I nearly always bring a bike when I come back to Guildford, but I never seem to actually ride the thing. Last time I was all set for a ride with Raoul before realising my helmet was still in Cheltenham. Bugger. This time though, things were going to be differ­ent. This time, I got up on Christmas Eve, chucked the bike in the car and headed towards vaguely famil­iar territory.

I’d not ridden around Peaslake for years — not since the heady days of my GT LTS singlespeed. My memor­ies of the place were all a bit hazy…

Now, I’ve not been out on the bike at all for a week or three. I had a couple of “can’t be arsed” weeks, followed by a bout of the dreaded man-flu. So perhaps charging up the opening climb like a bat out of hell wasn’t my best move. Where’s my lung capacity gone? Why am I trying to cough them up? Why do I feel like I’m going to vomit? Surely it shouldn’t hurt this much…ooo single­track! Lets see where that goes!

And so it begins. I followed myriad trails up and over and down and around. My mental map of the place started to return, or so I thought. I rode all the way up one myster­i­ous bike-tracked path until I reached a car park on top of the hill. “That one’d be really good in the other direc­tion” thought I. So I turned around and hammered back down it.

With the excep­tion of the odd puddle twenty foot deep bog of death, it was fantastic! I found myself drift­ing through loamy turns, railing natural berms, pumping the undula­tions and getting all sketchy over the exposed roots. Awesome. But my mental map had let me down. Somewhere I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up by a reser­voir I’d forgot­ten even existed. I was about to ride off up a rather dull-looking trail when I spotted another bit of single­track over the road…

Oh man. I remembered this one from years gone by. That ride when we broke Tim springs to mind. Back then, it was a fun and sinewy little bit of single­track. Good, but nothing really special. Someone’s been tinker­ing since then though. The fun factor’s been turned up to eleven. Loads of little jumps, whoops, drop-ins, fantastic zig-zag berms, endless roots and whoops of delight. Oh, and it’s really very fast indeed.

One moment stands out vividly. I came charging though a corner, saw some evil-looking roots ahead of me and instinct­ively pumped the front of the bike to lift it over them. Usually in these situations the back wheel follows without issue. Not this time. The rear shot sideways at light-speed before gripping hard. The back of the bike was now point­ing in an entirely differ­ent direc­tion to the front and moving just as quickly. I’ve no idea how I held it all together, but I pin-balled wildly into the next section with a massive grin on my face. BRAAARRP!

The descent finished within sight of the village. Whist resting there, I spotted adverts on the village notice­board for biking compan­ies based in Morzine and near Glentress, and that the village welcomes mountain bikers. Refreshing.

My second loop took an altogether differ­ent route around the woods, before quite coincid­ent­ally ending up at that car-park on top of the hill. Same again? Well, it’d be rude not to, wouldn’t it?

WHOOOP WHOOOOOOP!