Several Highs –
1) Commuting into work on the mountain bike the day the council failed to grit the roads before 4 inches of snow fell – 8 miles of riding through the snow past stuck cars and lorries, grinning like an idiot at the sheer fun of it all!
2) Doing a road ride with a mate who swore blind he'd never buy a road bike, on the first decent spring day that made us go home the extra long way back – he reckons it was his best ride of the year
3) Riding my first sportif on my 40th birthday
4) An hour long quickie play on the local routes when I managed to ride all the right lines for the first and only time in my life – with no one there to see it!
5) Watching my (then) 5 year old finally get going on two wheels, and seeing the realisation of the opportunities it would bring him in the future.
6) Meeting up with an old mate for a catch up ride where we spent longer chatting in the cafe than we did riding
7) Meeting up with one or two people on here to ride new places and make me test my self belief – one to work on next year
8 Finally starting to do a few simple fettling jobs myself.
Lows –
1) Putting my back out and losing all of July and August, and having to pull out of the Tour of Britain sportive
2) Failing – again – to get down to 12 stone
3) Spending too much time on long solo road rides and not enough time on an MTB with the regular group
On the whole, a good year for me though