FMFT "Winter Training Camp"

Yesterday was the occasion of what some people are calling the “FMFT Winter Training Camp”, but which I far prefer to call playing in the mud.

Once again we headed out to Aston Hill for another session in bad weather, because it would just be silly to go to an area famous for slippery mud, chalk and flint in dry or good weather, or without the added excitement of ice. Due in no small part to some obsessive refreshing of the Met Office website we neatly managed to schedule our trip in a window in the persistent rain that covered the South East and managed some pretty fun riding.

On a bit of a downhill session we rode both the DH3 route several times and the Red Route. DH3 is a generally flowing singletrack drop with the odd technical feature that made us baulk in the ice last time we were there. This time we showed some definite improvement and rode all of the bits that we’d failed on before, with a bit of confidence, more skill and more grip we pulled off the drops and chutes, while still failing pathetically on roots that were so wet that they dragged wheels downhill faster than we could move forward over them. The Red Route will be awesome in the dry with a fast and flowing combination of bermed turns and singletrack that still managed to be wide-grinned fun in the wet.

All of this was recorded in beautiful Technicolor with a view towards the film of the year, although it seems we have a lot to learn. Attaching a camera to an elastic strap and then bouncing down rooty trails results in what can only be described as a distinctly bouncy video which has the brilliant side-effect of making everyone who watches it feel sick. We’ll do some work on it before we release it to you.

The final runs on each of the trails resulted in a variety of slightly amusing crashes, whether they ended up with us sliding for a while on our faces in the mud, or ditching the bike off a wooden boardwalk and running towards an intimate meeting with a tree. With the mud changing consistency as it dried to make it even more slippery we called it a day and started the process of trying vainly to keep mud off the car on the way home.

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