Doing my first Trailtrax event this weekend, what’s best for these sort of things CX or HT?

oh and any other tips?

I’ll be riding a short-travel full-suss because that’s what I have, but any bike will be fine.

Other tips, if you’re feeling competitive:

Get there early enough to allow a decent amount of time to plan your route, half of the skill is in planning.

Bring a compass and some kind of mapboard to go on the bars. As its all on rights of way, and its likely to be a nice day, there will probably be plenty of walkers and horse riders out, so its pretty useful to have a bell too.

Try and work out how far you can realistically ride in 3 hours. Getting all the checkpoints usually involves riding 30+ miles, although it varies a bit from event to event. You can do a rough tot-up of your planned route distance by counting how many of the kilometre squares on the map you are crossing.

Its quite a hilly area, so the most direct route between checkpoints won’t always be the fastest. And a direct off-road route may be slower than a less direct bit of tarmac.

Have a bail-out decision point somewhere around the 1h30 to 2hr mark, so that if you’ve made slower progress than anticipated you’ve got a plan B that ignores some of the lower-valued checkpoints but still gets you back on time with a decent score.

And above all, keep looking at the map all the way round, looking out for landmarks. It is really easy to overshoot, or get disorientated!

I’m sure there’s plenty more, there’s quite a learning curve on these things. If you aren’t feeling competitive, just treat it as a pleasant ride in the countryside with a bit of a treasure-hunt thrown in!

Good luck, see you there 🙂

Thanks for the advice, I’m only doing the 120 as I had no concept of the effort and distances involved. I’ll be treating it more as an exporing and learning the format ride, rather than killing myself for max points this time round.

I’ve ridden some of the areas to the East as I’m fairly local in Tadley. I assume some of the check points will be on Wayfarers walk, which I’ve ridden some of also. Looking forward to the it and the weather forecast looks good still.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, no danger of getting all the checkpoints in 2 hours so you can ignore some of the most distant ones!

Have only ever ridden over that way once, nearly a decade ago, so looking forward to exploring a bit. Is the Wayfarers Walk good going, or is it badly rutted on the byway sections?

I must remember that the start finish is at the top of a big hill, so it’s going to be a lot slower coming back than going out!