Howdy cowdy!
And how be everyone on this fine Monday morning? Are you weary and fatigued from a weekend full of riding activities? Or are you simply weary from the thought of the impending school holidays as you count down the hours before true freedom begins?
We’re a little weary ourselves here at Singletrack HQ. It is, as they say, the dreaded deadline week, and there are more than a few nerves running through the office as everyone begins the process of finalising the brand new issue of Singletrack Magazine. We know we’ll get there (we have done it one hundred and thirteen times before), and we’re on the home straight, but lord knows that Thursday night post-deadline beers can’t come soon enough…
To help us bounce along through to deadline, we’ve got a little groove inspired by our recent trip to Innsbruck in Austria, where this fella (Tim Engelhardt) played at a music festival just near where we were staying on the same weekend. It’s a head-nodder of a tune that became the unofficial soundtrack for our week-long euro road trip, so make sure you get it lined up in those earphones and come with us on a journey of reflection from some of our riding memories of the week gone by!
The weather up our way has been absolutely sublime lately, and save for a few sprays of moisture from the clouds, it’s been dry and dandy on the local trails. Hannah has been making full use of the long summer evenings, mixing it up with some testing aboard both mountain bikes and gravel bikes she’s currently testing. Love this shot of Stoodley Pike!
I’ve been on testing duties myself, with three hardtails on rotation as part of the upcoming group test in Issue #114 of Singletrack Magazine. The Kona Honzo CR Trail DL is one of those bikes on test, and while I’m not going to spoil the surprise, it’s one very, very fun ride indeed!
Meanwhile, Chipps travelled with a couple of hundred other racers (and grit.cx‘s Tom Hill) to the Scottish island of Arran for the Grinduro event. The idea was an 80km course round this rugged island, with four timed stages. The mix of surfaces – fire roads, actual roads, twisty singletrack and stony tracks ensured that whatever bike you brought would be the wrong one for some of the course, but that didn’t stop a huge range of bikes and riders from taking part. There was everyone from the first time on a ‘cross bike Germans, to the British bikepacking fat-bikers and the ‘really did bring the wrong bike’ road bike riders…
One of Chipps’ pals from Ibis Cycles, Scot Nicol, flew over to Scotland to get involved with the Grinduro event. Scot lives in Northern California and isn’t intimately familiar with the trail feature we refer to as ‘mud’. It seems Scot was treated to his annual dose of wet weather riding over the weekend!
Mr Tom Hill was on hand at the Grinduro event to represent both Grit.cx and Singletrack, and while the weather was not quite what everyone had hoped, Tom had a corker of a ride.
When he wasn’t smashing back whisky or coffee, or riding a bike through apocalyptically wet conditions, Tom had his camera out to report for Singletrack on some of the intriguing bikes being shown off at Grinduro – check out the beautiful purple machine below made by Adeline of brand Mercredi!
Alrighty, that’s Singletrack over-and-out for this week’s Monday Morning Debrief. We hope you’re having a wonderful start to your week, and we hope you can also get out on two wheels this week to enjoy the stunning British summer we’re all being treated to. Get at it!
ST Out.
Comments (5)
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shes a happy chappie.
Not wishing to be overly pedantic but this is not the first “Grinduro” event in the UK. Mid Devon cycling club have run an identical event, timed stages within a longer declassified ride, for several years. Its called the Haldon Heroic and very enjoyable it is to.
Not wishing to be overly pedantic, but the mid-Devon Haldon Heroic is not a ‘Grinduro’ event. While it’s a similar format, Grinduro is a ‘brand’ of event backed by Giro, Fabric and others and this is the first time that this event has come to the UK (there have been two other runnings of Grinduro in California and there’s another one this October). I’ll make sure they don’t call it the Haldon Heroic by accident. :-)
Hi Chipps. Ok, your pendantry is more accurate. It’s a ‘brand’ and not a format.
Nice interview