Saturday was supposed to be a tourist trip to London, but alas that fell through at the last minute. Luckily Simon swooped in with a trip over to the forest of dean for a bit of cross-country bike malarkey. I grabbed a lift from the G-Dog and despite getting caught up in some closed road shenanigans en-route, we eventually arrived and met up with Si and Emma at the cycle centre.

After the usual extended faffing we headed off around the FODCA trail, me on the ‘dale, Garry on the shiny Enduro, Simon on his Yeti DH6 and Emma on a tiny Spesh Hardrock.

The trail is only about 4km or so long, but that’s 4km of technical, swoopy, rooty joy. None of us were on top form, struggling up the climbs and depositing ourselves ungracefully in the dirt on the descents. Garry even managed to pull an SPD-cleat right out of his shoe at one point.

It was all good fun though, especially the final section of the trail which is a slice of fast swoopy singletrack from bike-heaven. WOOP!

After a quick bite to eat we set off again, for a nice relaxing half-hour jaunt down the fireroads to the lake. It quickly became a jaunt that took us miles off-course and significantly more than half an hour.

Fireroads aren’t the most interesting things in the world, but the slog was well worth it. We eventually found ourselves at the top of some lovely singletrack which took us across the top of the hill before diving steeply down the side, taking us nearly all the way back to the cycle centre. Lovely stuff.