So – rather like round 1, looks like it’s going to be a slop fest!!!
This time I’m DEFINITELY putting mud tyres on!

Race starting timings are up as well (on the website). Thankfully I’m near the start again, so won’t have to plough through deep tyre marks too much!!

I know a few from here did it last time – any takers again this round??

DrP (No 17)

I’m in Team Sledgehammer Manwolf!

Yes going it’s goner be wet and muddy, starting near the front so should miss the mud feast

Yep

Going again. Loved round 1

Is Salibury going to be a mud fest then?

Swampthing will be looked out (again)

hmmm might have to dig out some more appropriate tyres, i crashed about 4 times on the last timed stage of round 1 !!

I’m in for this, didn’t do round one.

I guess my Aspen/Larsen combo from BBF last Saturday will not be ideal by the sounds of things then 🙂

Quite looking forward to it, although in don’t really know quite where this sits on the ‘sunday-pootle-to-gnnnarrr-its-just-like-the-mega-don’t-you-know’ scale.

Luckily our team (SussexMTB) will have the benefit of 120 riders nicely bedding the trail in before we’re set loose…looking forward to it 🙂

Anyone looking for an entry? I can’t make it sadly – start time 12.36.
Free to a good home!

Phil56 – still available?

we have a space in our team 1145 start if anyones interested…….

now taken by Chris

Cracking ride, again!
Nice and sunny, and the timed sections had drained well – but what about the sloppy slidey linking section!!! Nearly lost a mech in there!
Oh- the last section was a bit, erm, “peddly through a field!”

DrP

I’ve never done an Enduro type event before, so it was certainly interesting.

When do the results get posted up? Looking on my Strava (groan) trace I probably should have been in the competitive class rather than sport, still I got good at overtaking people by the end of the day 😉

It was fun though, although i’ll stick my neck out and say riding DH tracks blind, some with some reasonable sized drops/stepdowns/gaps probably isn’t ideal. Maybe a time buffer should be allowed on some stages to at least walk the track if you wanted…

great ride today

although the signs from the main road going missing meant it took 40 mins to find the car park!

the muddy liniking section was emotional and the 3 stages on the dh track were scary fun!

Hob Nob, I agree it would have been nice to check out those three runs beforehand as they were much harder to ride unseen than those in race 1 at FoD (hence a catalogue of unrailed berms and unsent drops are taunting the back of my mind…) Kimbers, which of Team Stoned Fish were you? I was on the orange Soul in the dayglo yellow helmet. Another great event overall though!

Round 1 at FOD was excellent, today was ok and I expect round 3 to be very good.

Round 2 was always going to be the least exciting as the venue itself has its limitations but overall i enjoyed it and think Carlos did well with what was available.

Agreed that it was tricky riding sections with drops etc blind and getting some flow was difficult and a little frustrating.

My main gripe was the fact that I missed the bombhole on the first stage and had to turn back once I realised, the marshal was stood in the trees to the right in camo gear… WTF…(I am blind in the right eye so maybe my fault but felt a bit miffed) so I lost somewhere in the region of 40 seconds… a lot of training and prep out the window straight away and the sense of having let my team mates down…

Overall, a fun series with a good vibe and some good sections… price is reasonable too.

hi chiefgroove i was the guy discussing with you how there wasn’t much mud right before the swamp !

Great event really glad i filled in for missing “Team Stoned Fish” member. 🙂

Stages were good fun, Bit of signage before the big drops and gaps would have been good. 😐 Re: the website signage: http://www.enduro1.co.uk/raceformat.php

Tidworth Freeride looks good too, will be going back when they sort out there lease thing. 😉

All the stages were mud free which was a bonus.

Looking forward to Race 3 now.

Really good day with nice folks and much better than expected weather… Morning DrP I was no. 16 so we spent quite a while together. Cheers all for being so chatty and nice 😀
I agree that some of the advertised signage on the 3 DH sections would have been useful, however that may have made it all feel worse than it was, at least we all rode it ‘blind’ so all (I think) had a healthy respect for the unknowns over each drop/roller!
Only real disappointment was not getting a ‘proper’ number… With all the names on the sponsors list decent numbers shouldn’t be too hard to sort out?

Morning all,

Myself and moonboy both rocked up to a reasonably sunny morning, and looked forward to hopefully being reasonably competitive having bashed out a 20th in the 12hr Team last week in BikeFest.

Off we rocked to the start, and got ready. Only for moonboy to snap his chain in the bombhole, and for me to do EXACTLY the same as MBNut – I went directly left into the trees and didn’t drop into the bombhole – again, a significant loss of time. Really rather annoyed #1

I made it down the rest of the track and moonboy and I faffed to try and fix his chain once he arrived.

With moonboy still trying to get a new chain fitted, I rushed off to Stage 2, which having fitted a CrossMark to the rear, I instantly regretted such a choice and dabbed all over the shop.

Still no moonboy.

Rode off to Stage 3, and arrived. No moonboy. Just as they announced his his 1 minute call, he appeared on the horizon, and pedalled flat out, to arrive 8 seconds before his off!

I then set off a minute behind and had relatively quick run UNTIL THAT SODDING BEND WITHOUT DECENT TAPE! I, just like pretty much 50% of others whom went through there, went off the the left totally confused – completely screwing up my run, losing probably 30 seconds or so. Would it have been so hard to have applied a bit of common sense to the taping there? It was awful. Annoyed #2

Stage 4 was uneventful, and Stage 5,6 and 7 and absolute riot – although I was pretty confident on the drops etc, I do agree with everyone else that perhaps putting such extreme obstacles into a blind run was a little brave – there are quite a few newbies on a range of bikes (I saw one dude on a 29er!) and a big 6 ft ladder drop isn’t probably what they’re expecting…

However, I did enjoy my day overall, and although very annoyed at the marking of the course in places, just as MBNut feeling miffed at all that training and preparation being thrown out of the window, I felt that it was a good event in hindsight.

Absolute credit must go to the army boys whom were absolutely professional and gave up their day to help us moan all day. Some were absolutely hilarious in their banter!

I’m going to write an email to Carlos to thank him for the event, and the army’s help, but also point out that taping needs to be carefully considered – it’s very annoying when it isn’t or is confusing – it happened at FoD last time, and it’s quite critical in order to keep a race series alive…

I really like the idea of these events, and would like to give one a go, but it seems they need to standardise the terrain a little! If they were ‘trail centre red’ grade trails (as I thought most were generally marketed as) they sound great, but 6ft ladder drops? WTF!

It seems some are just the down hill parts of XC races, whilst others are basically marginally easier(?) DH races!

Absolute credit must go to the army boys whom were absolutely professional and gave up their day to help us moan all day. Some were absolutely hilarious in their banter!

Big +1

6ft ladder drops did have a chicken run round it as did all the big jumps and drops. (apart from the drop with the sand bags after it)

Guess the issue though is that if you’ve not pre-ridden/walked the course you don’t know there’s an obstacle that one may wish to avoid!

Yer i see what you saying but i just ask the Tidworth freeride guy running the stage what was in the trail Any gap/drops 😉

The challenge for someone of my skill level was that everything bar the 6′ drop was within my ability if I’d had some time to walk the course but riding it blind there were so many moments of “WTF! Where’s the line? Over or round? Aarghh, not carrying enough speed, etc…” Then again I’m not that experienced on gnarly stuff so I suppose it’s fair that the inevitable mincing cost me time compared to better and braver riders – it isn’t meant to be easy!

The warning signage options aren’t actually very logical because the last thing you want to do before a drop or gap is slow down. Where there’s a chicken run option (of which there were quite a lot on stages 5, 6, 7) a sign pointing one way labelled ‘chicken run’ and another sign pointing the other way labelled ‘6 foot drop’ or ‘5 foot gap’ would have been nice and allowed a bit more flow.

Yer i see what you saying but i just ask the Tidworth freeride guy running the stage what was in the trail Any gap/drops

Which to be fair, I did – and to be told everything is ‘rollable’, which quite frankly was b*llocks. On stage 7, the drop was a good 6-8ft if you hit it at any sort of pace, and the double after was a good 15ft to the lander. Hence my point about riding stuff blind.

Now me being me, I hit it anyway and the double, but a less than confident rider who was told similar could have done themselves some serious damage.

It’s not about having the cahoonas to hit stuff, its about riding what were essentially DH trails, completely blind with questionable information given out.

I’m agreeing with chiefgrooveguru and Hob Nob; the point is not so much that they were there, it was more that 6,7 and 8 were a bit ‘in yer face’ with regard to everything coming up so quick and you would go around a corner to be faced with the 6ft ladder drop (which in itself was actually dead easy, but to a newbie, it would scare the shit out of them) and a huge 15ft fast double (again, easy, but you needed to know to carry speed).

The fact that often you didn’t know where the trail went, and thus, where you could get around the chicken run, was where I think there is a few grumbles.

For the more competitive riders such as I, I was more narked at getting into the flow of a run and then all of a sudden not having any idea of which way I was supposed to be going – which is chuffing annoying when you’re against the clock.

One mans easy drop in is another man’s scary beyond belief drop in.

Considering some of the bikes that people were riding (some hero was riding an old skool GT Zaskar!) certain sections must have been frightening!

Moonboy and I were both agreed, part of the fun is that it IS unsighted – if we knew the runs we’d go so much faster – but then that defeats the whole object of the day.

I guess the difficulty is finding the right balance.

ps, I was number 32, Moonboy was 31. Just sayin.

some hero was riding an old skool GT Zaskar!

He broke it at the bottom of run 6!!
Snapped the wheel and ruined the retro V brakes!

DrP

Bloody hell! I did sort of wonder, it’s a hell of a bike to rattle down on; I did the FoD on my Charge Duster hardtail and found that I bounced around a lot (although loved it).

Anyone know the old dude on the retro Giant full sus? He seem to be really enjoying himself!

ps DrP was it you I was in front of at FoD last time? Shame I didn’t see you yesterday!

I’ll tell Jase he’s a hero! He does have some 100mm SIDs and a disc brake on the front now, so not entirely old school… 😉 Another of our group (Sledgehammer Manwolf / BrightonMTB / SussexMTB) was on a fat-front Jones Spaceframe.

I asked the marshall at the top of stage 7 about how big this big drop was and he indicated that it was about mid-thigh height. On further questioning about the landing he said it was to a downslope but you needed to clear some distance to reach the proper smoother landing spot. Fortunately I took a wide line round the corner and ended up on the chicken run, thus depriving the teenage spectators of what could have been the most epic fail of the day if I’d had a freak-out going over the edge.

I really wanted to ride 5, 6 and 7 again and do them properly (especially the quasi-pump track at the bottom of 5) and I didn’t feel like that at FoD. All came down to visibility really.

ps DrP was it you I was in front of at FoD last time? Shame I didn’t see you yesterday!

Wasn’t me! I was on a white/green VIP meta 5 at the FOD, and a blue meta 5 yesterday.

DrP

Ah, so there were two GT Zaskars! Jase didn’t break his though a teammate mangled a front wheel coming short on a small gap and rode the final two stages with it looking way out of whack despite some percussive maintenance. The only bit where I missed having rear suspension was the ‘bunny heads’ section on stage 1 but I did take a fair few chicken runs to my shame… Dr P did the new Meta survive uncracked? 😉

It sounds like the tape markings werent up to scratch again, or at least got removed. This happened on their 1st event last year – very annoying to get sent off in wrong direction. Each section should be ridden carefully before the 1st man/woman down the section just to ensure tape hasnt been removed.

Riding the trail blind is a good leveller. Chicken run (but slower) options should be considered at each major obstacle though.

Thought it was an ok event for the money, good trails for the timed stages, even some of the linking stuff would have made for good timed stages.

Thought the hill climb was abit of a non event and maybe the stage before it could have gone directly into it???

Maybe the details on the website about it being ok for “novice once a week rides” to enter was a touch misleading?

The only other negative that i was alittle cheesed off about was, when I asked the sexy blond at the finish, when the results were going to be posted, she said errr wednesday!!! (i was expecting “oh in half and hour” or something like most events… I think use of a dibber system like sportident or simular would have sorted that problem nicely…

Keen to try one of the Steve Parr enduro’s now and see how they compare.

and to be told everything is ‘rollable’, which quite frankly was b*llocks

Ture, said the same to me too. 😕

Good looking set of DH trails they got there, Some of them berm/bowls were amazing.

Got to say I thought is was another great event and made the most of the area

Stages 5, 6 & 7 were definitely a challenge ‘blind’. I am fairly confident in the air so not a huge issue for me, but certainly had me buzzing hitting large drops purely on trust. Would love to have walked them before hand but at the same time half the challendge is riding blind.

The marking does need a bit of sorting. Very glad to hear I was not the only one to be tonking it down stage 3 just to go straight on / left at the end and cost myself 30 plus seconds. More tape and a big right turn pointer would surely be an easy fix?

I messed up stage 1 as I aimed for the wrong gates at the and had to circle back. As I waited for my mates and looked at the tape / markers it was so obvious that I only have myself to blame on that one.

My mate also got ‘lost’ on stage 1. Still not sure how TBH (Was not at the bomhole)

The link from stage 1 to 2 seemd to create a widespread sense of humour failure.

The rules of the no dabs stage should be clarified. What I though was 1 dab cost me 4 as I manouvered my bike to get started again. Really wish I had known that.

OK – need to end on a positive note. It really was a great event and with constructive input will just get better. I certainly plan on going to Aldershot. 🙂

scottfitz, im keen to go back and ride there free ride club spot. The marshal on stage 7 said once its up and running proper they will put on some push up races….. Mind you it was quite a nasty push up wth a trail bike, never mind a DH bike after a morning of practice…

Agree with xterramac. Being suitable for ‘once a week novice riders’ is clearly very misleading and potentailly dangerous.

I think the timing delay is a pity. From stage 5 onwards I waited until my 2 mates came down and we comapred times recorded by the marshals. As most folks I only really care about how I did versus my mates.

But hopefully as the event grows the timimg sophistication will also.