and a drink as we flew past. Niall had gotten a puncture somewhere up the trail and since the repair kits were with myself and Kev, he’d stopped to ask this guy if he had a patch. The poor man volunteered to fix the puncture, only to find that there turned out to be four punctures in the tube! Got all that sorted out, then took off again. At the end of the downhill run, we hopped the National Park gate and headed off on the singletrack part of the trail. We’d covered about 1km when Niall got another two punctures, in the same tyre, so we stopped to fix that. We decided that in future we’d all bring two tubes so we wouldn’t have to deal with punctures again!

The rest of the singletrack changed between nice wooded sections through the trees to more technical, rocky downhill sections and a couple of kms later we ended up in a car park. We weren’t sure where to go from there, so we followed the tar road, splashed through the creek and stopped. We were faced with a very steep hill, which we were hoping to avoid having to climb, but a couple of passing bikers told us that the hill was the way out. Just what we needed to finish the day: a bloody long, steep hill. Thankfully it wasn’t as long as we thought it was going to be, and 6 hours after we’d started the trail, we reached the top, with lots of needed drinking water available from the fountain.

A quick cycle back to the cars, a change of clothes and we headed into Glenbrook for a perve at all the cool bike gear in Cycle Fantasy. There was a lovely Ellsworth frame for $3250!! A couple of Coopers later and we were on the road back to Sydney.

All in all it was a bloody long day, and everyone was exhausted. We’d cycled around 35km, 30 of which was the trail itself, and it had turned out to be a fair bit hillier that we’d expected. We’d also learned to have a couple of tubes with us in future!

B: 80km