The wonders of working out in the woods (and some awesome mountain bike skills).

I’m a huge fan of exercising outdoors. A gym full of mirrors is every shade of wrong when you could be gulping fresh air into your needy lungs and plugging into the delicious power supplied by the sun on your back. When you’re so fixed on nailing the next berm on the trail that you forget what your thighs look like or how many calories were in your breakfast: that’s a good place to be. The trails that I ride with my girlfriends may be less than forty miles from London, but you can forget about mirrors. Come to think about it, you can also forget about mobile phone signal and sign posts. So every ride is a little adventure, as well as a workout.

We found this jumps section recently. Despite being a few metres away from a trail we know well, we’d never spotted it before. We dismounted our bikes to have a closer look (you don’t get to do that in a spin class!) and discovered a series of ‘tiger trap’ pits built beneath it. It looked truly terrifying.

Before long, two riders approached through the woods and, without even slowing down to look, soared over it. They pulled up ahead, and walked back past us to have another go. Now, we’re not really in the habit of talking to strangers in the woods, but this is outdoor exercise so you can talk to anyone, so long as they’re doing of a version of what you’re doing. We asked about their bikes (Specialized Enduro, quite heavy – no wonder they were pushing up hill.) We asked them if they found jumps scary (‘to be honest, yes’). They jumped again, I took some pictures on my phone (above and below), said thanks and we went our separate ways.

 

I will never ride this jumps section for a trillion different reasons that mostly revolve around being a complete coward. That doesn’t matter. What counts is being outside on my bike, and being open to whatever experience the trails choose to throw at us. Which, in this case, is happily acknowledging that some riders are far more awesomely skilled than I will ever be, and that’s fine.

(with thanks to John and Rich for jumping!).